Understanding the forms of media and what they can and cannot do will help you optimize your ad spend.
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Bustle, a digital media company that caters to millennial women, has acquired Elite Daily from Daily Mail. Bustle now owns three web properties - Bustle, Elite Daily, and the young-mom site Romper - and is changing the name of its parent company to Bustle Digital Group. Bryan Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Bustle, says BDG will reach about 80 million unique monthly viewers, per Google Analytics. Goldberg says Bustle has about 50 million readers, while Romper is nearing 10 million. Elite Daily, a general interest site similar to Bustle, could add another 20 million or so. Bustle's readership appears to be stagnant; the site boasted 45 million monthly uniques in October 2015, the same month it launched Romper. And Elite Daily's 20 million is down significantly from its high a few years ago. Bustle says most of its growth over the past few years has been on other platforms like Instagram, where its audience grew 600% in 2016 and is making "significant revenue" from Stories. Bustle expects to bolster those cross-platform efforts by adding Elite Daily. Another man's treasureGoldberg, who founded the sports site Bleacher Report and launched Bustle in 2013, believes he has acquired a "true trophy" in Elite Daily and says he has wanted to own it for a long time. "I've been working in this market for four years now," Goldberg said. "Elite Daily, Refinery29, and Bustle are what I hear when I ask [our users] what they read." Elite Daily's audience skews slightly younger than Bustle's, with core readers between 18 and 24. But Elite Daily has had a turbulent few years - both its audience and value have tanked. Daily Mail purchased Elite Daily for about $40 million in 2015. At the time of the sale, Elite Daily had about 40 million monthly unique visitors. But the media landscape - including algorithms on social media platforms - has changed significantly since then. A lot of the viral traffic Elite Daily enjoyed from Facebook has disappeared, and now its on-site readership is half of what it was. Daily Mail recently wrote down its purchase of Elite Daily, Recode's Peter Kafka reported, citing "poor performance." Both of Elite Daily's founders have moved on from the company. When Business Insider told Goldberg he blew millions on a dead company, he said he didn't care. "This property is valuable. I know it's valuable," Goldberg said on a call. "If there's one person who doesn't care what the press thinks, it's me. "I can't speak to Elite Daily's past, but this is a site that has always been extremely valuable in my estimation," he added. "It is a great property, and we're going to show everyone how great it is." A video and social boostGoldberg's plans for Elite Daily may have more to do with boosting Bustle's video and social media efforts than anything else. Elite Daily produces original videos that generate about 60 million monthly views, Goldberg says, while Bustle's early video efforts generate about 10 million. Additionally, he says Elite Daily's brand has "off the charts" social engagement, with about 6 million Facebook and Instagram followers. "This deal is very much about us doubling down on platform revenue," Goldberg said. He estimates BDG will double its video inventory through the acquisition. It's unclear who will run Elite Daily under BDG, or how exactly the teams will be integrated. "We are endeavoring to keep as many team members as we can," Goldberg said. Goldberg struck up conversations with Daily Mail a few weeks ago. Jon Steinberg, who was the US CEO of Daily Mail, oversaw the purchase of Elite Daily in 2015 and now sits on Bustle's board. Steinberg recused himself from Bustle's and Daily Mail's acquisition talks. While the acquisition price is undisclosed, it was implied that BDG paid less than Daily Mail did for the property. The deal was a mix of cash and equity. Bustle has raised $50.5 million from investors and said its recent $12 million round would be used for acquisitions. It generated about $30 million in revenue in 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Your neighbor's WiFi is ruining yours - here's how to fix it Capitalize on the web's fastest growing advertising medium.
In the recently held 'Qatar IT Business Awards 2017' Doha based company Q-tickets won the award of 'Best Digital SME' of the year in Qatar.
It appears Google has stopped the fun (or aggravation) but for awhile, Google Home responded to a Burger King TV ad with Whopper facts.
Snap has a date with Wall Street. The maker of the popular messaging app announced on Wednesday that it's set to host its first ever quarterly earnings call as a public company on May 10. For Snap, it will be an important opportunity to regain its luster after a rocky debut and to make a good impression with the finicky shareholders that the company now answers to. The two big questions on everyone's mind:
There's no word on whether the 26-year old Spiegel will participate in the call, as arch-rival Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does every quarter. Skipping the calls would not be unprecedented. Google cofounder Larry Page stopped doing conference calls years ago, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is never on earnings call. Snap declined to comment. But with Snap's stock suffering, investors may be eager to hear the vision from the founder. Snap's stock soared more than 50% percent on its first day of trading, reaching $26, but has since sunk back to around $20, as investors fret about user growth and competition from the likes of Facebook's Instagram. No guidanceThe company said in its IPO prospectus that it does not plan to offer financial guidance for the quarters ahead. That leaves analysts doing the lion's share of predicting what's happening to Snap's business and where it will go from here. And ahead of Snap's first-ever earnings report, they seem to only care about one thing: users. A "lot is hinging" on the company's daily active user numbers although the "long term outlook remains solid", wrote Barclays analyst Ross Sandler in a note Wednesday. "As a newly public company, DAU adds are by far the most important metric for SNAP investors, and a beat here should assuage investor concerns regarding competition from Instagram/Facebook/Messenger, and should help drive the stock up meaningfully," Sandler said. "Another sluggish DAU and shares are likely to trade off, potentially a lot." Sandler called it a "binary event" where anything above nine million added daily active users will move the stock up, but anything below it could do just the opposite. Snapchat's user growth had slowed down going into the third and fourth quarters after a botched product release on Android and increasing competition from Instagram. Facebook has continued to copy Snapchat's features, adding "Stories" to both the main newsfeed and Messenger, along with Instagram. But Barclay's Sandler argues that Snap should get be able to pass the bar set by investors of around 10 million in new daily active users now that it's resolved some of the bugs and Snap's leadership comments that the company was "back on track," according the Barclays note. Whether or not Snap has cleared that hurdle will now be answered on May 10. SEE ALSO: $9 billion startup Stripe is automating the complicated process of starting a company Snap Inc. executives frequently tout Snapchat as the best place for advertisers to win over its youthful, primarily millennial user base. Now the company is letting advertisers track those users based on the stores they visit. A new tool called Snap to Store will let advertisers track where Snapchat's 158 million daily users go in the real world on an anonymized basis. Marketers will be able to correlate ad campaigns in the app with actual foot traffic. The tool is available to any advertiser with physical stores in the U.S. that meets an undisclosed minimum spend amount, a Snap spokesperson told Business Insider on Wednesday. Snapchat's app relies on a phone's GPS to determine users' locations, including which stores they are visiting. Users can opt out of being tracked and turn off the app's access to their phone's location altogether. A select few advertisers, such as Wendy's, 7-Eleven, and Paramount Pictures, have already participated in a closed beta of Snap's new tool. Wendy's, for example, found that 42,000 people visited its restaurants in a seven-day period after seeing a sponsored geofilter for its jalapeño fresco chicken sandwich. Snap has made a number of moves in recent months to refine its ad offerings as it steps up competition with more established players like Facebook and Google. The company has disclosed that its average user spends 25-30 minutes per day in Snapchat and opens the app 18 times per day. A 2017 Snapchat-commissioned study by Greenberg Strategy found that 80% of Snapchat users have opened the app at a restaurant and 66% have used it in a shopping mall. Snap has said that the key to growing its business will be further monetizing its highly engaged users in more developed ad markets, like the U.S. and Europe. SEE ALSO: Snapchat just launched an attack on a key source of Facebook's ad revenue Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos knows a thing or two about building a successful business. Several analysts have predicted that Amazon will be the world's first company with a trillion-dollar valuation, and Bezos recently became the second-richest person on earth. In his latest letter to Amazon shareholders, published Wednesday, Bezos explains why he believes centering a business on "obsessive customer focus" is the best way to succeed. He also touches on Amazon's use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, one of the biggest trends in tech, and how it touches nearly every part of the company. You can read Bezos' full letter below: "Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?" That's a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I've been reminding people that it's Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic. "Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1." To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. I'm interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization? Such a question can't have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision-making. True Customer ObsessionThere are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here's the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen. Resist ProxiesAs companies get larger and more complex, there's a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it's dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you're not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp. It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, "Well, we followed the process." A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it's the second. Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers - something that's especially dangerous when you're inventing and designing products. "Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey." That's hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead. Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you'll find on surveys. They live with the design. I'm not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won't find any of it in a survey. Embrace External TrendsThe outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind. These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We're in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence. Over the past decades, computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder. At Amazon, we've been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We're working on it.) But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type - quietly but meaningfully improving core operations. Inside AWS, we're excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques. Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we've also made Amazon's higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what's inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls - no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come. High-Velocity Decision-MakingDay 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business - plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too. We don't know all the answers, but here are some thoughts. First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you're wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year's letter. Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. Third, use the phrase "disagree and commit." This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there's no consensus, it's helpful to say, "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?" By the time you're at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you'll probably get a quick yes. This isn't one way. If you're the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren't that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with "I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we've ever made." Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment. Note what this example is not: It's not me thinking to myself "well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn't worth me chasing." It's a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I'm just glad they let me in the room at all! Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision. I've seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages - that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team. "You've worn me down" is an awful decision-making process. It's slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead - it's better. So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world's trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it. A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion. As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1. Sincerely, Jeff SEE ALSO: The 25 highest-paying tech companies in America in 2017 Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Amazon is launching a drive-up grocery service - here's how it works The sculptor of Wall Street's "Charging Bull" is accusing New York City of infringing on the copyright of his sculpture by extending the temporary installation permit for the "Fearless Girl" statue, after having done a similar thing when he installed his sculpture in 1989. New York City doesn't give out permanent permits for sculptures it doesn't own, which is how artist Arturo Di Modica started out. In an act of guerilla art, he installed his "Charging Bull" in front of the New York Stock Exchange in December 1989, without a permit. The sculpture was impounded by the city but the public appeal it generated forced officials to bring it back, just two blocks farther south from where Di Modica had originally placed it. "Fearless Girl" was installed, with a temporary permit, on International Women's Day by State Street Global Advisors as part of a campaign to pressure companies to add more women to their boards. After a petition and a lot of tourist as well as social media attention, New York City officials extended the permit until 2018. In March, Di Modica called "Fearless Girl" an advertising trick and appealed to officials to remove the statue. "Women, girls, that's great, but that's not what that (my sculpture) is," he told MarketWatch. "I put it there for art. My bull is a symbol for America. My bull is a symbol of prosperity and for strength." Di Modica and his lawyer will hold a press conference to explain how he will challenge the city, which gave "Fearless Girl" a permit to stay in front of the bull until February 2018. The artist told AP that having another bold presence changes the creative dynamic of his installation. The complaint got the attention of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who responded on Twitter:
SEE ALSO: This app says it measures how many times women are interrupted by men Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: The disturbing reason some people turn red when they drink alcohol Small online publishers are seeing a double impact from ad blocking on traffic and revenue, according to a new report from PageFair. PageFair sells anti-ad blocking solutions to publishers, so it is in the company's interests to show how terribe ad blocking is. As users begin blocking ads, smaller publishers will temporarily see an uptick in traffic, when users can access the full site without ads. After a year and a half, traffic falls because, according to PageFair, sites can no longer afford to keep producing high-quality work. Traffic can fall by an average of 8% after nearly three years. Johnny Ryan, PageFair's Head of Ecosystem told Business Insider in an interview: "What we're talking about is the death, the slow death of niches and of diversity on the web. This is happening at the same that we have a media dupoloy (in Facebook and Google which show ads to ad blocking users)."
"It's a hidden pain for the small and medium publisher and will be a very big pain for the large publisher." Websites in the top 20% of Alexa rankings were so far unaffected by the decline, which PageFair said was a result of larger websites selling premium online ads directly to advertisers. But even that may not last according to the lead researcher Dr. Ben Shiller: "If more people start to use ad blockers, eventually these larger websites will have to be impacted." In January PageFair revealed that ad blocking had gone up by 30% in 2016 and predicted that it would continue to grow. The result for larger publishers will be a shift to subscriber models. "We'll see a reduced quality but the internet isn't going to disappear," Shiller said. "A few websites will just start to charge for access and they may not earn nearly as much as they used to under an advertising model but they'll earn something. There will still be content on the web, it's just a question of quality." |
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