LinkedIn Referral Traffic, Q&A With Quartz Publisher, Magzster’s Article-centric Browsing Format, Facebook Audience Optimization Tool, TFP’s Media Metrics, Digital Publishing Solution Tip: Drag and Drop App Asset Files
Welcome to Technology for Publishing’s roundup of news and tips for media industry pros! This week, we’re sharing stories about publishers seeing big increases in LinkedIn referral traffic, how fast-growing digital news site Quartz is evolving, digital magazine app Magzster’s article-centric browsing format, Facebook’s rollout of a new audience optimization tool for publishers, and more.
- Calling LinkedIn’s relationship with publishers “schizophrenic,” Digiday reported the professional network has opened the referral pipeline once again and is letting traffic flow out. And of course publishers are happy about that, given their traffic from the platform plunged by as much as 44% earlier last year at the same time Facebook referrals slowed due to algorithm changes. At Forbes, referrals from LinkedIn jumped 127% from July to December last year, while the Financial Times and Business Insider said they’re also seeing traffic spikes, with the latter reporting a 300% increase in the past month alone. The article said LinkedIn’s attempt to “mend fences” with publishers included tweaks to its Pulse news aggregation app and a new publisher recommendation feature.
- Fast-growing digital site Quartz reported an 85% jump in 2015 revenue, with 16.8 million unique visitors in December. But, while those numbers are impressive, the Atlantic Media-owned news outlet is continuing to evolve, reported Nieman Labs, with plans to roll out its first iPhone app, grow its popular email newsletter offerings, and expand its Atlas chart-sharing platform. In an interview, publisher Jay Lauf discussed those efforts along with the site’s mobile-first strategy, ad blocking, reports of a potential sale, and more.
- Recognizing that most people don’t read magazines cover to cover, digital magazine app Magzter is moving to an articlization model that lets subscribers browse by article rather than magazine edition. The new format is also optimized for cross-platform viewing, unlike other apps where articles are just bookmarked PDFs of larger magazines, which don’t always display well on smartphones and tablets. TechCrunch said Magzter has developed technology that automatically creates article layouts from a PDF, though editors will review and sign off on each article. The model will allow readers to not only browse articles by topic, but also perform full-text search and share individual articles on social media. To start, Magzster will curate popular articles from about 250 magazines and scale from there, the report said.
- And Facebook introduced a new audience optimization tool that helps publishers better engage their audiences and gain more insights into readers’ interests. Features include interest tags that connect individual readers with topics and subtopics that are most likely to engage them; audience restrictions, enabling publishers to limit the visibility of posts on Facebook by specifying which audiences wouldn’t find a particular post relevant; and audience insights, which, in addition to Facebook’s existing Page insights product, shows publishers how their content is performing at the post level, with breakdowns by interest tag. According to Facebook, testers have seen a considerable lift in engagement using the tool. Entertainment publisher MTV is quoted on its site: The tags “did a great job at picking apart the massive entertainment audience and identifying which segments were most responsive to which kinds of stories.”
On the Technology for Publishing Blog
- Media Metrics Roundup: This month’s Media Metrics installment covers print-only newspaper readers, media fragmentation, mobile apps vs. mobile browsing, native ads, and more.
- Adobe Digital Publishing Solution Tip: When building Digital Publishing Solution apps, several image files are required for icons and splash screens. This week’s tip highlights how to simply drag and drop the app asset files you need.
- ICYMI: Check out our latest infographic pick to see if your content strategy is in sync with the top tech trends projected for 2016.
Image: Digiday
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Posted by: Monica Sambataro
