Gigaom » social https://gigaom.com Technology news, trends and analysis covering mobile, big data, cloud, science, energy and media Wed, 29 Jul 2015 17:15:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2 While others shut down comments, the NYT wants to expand them https://gigaom.com/2015/02/25/while-others-shut-down-comments-the-nyt-wants-to-expand-them/ https://gigaom.com/2015/02/25/while-others-shut-down-comments-the-nyt-wants-to-expand-them/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2015 21:50:45 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=917248 While others shut down comments, the NYT wants to expand them originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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If there was a ranking of popularity for online behavior, internet comments would probably wind up somewhere just below pop-up ads or auto-play videos. Seen by many as a haven for trolls and spam, a number of sites — including Popular Science and Bloomberg — have gotten rid of them. But there are still those who believe allowing readers to comment is a worthwhile endeavor, and the New York Times appears to belong to this group: instead of getting rid of comments, the paper says it plans to expand its commenting features and invest more resources in them.

Community editor Bassey Etim told public editor Margaret Sullivan that in contrast to some other organizations, the Times sees the readers who leave comments on its site as a “celebrity class” of users, and wants to give them more features and recognize their contributions. How exactly it plans to do that isn’t clear, but Etim said the number of Times stories that are open to comments will increase — from an average of about 20 each day to more than twice that (opinion columns are almost always open).

Unlike many of the other organizations that have chosen to kill off their comments — including Re/code, Reuters and The Week — the New York Times apparently doesn’t believe that social-media networks such as Twitter and Facebook can take the place of reader interaction directly on the Times site. As I’ve tried to argue before, the fact that those tools exist should be seen as an addition to traditional commenting, not a replacement for it. In addition to the Times, sites like Quartz, Medium and Gawker have been experimenting with ways of improving comments rather than killing them.

Those are real readers

Another common argument made by sites that have chosen to kill their comments is that the people who post comments aren’t a publication’s “real” readers, and/or make up such a small proportion of the readership that they don’t really matter. Bloomberg’s online editor Joshua Topolsky, for example, said that the site would not have comments after a redesign because the number of people who would be served by them was so minuscule:

“You’re really talking about less than one percent of the overall audience that’s engaged in commenting, even if it looks like a very active community. In the grand scheme of the audience, it doesn’t represent the readership.”

This kind of comment ignores a number of things, however: One is that an active community of readers should never be ignored, even if some of them behave badly from time to time (and in fact that kind of behavior only increases if you ignore them). And the second is that even if the number of people who comment is low, the number of readers who pay attention to comments is arguably a lot higher — given the traditional social-media rule of thumb that says 90 percent of people read or lurk, with only one percent taking action.

New York Times innovation report cropped

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who spent part of her column discussing the problems that readers have with the NYT’s comments — including having comments not show up, or not being able to post them from the West Coast because a story has already been closed to new comments — said she believes that comments are a key part of the newspaper’s relationship with its readers. While the Times system is not perfect, she said, “reader commenting is one of the best ways for The Times to stay close to its readers and what they care most about.”

Comments have value

The NYT isn’t the only major publication that believes comments have value: Aron Pilhofer, the head of digital for The Guardian in London — and the former head of the digital team at the New York Times — said at the recent News:Rewired conference that he believes media organizations who choose to shut down their comments are making a huge mistake:

“I feel very strongly that digital journalism needs to be a conversation with readers. This is one, if not the most important area of emphasis that traditional newsrooms are actually ignoring. You see site after site killing comments and moving away from community – that’s a monumental mistake… readers need and deserve a voice. They should be a core part of your journalism.”

The audience-development team at the Times is said to be working on a number of potential enhancements to the commenting function at the paper, changes that are expected to build on some earlier features and experiments with added functionality — such as the introduction of “verified commenter” status in 2011. Verified commenters are selected by the Times based on their previous behavior and can post comments without having them be moderated before they appear (the paper has a moderation team of about 13 people).

As I argued at the time, the verified-commenter feature could have been the first step in getting some devoted Times readers to “level up” or become more involved in a community of readers at the paper, a relationship that could then be monetized in a number of ways. The Times is also a partner — along with a number of other media organizations such as the Washington Post — in a project being run by the Mozilla Foundation, called The Coral Project, which is building an open-source platform for reader interaction, including comments.

While others shut down comments, the NYT wants to expand them originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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This explains why no men were using Pinterest https://gigaom.com/2015/01/23/this-explains-why-no-men-were-using-pinterest/ https://gigaom.com/2015/01/23/this-explains-why-no-men-were-using-pinterest/#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2015 01:08:32 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=909471 This explains why no men were using Pinterest originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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If you ever wondered why Pinterest took off with women and not men, we have our answer. Friday the company announced it had changed its search filtering options so that men could see results catered to their gender.

In the past, when searching for workouts or clothes their feed would fill with pins targeted to women. Since Pinterest’s early users were women, the application spread virally through that demographic. Naturally the most popular pins and pinners are, as a result, for women or by women.

That shut out men who might also find the technology useful but didn’t like the results they were served. Although some people who identify as men might appreciate a more feminine selection, not all would. Take a look at Pinterest’s screenshot on the difference in genders:

The difference in gender searching on Pinterest. Left: Men ; Right: Women

The difference in gender searching on Pinterest. Left: Men ; Right: Women

The new gender focus will appear as a toggle, allowing women and men to search for items of the opposite gender as well. That could be helpful for anyone with more androgynous taste, or it could serve well for gift shopping purposes.

The attempt to make Pinterest appealing to men comes from the company’s new head of brand, David Rubin, who formerly ran marketing for the ultra dude product Axe body spray. He was brought on in part to achieve that goal, and he started by commissioning Pinterest ad storylines to appeal to men and filling men’s home feeds with male products. Frankly I’m surprised it took the company this long to create gender specific search results — it has been around for over seven years, after all.

With the product announcement Pinterest also revealed new statistics, saying that its number of male signups have grown 73 percent year over year. It’s impressive numbers for the U.S. As we’ve covered, in some other countries, Pinterest has actually had a far easier time recruiting men to the application.

Since it’s a user-generated content site it’s demographics tend to build on themselves. The more women — or motorcycle fans, or cooks, or interior designers — are on the site, the more pin will be created that appeal to them.

To kickstart other groups Pinterest has to woo them with product shifts, and it’s doing just that.

This explains why no men were using Pinterest originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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RebelMouse wants to help media companies own their social graph https://gigaom.com/2015/01/23/rebelmouse-wants-to-help-media-companies-own-their-social-graph/ https://gigaom.com/2015/01/23/rebelmouse-wants-to-help-media-companies-own-their-social-graph/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2015 19:23:05 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=909282 RebelMouse wants to help media companies own their social graph originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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For many media companies, whether traditional or digital-only, the main focus is on the publishing of content — as much as possible, in most cases — and whatever social engagement there is with readers either takes place in a swamp of comments below a post, or is outsourced to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. In an age where social is becoming more important than search, that’s a very dangerous approach to take, says RebelMouse founder and former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry. And he has a point.

Berry says he left HuffPo and started RebelMouse because he saw what was possible in terms of combining content and community, but the barriers to actually getting there seemed almost insurmountable — especially for media startups — because there was no platform or content-management system that made that kind of thing easy. What most outlets use is what Berry calls a “Frankenstack” of cobbled-together pieces of technology.

“I saw this enormous gap between what people could do with content and social and what they were able to do — there was like this enormous canyon, and people had to climb down and swim across a river and then up the other side, and only one in a hundred could make it. Everyone thought all they needed was WordPress, but the amount of product and design and sysadmin even to just to build the site was overwhelming.”

A social-first CMS

What RebelMouse started with was a service that pulled in a user’s social graph from Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social sites they belonged to, and then made it easy to aggregate and display that. But that was never really the end goal, Berry says — building those tools and APIs gave RebelMouse what it needed to design and build a fully social content-management system or CMS for media companies and brands (which are increasingly becoming the same thing in many ways, at least in how they approach media).

The flagship example of what that allows, he said, is The Dodo — a site devoted to animals that was launched last year and is funded in part by Lerer Ventures, the investment arm of Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer (who is also a backer of RebelMouse and BuzzFeed). Unlike most media sites, The Dodo has no designers, no developers, no system administrators and no mobile team: that’s because RebelMouse powers the entire thing, including the apps, and gives editors all the various levers and analytics that come from its understanding of social content.

The Dodo

In addition to The Dodo, the company has also been building partnerships with more traditional media companies like Time Inc. and Viacom. For some, like MTV, Berry says RebelMouse just powers the social side of the company’s content — but in other cases it allows a media company like Time to experiment very quickly with verticals or online properties like The Snug, a site devoted to home decorating that is powered by RebelMouse and launched last year. More offerings like that are coming, says Berry.

The other big area of growth for RebelMouse has been with brands, such as General Electric, United and Samsung, Berry says. Thanks to the web and social media, brands have the same ability to become content creators and publishers that traditional media entities do (the recent State of the Union address being a good example) and RebelMouse handles all of the back-end and provides social tools and features that it would take those brands months or even years to build on their own.

Outsourcing to Facebook

But the thing that Berry says he is most excited about when it comes to the company’s partnership with media outlets like Time is that he believes RebelMouse can help those properties build or re-build a relationship with their most devoted readers — a relationship that many of them have effectively given up on, or outsourced to Twitter and Facebook, because managing it was just too difficult. And that is dangerous, he says:

“As media companies are growing their audience, their pages per visit and actual engagement is shrinking dramatically. They like to say we’re growing like crazy on Facebook, our unique visitors are up and it’s all mobile traffic — so it sounds like they’re hitting all the trends. But instead of a single pageview per visit, they’re getting like half a page view or a quarter pageview.”

One of the biggest factors in that change has been Facebook, Berry says — because unlike Google, which used to control how people found content, Facebook doesn’t want to send you away as quickly as possible, it wants to keep you on its site as much as possible, and get you to return as often as possible. And that makes it hard for media companies to build an engaged community of their own.

Rebel Mouse slide

The River

That’s where a feature RebelMouse calls “The River” comes in: it effectively creates a social graph on top of the one that readers already have on Twitter and Facebook, but this separate graph is part of the media outlet’s website and app, instead of occurring somewhere else. So readers of The Dodo, for example, can connect Twitter and Facebook and follow the activity of their friends within the Dodo app — but they can also follow other readers, as well as writers and editors, and interact with them.

This might sound a lot like comments, which many sites either ignore or hand over to Facebook to manage, but Berry says there is a crucial difference, which is that only logged-in readers who choose to follow someone will see their comments. “That makes it a totally inhospitable environment for trolls,” the RebelMouse founder says. What it creates instead is a vertical social graph focused around the specific content of the site, which in turn increases engagement and community.

By using these tools — which also notify other users when someone they follow within the site or app posts a comment, shares a link or likes a post — The Dodo has seen time spent on the site more than double, Berry says, and other media partners are seeing the same kind of growth. More media partners will soon be implementing either the app features or modules on their site that have the same functionality, he says, but for now “this feels like a kind of next-generation of what comments could become.”

Could some vertical or niche media sites take back some of their community and social engagement from Facebook and Twitter by using RebelMouse’s tools? The company is still fairly young and its promise remains relatively untested, but Berry understands social like few other people (except possibly BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti), so it would be unwise to count him out.

RebelMouse wants to help media companies own their social graph originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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New Firefox gets social, brings beta Marketplace to desktop https://gigaom.com/2015/01/14/new-firefox-gets-social-brings-beta-marketplace-to-desktop/ https://gigaom.com/2015/01/14/new-firefox-gets-social-brings-beta-marketplace-to-desktop/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2015 09:25:56 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=906410 New Firefox gets social, brings beta Marketplace to desktop originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 35, which brings with it the enhancements to the Firefox Hello video-calling feature that I wrote about when they were in beta.

Firefox 35 also introduces a social sharing feature, making it easy to post a link to a webpage to a service such as Facebook or Twitter, or to email it to a contact. This is similar to what Opera has been doing recently, and it’s interesting to see how the big Chrome rivals (let’s leave Internet Explorer out of it for now) are adding more features in a way that doesn’t necessarily make them look bloated in comparison to Google‘s streamlined browser.

Here’s how the right side of my Firefox toolbar looks now – there’s a good deal of functionality in there (the 1Password icon is the only third-party one) but it’s still tasteful and unobtrusive, at least to my eyes:

Firefox toolbar

To quickly recap the new Firefox Hello features, it’s now easier to set up an ad-hoc, anonymous call and to create a URL for such a call that can be repeatedly revisited by the participants – making it a bit like a virtual meeting room.

In a Tuesday blog post, Mozilla also said that it and its telco partner, Telefonica, aim to add new features to the WebRTC-based Firefox Hello such as screen-sharing and online collaboration – all from within the browser.

A more general blog post about Firefox 35 also noted that the Firefox Marketplace is now available for beta testing on the desktop. Firefox already has an add-on search facility, of course, but this is more like the Chrome Web Store, featuring a range of web apps.

The Firefox Marketplace is already available on mobile, and indeed it is effectively the app store for those with Firefox OS phones – the apps are all HTML5. So, by bringing it to the desktop, Mozilla is bringing its mobile and desktop efforts closer together.

New Firefox gets social, brings beta Marketplace to desktop originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

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Online privacy will still be a mess a decade from now, experts say https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/online-privacy-will-still-be-a-mess-a-decade-from-now-experts-say/ https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/online-privacy-will-still-be-a-mess-a-decade-from-now-experts-say/#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:59:07 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=901403 Online privacy will still be a mess a decade from now, experts say originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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The shifting sands of online privacy are not going to solidify any time soon, judging by the responses to a recent survey of technology experts, internet pioneers and prominent sociologists done by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project. The survey asked respondents whether they thought the minefield of issues surrounding online privacy rights would be solved either by government or by society as a whole by 2025. The verdict? Not bloody likely.

The report is part of a series of studies the Pew Center has done to mark the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the worldwide web, and includes responses from hundreds of experts as well as some anonymous answers from those who didn’t want to provide their names. The main question was: “Will policy makers and technology innovators create a secure, popularly accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025?”

A little over half of the respondents said no to that question and a smaller number said yes — but even those who said yes were skeptical about how prevalent such an infrastructure would be, and how strongly individual users or citizens would adhere to it even if it did exist. As one respondent described it, “privacy is still a fluid concept,” with different users defining it in different ways — and that’s unlikely to change in the next decade. Here are some of the responses that stood out from the Pew Center’s report:

danah boyd, Microsoft research scientist: “I expect the dynamics of security and privacy are going to be a bloody mess for the next decade, mired in ugly politics and corporate greed. I also expect that our relationship with other countries is going to be a mess over these issues. People will be far more aware of the ways that data is being used and abused, although I suspect that they will have just as little power over their data as they do now.”

Big Brother is watching you

Howard Rheingold, Institute for the Future: “Citizens will join the state and digital businesses in the surveillance game. Privacy is a social construct — for example, until central heating, most people in most houses slept in the same room; in Japan, for centuries, walls were made of paper. Ask any teenager about his or her ‘Facebook-stalking’ habits. Privacy has already changed.”

Hal Varian, chief economist for Google: “By 2025, the current debate about privacy will seem quaint and old-fashioned. The benefits of cloud-based, personal, digital assistants will be so overwhelming that putting restrictions on these services will be out of the question. Of course, there will be people who choose not to use such services, but they will be a small minority. Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great.”

Vint Cerf, co-developer of TCP/IP: “By 2025, people will be much more aware of their own negligent behavior, eroding privacy for others, and not just themselves. The uploading and tagging of photos and videos without permission may become socially unacceptable. As in many other matters, the social punishment may have to be accompanied by legislation—think about seat belts and smoking by way of example.”

David Weinberger, Harvard’s Berkman Center: “Unfortunately, the incentives are unequal: There is a strong incentive to enable strong privacy for transactions, but much less for enabling individuals to control their own info. So, of course, I do not actually know how this will shake out. I assume we will accept that humans do stupid things, and we will forgive one another for them. When your walls are paper, that is what you have to do.”

Mark Rotenberg, Electronic Privacy Information Center: “There will be many contentious battles over the control of identity and private life. The appropriation of personal facts for commercial value — an issue that emerged with Google’s ‘shared endorsements’ and Facebook’s ‘sponsored stories’ — are a small glimpse of what lies ahead. The key will be the defaults: either individuals will control their online persona or it will be controlled by others.”

Security - generic

John Savage, professor of computer science: “A secure, accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure on the Internet, at the global scale, is impossible for the foreseeable future. For too many large nations a tension exists between state security and privacy rights. They will not sacrifice the former for the latter.”

Kalev Leetaru, Yahoo fellow: “While people publicly discuss wanting more privacy, they increasingly use media in a way that gives away their privacy voluntarily—for example, broadcasting their location via phone GPS when posting to social platforms, photographing their entire lives, etc. People seem to want to be famous, documenting their lives to the most-minute detail, in ways that would have been unheard of to a past generation.”

Stowe Boyd, Gigaom Research: “We have seen the emergence of publicy as the default modality, with privacy declining. In order to ‘exist’ online, you have to publish things to be shared, and that has to be done in open, public spaces. If not, people have a lesser chance to enrich friendships, find or grow communities, learn new things, and act as economic agents online.”

Kate Crawford, research scientist: “In the next 10 years, I would expect to see the development of more encryption technologies and boutique services for people prepared to pay a premium for greater control over their data. This is the creation of privacy as a luxury good. It also has the unfortunate effect of establishing a new divide: the privacy rich and the privacy poor.”

Online privacy will still be a mess a decade from now, experts say originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Will Change.org’s new funding compromise its mission? https://gigaom.com/2014/12/09/will-change-orgs-new-funding-compromise-its-mission/ https://gigaom.com/2014/12/09/will-change-orgs-new-funding-compromise-its-mission/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:49:16 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=899077 Will Change.org’s new funding compromise its mission? originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Petition website Change.org has raised a $25 million Series C round in a rather unusual way. Instead of finding institutional investment firms, Change.org’s new funding comes from socially conscious individuals (and a few firms with social investment mandates): Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Evan Williams, Jeff Weiner, Jerry Yang and others. The list is a veritable who’s-who in tech.

Change.org makes money through sponsored recommendations, where petition creators can pay to put their petitions in front of other Change.org users with similar interests.

With the additional capital, Change.org will expand its mobile, political, and global efforts (Yeap, they’re pioneering GoMoPo. Hey, it’s better than AOL’s HoMo). The company plans to make it easier for people to create and sign petitions from their phones, as well as verify politicians and organizations on the app so these entities can converse directly with petitioners. And although Change.org already has employees in twenty countries, it wants to further expand the app’s tools and languages.

But the hefty bundle of new cash raises some questions for the company. Will Change.org’s humanitarian mission — “to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see” — be compromised by its investors’ need for an exit?

Not surprisingly, Change.org COO Jen Dulski says no way. She had a few solid points to back herself up. The investors joining Change.org’s round have agreed to an unusual exit route. Down the line, the company can choose to return their money via private secondary equity offering or stock repurchasing, instead of an acquisition or IPO. That’s one big benefit to raising funding from socially conscious investors who are putting in their own cash, instead of a VC firm with LPs who need a big return.

Secondly, Dulski pointed out that Change.org is a certified benefit corporation. There’s no legal requirement to go along with that, but in order to keep its benefit corp status Change.org needs to apply to renew it every year. “The process is very rigorous,” Dulski says. “It makes sure you treat your staff in a certain way, you take care of the environment, that you’re transparent.” Change.org is also in the process of legally incorporating as a benefit corporation, which will add even more onerous standards to live by.

Will Change.org’s new funding compromise its mission? originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Syrian Electronic Army hacks websites via Gigya’s login service https://gigaom.com/2014/11/27/syrian-electronic-army-hacks-websites-via-gigyas-login-service/ https://gigaom.com/2014/11/27/syrian-electronic-army-hacks-websites-via-gigyas-login-service/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2014 15:40:16 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=896760 Syrian Electronic Army hacks websites via Gigya’s login service originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Visitors to some large media and entertainment websites on Thursday — including NBC, The Independent and NHL.com — were greeted by pop-up messages that said those sites had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. According to an analysis by the Independent, the hack used a vulnerability in the DNS settings of Gigya, a service that many large websites use to handle comments and social logins, which the company says it has now repaired.

In a post on its blog, Gigya said that the Syrian Electronic Army modified the WHOIS record for its website and pointed it to a different DNS (domain name system) server, which in turn pointed Gigya’s content delivery network or CDN domain to a server run by the SEA:

“At approximately 6:45 AM EST we identified sporadic failures with access to our service. An initial inquiry has revealed that there was a breach at our domain registrar that resulted in the WHOIS record of gigya.com being modified to point to a different DNS server. That DNS server had been configured to point Gigya’s CDN domain (cdn.gigya.com) to a server controlled by the hackers, where they served a file called ‘socialize.js’ with an alert claiming that the site had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.”

Gigya, which recently raised $35 million in a round of venture financing led by Intel’s investment fund, is a San Francisco-based company that provides social-login and marketing services to more than 700 firms worldwide, and processed more than a billion logins this year, according to information it provided to the New York Times.

B3c-PKRIYAAaK02

Gigya said in its post that no user data was compromised or lost in the attack, and the DNS settings have been repaired — although it may take some time for all sites to be updated, because of the way the domain-name system works. The company added that it maintains “the highest levels of security around our service and user data” and that it has “put additional measures in place to protect against this type of attack in the future.”

The Syrian Electronic Army has become notorious for such hacks over the past few years, including attacks that compromised PayPal, Microsoft and Facebook. The Army is made up of hackers who support Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and it is believed to be run with official government approval.

Syrian Electronic Army hacks websites via Gigya’s login service originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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BuzzFeed says social rules and it is bigger than most TV networks https://gigaom.com/2014/11/24/buzzfeed-says-social-rules-and-it-is-bigger-than-most-tv-networks/ https://gigaom.com/2014/11/24/buzzfeed-says-social-rules-and-it-is-bigger-than-most-tv-networks/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2014 23:42:04 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=893636 BuzzFeed says social rules and it is bigger than most TV networks originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Although it is still relatively new as far as media entities go, BuzzFeed has become one of the leading new-media players, thanks in large part to its command of the social web, an ability to craft viral content and a large fan base among millennials. True to form, the company has created a visually-rich index of facts about its size and reach — numbers which help explain how it was able to raise $50 million in a recent financing round.

As a caveat, it’s worth noting that the presentation is clearly designed to be a sales pitch for the company’s native advertising efforts, and so there are no links to or discussion of any of the data used to compile the charts. Most of the figures come courtesy of the site’s Google Analytics data, or from firms like Nielsen and comScore.

One of the core principles behind BuzzFeed is that social sharing is more important than search, so it’s no surprise that the main driver of traffic (which is estimated to be about 150 million unique visitors per month) is social — in fact, the company says that its social traffic is five times larger than its search traffic.

Search vs. Social2

Although social has grown to become one of the leading sources of traffic to most web content, the advertising industry still hasn’t quite caught up to this development, as shown by a BuzzFeed graph courtesy of eMarketer and Shareaholic — which says that social accounts for 30 percent of referral traffic but only 14 percent of advertising budgets.

Search vs. social

The other major shift in content consumption is mobile, and according to BuzzFeed the two are interconnected, in the sense that a majority of the site’s social traffic comes from mobile, and its share rates on mobile are twice as high as they are from its desktop users.

Mobile and social

BuzzFeed said mobile also accounts for a rapidly growing amount of video consumption, including 50 percent of all the video that the site produces, and this is particularly the case among millennial users. As a result of its focus on that market, BuzzFeed says that its reach is larger than several leading TV networks, including Fox, CNN and MTV — and among millennials it is larger still, putting the site ahead of most of the major networks, including NBC.

BuzzFeed reach

Obviously, BuzzFeed’s statistics are designed to promote its advertising appeal. And as with any form of web measurement, the sources it has chosen have their flaws — Google Analytics has a tendency to over-estimate certain kinds of traffic, while Nielsen and comScore have a tendency to under-estimate other kinds, including traffic from corporate networks (and BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has said one of his secret weapons is the “bored at work” network).

Some of the conclusions suggested by the BuzzFeed numbers are also debatable: for example, some media analysts argue that social is not as good as search — even if the raw traffic number is larger — because search is a better indicator of purchasing intent. As for video views, TV insiders would no doubt argue that their viewership is more loyal than someone watching a viral video on their mobile device.

Those caveats aside, however, the numbers BuzzFeed is generating are still quite impressive for what is still a relatively young company.

BuzzFeed says social rules and it is bigger than most TV networks originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Uber: For better or worse, this is the way the media works now https://gigaom.com/2014/11/19/for-better-or-worse-this-is-how-the-media-works-now/ https://gigaom.com/2014/11/19/for-better-or-worse-this-is-how-the-media-works-now/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:24:50 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=890385 Uber: For better or worse, this is the way the media works now originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Every once in a while, I think it’s worthwhile to step back and look at just how much the media landscape has changed in a relatively short time — and the latest example of that is the growing controversy over the behavior of some Uber executives, who appear to be threatening journalists and possibly using data on their customers in ways it was never intended to be used. Whatever you think about the company’s actions, it has been fascinating to watch the story unfold.

Some comments on Tuesday from Spencer Rascoff, CEO of real estate service Zillow, got me thinking about this again: in a series of tweets, Rascoff noted that the Uber story has been developing in real time through social platforms like Twitter, on blogs and through new-media outlets like BuzzFeed — which has been out front on the story from the beginning — and only secondarily through traditional media like the New York Times.

It’s easy to forget that Twitter and Facebook and blogs haven’t always existed, and that CEOs of companies and venture-capital investors in those companies haven’t always been able to comment on or respond to accusations or criticism so quickly and easily. But the impact of this phenomenon — which blogging pioneer Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct” — is undeniable, and arguably growing.

Sources go direct

Om wrote about this in 2012, after Jack Dorsey blogged about his diminished role at Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg wrote about some new developments at Facebook on his personal page. It’s getting so if a CEO or founder doesn’t tweet or blog, it seems unusual — even suspect. In many cases, this is where news starts now, and that has changed a journalist’s job in more ways than many realize.

“There is a blurring of the line between what is news and what is a tweet, photo or a blog post. In other words, it is a kind of mosh pit of data and information — and that means the role of media is changing.”

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? That depends a lot on your perspective. Obviously if you’re the New York Times or some other traditional news outlet, it’s probably not a good thing, because you aren’t prepared for it and it takes time to realize that you don’t “make” the news any more, or at least not as much. Many journalists resist this new role as aggregator or interpreter because they liked being a gatekeeper.

It’s not clear whether this democratization of distribution (as Om has called it) is a good thing in terms of the way that we perceive or understand a complicated story. Does having people like Uber investor Ashton Kutcher tweet about the controversy help or harm our understanding of that story? Does a “tweetstorm” from CEO Travis Kalanick actually help, or is it just a cop-out compared to a more formal apology? Which is more useful?

The kind of outrage that incidents like Uber or the shooting in Ferguson trigger — or the uprising in Ukraine, to use another recent example — can be beneficial in so many ways, because it can actually help encourage or foment change. But this kind of social-media event can also be a distraction, in the sense that people tweeting or retweeting think they are accomplishing something when they really aren’t. Will a hashtag about boycotting Uber really change anything?

Is more always better?

University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has written about the influence that social media had on incidents like the revolution in Egypt in 2011, raised this question after the upheaval in Turkey earlier this year: Twitter was a crucial tool for activists to spread the word about the government’s misbehavior, but it also may have sapped some of the energy that would once have gone into actually making real political change happen.

“What if the new power that social media gives ordinary citizens is also part of the new problem? What if the very abilities of social media — ad-hoc but powerful capacity for organizing and logistics — lead to shortcomings which then hobble movements, at least in the short to medium term?”

In the end, I think having CEOs and VCs and even presidents and armies tweeting or blogging is good, in the sense that more information is almost always good — even if the source of that information is trying to spin public opinion, or avoid making real decisions that will have actual impact. The unfiltered (or barely filtered) nature of this kind of communication is arguably better than the days when we got all of our news from a couple of mainstream sources.

The risk is that this endless supply of sources — many with biases and agendas of their own — also leads to more noise, and more confusion, and sorting through it all in real time becomes harder and harder. A good reason why we need more journalists (professional or otherwise) than we ever have before.

Uber: For better or worse, this is the way the media works now originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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Mashable editor Jim Roberts on how he approaches the news https://gigaom.com/2014/11/18/mashable-editor-jim-roberts-on-how-he-approaches-the-news/ https://gigaom.com/2014/11/18/mashable-editor-jim-roberts-on-how-he-approaches-the-news/#comments Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:06:48 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=889857 Mashable editor Jim Roberts on how he approaches the news originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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When Mashable editor-in-chief Jim Roberts joined the site a year ago after a couple of decades working for the New York Times, some were surprised that the veteran journalist would go to a new-media upstart, especially one that wasn’t known for its high-quality journalism. But Roberts told a group of Canadian journalists Monday night that he has no regrets about his decision, and that the way Mashable approaches the news — as a social activity — is the way that content works now.

While media outlets like the New York Times spend hours thinking about what stories should go on the front page, and where to put them, the front page of Mashable is almost entirely automated, Roberts said: stories that are being shared heavily — based on the company’s proprietary Velocity ranking — show up highest, although editors can pin specific stories to the page if necessary.

Sharing is the main guiding principle of Mashable’s approach to news, Roberts said: with any story, a reporter or editor should be asking themselves whether it is something they would share with their friends or family. The Mashable editor said that when he is looking through Twitter or Facebook or the news-wire, if something catches his eye and is worth sharing then it should be on the site.

That focus on social behavior goes in both directions, Roberts said — Mashable also makes heavy use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook for finding news when there is a big event like the uprising in Ukraine. In the early stages of that incident, there was far more information coming through social channels than there was from mainstream media, he said. Mashable uses tools like Geofeedia, Dataminr and Storyful to sift through and verify the content it finds.

Roberts said that unlike a news entity like the New York Times, Mashable has the luxury of not having to cover everything — it can pick and choose which stories to focus on, based on whether it thinks those stories will resonate with its audience, which he described as “millennials and those who think like them.” And that means a combination of hard news stories and entertainment — but finding the right balance between whimsy and serious journalism is hard.

[tweet 534497046758432768 hide_thread=’true’]

Somewhat surprisingly, the Mashable editor said that even though the site’s staff — which numbers almost 55 now, up from 35 when he joined — is mostly young, they still tend to think about doing stories using primarily text, because it is the easiest thing to produce. Roberts said he is trying to get his writers (or “content creators”) to think more about other ways to tell stories, whether it’s with Instagram photos or tweets or video.

From a business perspective, Mashable is profitable, Roberts said, and has been since it started. The company raised $13 million in January to finance its growth efforts, he said, which include covering new topics and verticals such as climate change and sexual equality. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore — who started the site in 2005 from his home in Scotland when he was just 19 — is closely involved in the evolution of the site and meets with him weekly, said Roberts.

When it comes to sources of traffic to the site — which averages around 40 million unique visitors a month, the Mashable editor said — Facebook is by far the largest single social driver, accounting for anywhere from 25 to 30 percent of the site’s visitors on a typical day. While Twitter accounts are the responsibility of the individual reporters and news desks, Mashable has a team of people who just focus on Facebook, and trying to figure out why certain stories go viral and others don’t.

Although Mashable looks closely at sharing, and displays the sharing numbers at the top of each story, Roberts said that isn’t used to determine compensation for writers — and in fact, he encourages them not to focus exclusively on traffic, but instead on coming up with ideas that they believe are worth sharing. Not everything works, Roberts said, and it’s easy to get caught up in trying to figure out why, but there are just too many variables.

Roberts said that in addition to expanding the topics it covers, Mashable is thinking about the future of wearables and how that might affect the company’s business. And when it comes to competition, he said he closely follows BuzzFeed and VICE, among others. For an overview of some of the Twitter discussion of Roberts’ talk, you can check out a Storify collection I put together.

Mashable editor Jim Roberts on how he approaches the news originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2014.

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