IF YOU read ONE THING
Brands are not your friends

“soo hungry need to find my wife and head to pf changs” is a real tweet from the San Diego Chargers Twitter account from 2007—before the team even controlled the @Chargers handle. Twelve years later, the idea of a brand not being on Twitter is hard to imagine, and plenty of them have taken a maximalist approach to posting: Brands now roast each other and their fans, opine about depression and societal disillusionment, and even drop mixtapes. How did brands find their voice online? (Spoiler: It wasn’t easy, and many of them failed hard, and often.) The arc from awkward phase to meta-commentary is explained in a new Vulture article written by the ideal guide: the brand manager behind the Steak-umm Twitter account, Nathan Allebach. Beyond drawing a compelling timeline of the evolution of brands on Twitter, Allebach also dips into the fraught nature of this kind of branding. “When Wendy’s roasts someone, everyone laughs,” writes Allebach. “But when someone tweets ‘Wendy’s pay your tomato workers,’ he’s the jerk ruining the fun.”

POWERSTAT
Another news aggregator on the rise

SmartNews, a free news aggregator app, continues its referral growth according to analytics firm Parse.ly. Publications such as the MIT Technology Review are seeing as much as a 17 percent increase in traffic coming from the platform month-over-month.

Source: Nieman Lab

TREND WATCH
Bundled news apps off to a slow start

Publishers seeking to promote their own subscriptions now have to contend with a growing number of apps looking to aggregate premium content from publishers for a monthly fee. While Apple News+ made the biggest splash, other contenders include Mogul News, which launched earlier this month, and Scribd. As promising as the idea of being the “Netflix for news” is, however, no platform has amassed subscribers near the level of the streaming giant. Apple News+, for instance, has reportedly gathered 200,000 paid subscribers in its first few months, a far cry from the tens of millions of users on Netflix. The problem, however, is that publishers lack any incentive to promote a third-party app over their own subscription plans. Adding yet another subscription among existing ones may just increase fatigue, rather than solve it.

NEWS YOU CAN USE
Stay visible amidst LinkedIn algorithm changes

The LinkedIn algorithm is changing, prioritizing niche ideas and conversations over viral content, reports Axios. Until now, a great deal of attention on the platform has been directed at the top 1 percent of power users, explains Tim Jurka, director of artificial intelligence at LinkedIn. The goal of the update is to encourage broader participation by elevating content that relates to users’ interests and networks, promoting posts that include mentions and hashtags, and circulating posts by users who respond to commenters. What does this mean for you? “LinkedIn editors have been asking publishers to have their reporters share content to boost posts from authoritative individuals, as opposed to having content come from brands directly,” writes Sara Fischer. A strategy that follows a similar path might perform better on the platform.

PERSPECTIVES
Google fixes Incognito’s paywall “bug” Publishers’ efforts to detect when readers are bypassing their paywalls are about to hit a roadblock. In the past, when readers hit paywalls, they could bypass them by opening the desired article in Google Chrome’s Incognito mode, which prevents websites from tracking how many articles a reader has already read. To push back, some publishers implemented trackers that would detect readers in Incognito mode and prompt them to pay or view the article in the normal browser. The newest update to Google Chrome, slated to arrive on June 30th, will remove this functionality for publishers. What will this mean for the future of paywalls and publishing?

• “Google viewed publishers’ ability to detect an Incognito browser as a bug. But users’ ability to get around a paywall is apparently a feature. … The reopening on this loophole could encourage more publishers to go all in on a hard paywall, in which you can’t read a single article without first registering.” - Christine Schmidt, reporter at Nieman Lab (Nieman Lab)
• “Free riders aren’t that valuable; it’s a low likelihood they will ever pay, so why bother. … Publishers are trying to find the right balance between restricting access and making it harder for current and prospective subscribers who are considering it. They don’t want to add too much friction and are wary of tactics that get in the way of that.” - Michael Silberman, senior vice president of strategy at Piano (Digiday)
• “This most recent move is really disappointing. … What we’ve found is that the publisher team within Google is in a vertical silo; the search folks are in a vertical silo; the ad folks are in a vertical silo. … I don’t know whether the silos are intentional or accidental. But at the same time, if their interest was really in helping publishers, they’d be able to bring the point of contact down to where we could speak to them.” - Anonymous news publishing executive (Digiday)

This week in our office

Our team is thrilled to be at the Aspen Ideas Festival. We can’t think of a more breathtaking backdrop to inspire conversations about the issues that matter most.

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