How Publishers Can Use AI to Increase Subscribers PLUS Young Brits More Likely to Pay for Podcasts than News

June 08, 2021

And those websites you couldn't reach this morning? It wasn't just you. Issues at CDN Fastly knocks major websites offline today.

The Fix (via What's New in Publishing) has a great piece on how publisher can leverage data, AI and machine learning to drive business success. It's a good piece.

My friend Damian Radcliffe has an excellent overview - as always - about some of the innovations that journalists and news organisations have launched during the pandemic.

I also really enjoyed Timothy B. Lee's review of the hey days of blogging back in the mid-Naughties and how social media changed it all.

'Have You Tried Turning It on and off?': CDN Takes out Huge Parts of the Internet

The sites of the British government, The New York Times and Twitter were among those that were briefly inaccessible for some users.

Content Delivery Network Fastly wasn't so fast this morning. An outage at the CDN took out the New York Times, The Guardian, Etsy and many UK government sites.

Publishers Need AI to Understand What Drives Subscriptions

How new technologies advance the work of newsrooms Big databases help news organizations predict who might subscribe or donate If it seems like this blog is turning into a book review section. It could be because classes have ended here in Pamplona and I am reading more to “sharpen the saw”. (Can you guess which …

"For publishers to compete, they have to find ways to acquire enough data at an affordable cost to develop their own algorithms (prediction machines), and not just for advertising. As they transition to user-generated revenue, they need to be able to predict which online users are most likely to subscribe and target them with appealing offers."

Young Brits Twice as Likely to Pay for Podcasts as News

Press Gazette has been reporting on British journalism without fear or favour since 1965. Our mission is to provide a news and information service which helps the UK journalism.

The real news is that some 60 per cent of people in the UK are willing to pay for content online but only 10 per cent are willing to pay for news. People are most likely to pay for movies and music.

How Journalists and News Orgs Have Innovated During the Pandemic

As further waves take hold around much of the world, this presents an opportunity to take stock of earlier reporting and showcase some of the fresh approaches newsrooms have used in covering…

A really excellent overview by my friend Damian Radcliffe about new products and partnerships that have been created during the pandemic.

The Shifting Trends of Digital Content in the Age of Platforms

We didn't stop blogging. We just do it 280 characters at a time now.

As someone who got into blogging at the BBC in 2004 and then became the first blogs editor at The Guardian in 2006, this piece really resonated.

"Bloggers like me hoped this would become a major way people got news. In our utopian future, everyone would use an RSS readers. The typical reader would have a few favorite bloggers who would introduce them to the most interesting content elsewhere in the blogosphere. We naively thought the social nature of blogging provided something of a quality-control mechanism, with prominent bloggers amplifying the most credible and insightful content and ignoring the rest.

That's not exactly what happened."

A Product View of Twitter Blue

Twitter’s latest foray into consumer revenue is service-focused, rather than experience-focused.

Oz: The Sydney Morning Herald Launches Hub for Parents to Research Schools

The Sydney Morning Herald has launched a hub on its website to allow parents to research NSW Independent schools to find the right education.