Slower Loading Pages. 40% Less Revenue for Publishers. Developers Ask Why They Should Trust Google after AMP PLUS Why Do Publishers Try to Build Their Own CMSes?

November 08, 2021

Google and Facebook are coming in for a lot of scepticism after both have burned through goodwill due to a number of reasons. Sarah Gooding writes in WP Tavern that developers have lost trust in Google after accusations in an antitrust case that the search giant promised a lot with AMP but not only failed to deliver but also that Google worked to penalise non-AMP pages and impeded header bidding. This has left some developers to question new initiatives such as FloC. It's really worth a read.

And my friends at What's New in Publishing look at the range of reactions to Facebook's Meta launch. A smart business move to create a division that focuses on the existing social portfolio and a division that focuses on their future business? It's a classic move that allows businesses to simultaneously focus on exploitation and exploration, optimising their current business while experimenting with future opportunities. Or is it just a branding gimmick after the Facebook papers and whistleblowing over Facebook's failure to protect elections?

PLUS the Press Gazette asks why publishers keep trying to build their own content management systems? From my experience, the business has to operate at a large scale to even consider this, and even then the investment brings limited results. It's a huge investment, and a bespoke CMS doesn't benefit from constant development that being part of a larger CMS eco-system can bring. It's a classic build-versus-buy issue. It's too bad that we in media often don't read classic business research on these issues which so many other businesses and industries face as well.

This and so much more including how Americans are turning off the news after Trump. Murdoch's UK empire has suffered a number of digital flops. Can it right the ship? A university has taken over a small-town newspaper in the US. Interesting. Speaking of Murdoch, Fox is betting big on blockchain.

The Chrome Dev Summit concluded earlier this week. Announcements and discussions on hot topics impacting the greater web community at the event included Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, i…

Facebook is changing its name to Meta and with it, the future focus of the company. Meta’s long-term mission will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses. The change moves the company beyond its social media roots, but will its planned move to the metaverse affect publishers? Takeaways …

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.

For a ProPublica reporter who did Ph.D. work in bioinformatics, data on bacterial DNA helped reveal how a once-rare salmonella strain spread through the chicken industry. Salmonella infantis is multidrug-resistant and is still making people sick.

After a year of voracious consumption fueled by the election, post-election violence and pandemic coverage, Americans have turned off the news—on television, online and in print. News outlets are used to declines following elections—with the exception of the 2016 election, a news spectacle which electrified one half of America, and petrified the other, focusing both […]

The effort to break free of its print roots has been a long and expensive struggle for News UK

Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative is developing tools and standards that allow people to capture, store, and verify key details about a photo — its digital provenance — with an eye toward creating standards that can be used across the internet.

No one knows what the next decade will bring. But transforming your newsroom today will make it more resilient when the next crisis hits

By setting up a nonprofit to manage and run the paper, the University of Georgia is hoping to inspire community journalists

"Readers want to be contributing to something that is successful. So you have to be careful about crisis messaging, saying, 'Oh gosh, we're going to go under if we don't get support.'"

"This is a revenue generating business," said Scott Greenberg, the CEO of Fox's Blockchain Reality Labs division.