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Welcome to your weekly digest of digital media and technology news and opinion.
Please note next Sunday is my birthday! So depending on events this may or may not reach you Monday morning on the 11th.
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BuzzFeed had one small win this week, in that after years of protest the BBC's somehow-growing morning radio program 'Today' will begin to feature websites, and the stories that come from them, as media sources alongside British newspapers in their morning paper review. A very long time coming, as frequently for the past several years we have had agenda-setting stories from outlets like BuzzFeed where the review has focused on the publishers following in their footsteps.
However, much less exciting for BuzzFeed is the news this week that they will begin to introduce programmatic banner advertising on their own platform BuzzFeed.com. After the publisher was initially committed to a 'native advertising' strategy, that appears to have been blocked somewhat by the limited audience BuzzFeed was able to direct at such content, and the expense of producing it, at least in comparison to the scale and expense of the distributed publishing model that they have embraced wholeheartedly most recently. It is difficult to monetise a company based on scale with a strategy that is not especially scaleable.
Disappointing as native ads were for a time hailed as the revenue model of the future, and further disappointing that BuzzFeed's 'full stack publisher' approach hasn't enabled them to point in the direction of The Outline's custom ad unit model, instead rushing to the cheap and easy DFP scripts.
It's another experiment at where to get the money (after the company has tried selling books, wine, and stovetops) before the inevitable IPO. Those investors want their paycheques.
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A big Google story this week as the search giant ousted a critic from a think tank it helped fund. Open Markets was a department of the think tank New America, and over the years had grown increasingly critical of the monopolised effect of internet giants such as Google and Facebook. Soon after New America published an article praising EU sanctions against Google, Eric Schmidt called through to 'voice his displeasure'. Later, Open Markets was forced out.
Now refocused as 'Citizens Against Monopoly', the events surrounding this group's attempted silencing have grown into a wave of criticism from across the internet, with more writers coming out over how Google's threats have forced their writing offline.
A serf on Google's farm is the excellently titled piece taking in all of this, by Talking Points Memo's editor in chief. While Google is a part of the internet that nobody nowadays seems to want to go without, its power in both major and minor ways controls more than just what you see in your search results. SEO is just one obvious example of a department, and now a specialised category of content, made to game Google's system. But from a business based on advertising there is Google AdExchange, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), Google Analytics and Google Apps (ahem... G Suite), all tightly interwoven into how you work.
The piece is an excellent expose of the blindingly obvious, but it's the scale of it that when reminded of you will wonder what anyone can do to escape it.
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Ev Williams, Medium CEO, also poo-poos native advertising in this NiemanLab interview where he is questioned on the 'clap' based business model. "We believe in the user-supported model", he says, and actually makes a pretty convincing case around how Medium planned to move into this area from the launch of their premium membership model.
It seems a lot of Medium's efforts have been into scaling the metrics around how writers should get paid for what kind of impact on the site.
There are also some good questions on the role of public service journalism, and how Medium really doesn't fit into that (from Ev's perspective), and of course how he changed his mind on ads (and infuriated a bunch of partner publishers all at once).
Although writers should still prepare for a dip in revenue to come: Medium are seeding the market with a pool of money larger than that which is coming in through their membership model.
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WYAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
That's the dying sound of the last Juicero, squeezing the last proprietary pack of juice. The company that started to be both the Apple and Netflix of juicing with a $400 wifi-enabled juicing machine has shut down.
And it's no wonder given, well, everything about the company, but also this video I stumbled across (skip to 12:50 for his first 'wow' moment) where an electrical engineer takes apart one of the juicers. Machined to perfection does not cover it: the original price for these was $700 and even that seems to have been subsidised against the weekly commitment of at least $40 worth of pulp packs. Pulp packs that were all predetermined flavours, and pre-ground, making the whole 'juicer' frankly pointless.
If anyone did buy one of these, they have until December 1st to claim a refund.
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