From @WNIP How publishers are finding and retaining tech talent PLUS @pressgazette Looks at how Bloomberg Quicktake grew to 120m video views a month

January 26, 2022

My friends at Whats New in Publishing have a couple of solid pieces today. The first one that caught my eye was about how publishers are leveraging read-it-later apps such as Matter, Pocket and Instapaper to drive higher pageviews. As the article points out, it helps that Mozilla-owned Pocket defaults as the homepage of the Firefox browser, driving views to a range of content. One way that publishers can take advantage of this space is through syndication deals, and it's proving to be a rich source of high-engagement traffic, particularly for niche sites like Nautilus, which covers a single scientific topic each month.

WNIP also has a great article into media shops can attract and retain tech talent particularly in developing markets. Publishers and broadcasters are challenged because they don't have the budgets to compete with tech companies on salary for data and developer talent. It's a great overview.

It's interesting to me because media is also struggling to attract and retain product development talent. It was actually part of my master's dissertation. It's not always an issue of pay or coolness. In the product managers I spoke to, they are leaving because of the lack of support for and understanding of the position in journalism organisations.

PLUS Substack is adding video to attract more creators. Opportunities for publishers in the metaverse. (Speaking of the Metaverse, did you see Meta's first ad for Facebook's Horizon virtual world? 🤢) How to calculate your value during the Great Resignation. Stripe partners with Spotify to support podcast payments, and YouTube is thinking NFTs. It's all about how creators earn coin (including dogecoin) for their creations. And Google backtracks on their post-cookie tracking programme.

As Matt Sternberg wrote recently in Adweek, read-it later apps are gaining traction with publishers looking for new ways to distribute content to habitual readers. For readers too, read-it-later apps serve a useful purpose by allowing content from a multitude of sources to be consumed at leisure on a single, self-curated app. Some read-it-later apps …

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How media managers can cope with hardships of finding and retaining talent digital transformation brought about Media in the emerging markets of CEE and Latin America are struggling to attract talent but even more so to retain it. The major issue – attracting specialist talent and skills is a barrier to further adoption and growth. …

The move comes as Big Tech platforms muscle in on the creator economy.

8% of publishers are already putting more resources into applications for the metaverse Today, we dig into a topic that has been discussed a lot over the last few months yet still feels somewhat superficial: the Metaverse. We spoke with our own metaverse expert Manuel Bolognesi, who has been on an entrepreneurial journey commercialising goods and services …

Here’s what one journalist considered before quitting her job

Stripe signs up Spotify in new deal for podcast payments

In a letter published today by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, the executive suggests the video-sharing platform may embrace web3 technologies, including NFTs — or non-fungible tokens, a way to certify digital assets stored on the blockchain — as a means of helping YouTube creators make money. While no concrete plans were shared, nor any sense […]

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google’s controversial project for replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into groups of users with comparable interests, is dead. In its place, Google today announced a new proposal: Topics. The idea here is that your browser will learn about your interests as you move around the web. […]