MEDIA NEWS ROUNDUP

Bluesky is already outpacing X and Threads as a traffic driver for some news publishers. The Guardian's Dave Earley reports that their first week on Bluesky brought more referrals than any week from X in 2024 and double the visits from Meta's Threads. The Boston Globe's Matt Karolian says the microblogging platform delivered 3 times more traffic and 4.5 times more paying subscribers than Threads. 

With a recent surge of signups, Bluesky has now more than 1.5 million active users. Meanwhile, more news publishers are moving to the platform, spurred on by the 2024 elections. And so the social media landscape becomes ever-more fragmented.

Perplexity launched its new ecommerce experience. Its earlier experiments with a “Shop with Pro” feature are now a fleshed-out feature of the AI search engine, offering product recommendations to its Pro users (in the States, at least) by pulling data from Shopify and other platforms for up-to-date product info. They've also launched “Snap to Shop,” letting users upload photos to find and ask about products they see IRL. The timing suggests Perplexity wanted its shopping feature to be in full swing by the 2024 Black Friday sales, but it’s not clear if that was a success. 

The Daily Mail’s publisher  made a “significant investment” in a publisher-paying AI platform. Prorata AI promises to compensate publishers “fairly” every time their content is used by GenAI products to answer a query. The investment also comes with licensing access to all DMG Media content archives.  

OpenAI struck a $16 million (minimum) deal for Dotdash Meredith content. The $16M content licensing deal represents the “fixed” part of the cost for content, with an additional “dynamic” figure to be paid based on how the content is used.

Firecrown has acquired Active Interest Media’s boating titles. The company has expanded from its original focus on aviation into other expensive hobbyist fields like yachting, model trains, and even astronomy and space exploration. It’s the latest in a string of acquisitions, including the largest ecommerce platform for NASA memorabilia, which Firecrown acquired earlier this year. Firecrown now publishes under 50 brands, and its monetization strategy relies on down-funnel ecommerce and financing for private planes and yachts, as well as good, old-fashioned advertising.

In a letter to one of the train hobbyist magazines Firecrown acquired in May 2024, the CEO expressed hope in replicating their success with their 2021 Flying Mag acquisition, which has been generating 5 times more revenue than when it was first acquired.

HOW TO DISASTER-PROOF YOUR MIGRATION

Welcome back to our series on preparing publisher websites for a successful migration. In Part 4, we made sure everything is in top shape by a final audit of URLs, content, navigation, and 3rd-party integrations. Today we’re talking about the analytics and ads setup, which is vital for ensuring your migration meets your business goals. We’ll also talk a bit about how to minimize downtime when flipping the switch.

Read the whole Disaster-Proof Your Migration series here.

Part 5: Setting Up Analytics and Gathering Data

By this stage in our theoretical migration, you’re almost home free. The content is migrated, the design is perfected, and functionalities are tested. But before you flip the switch, it's imperative to ensure your analytics and ads settings are configured correctly. Neglecting this step could lead to revenue loss, data gaps, and a lot of unnecessary stress.

MEET OUR PARTNER

Twenty-First Digital (TFD) 🚀

TFD is known for building audiences that love what you do. As audience development and digital marketing professionals, they help brands and publishers expand and monetize their most valuable asset—their audience. TFD’s team has experience developing and nurturing audiences for some of the most respected brands across the country, including Scientific American, New Republic, and Foreign Affairs.

They have helped us to increase organic traffic, expand into new markets, and better monetize audiences for our clients. To find out more about what they do, click here: https://www.twentyfirstdigital.com/what-we-do