For an internal PR piece, the Washington Post mobile insight is really good. Also check out the inside look at Bloomberg’s video strategy.
Meet the Post’s mobile leadership, A Q&A with Cory Haik and Julia Beizer (Washington Post PR)
We’ve hired a lot of key people to focus on our growing mobile audiences: a group of editors with deep knowledge in important verticals — from world news to social and engagement — producers with killer technical chops, designers with intense focus on producing across screen sizes and device types. To do mobile right, you have to think about the readers, the products and the stories together. With this team we’re attempting to do that from the small screen up.
The recent iOS 8 launch unlocked a lot of cool functionality for publishers. We added a Today Extension widget for our iPhone and iPad apps. The widget shows off the top three Post headlines at any given time and allows readers easy access into the app. We also took advantage of Apple’s new interactive notifications feature, allowing readers to dive right into a breaking news story – or save it to read later.
Readers coming to us from mobile devices are now more than 50% of our total audience—and 52% of our mobile readers are millennials.
Twitter’s Audacious Plan to Infiltrate All Your Apps (WIRED)
If Twitter succeeds with this plan, it won’t matter whether or not you use Twitter the product. You will end up using Twitter the company every time you use your phone—even if you’re not aware of it.
The payoff for Twitter will come if it can get developers to embrace MoPub,, its advertising product, because it gets a cut of any ad revenue. So it gives developers these nice tools to sign people up and improve their apps’ performance—and oh yeah, here is a click-to-install ad plug-in to go along with that, which happens to make us money.
While tweets will remain Twitter’s foundation, this is a real strategy shift that’s in many ways similar to Google’s growth out of search.
“It’s not a departure so much as moving beyond Twitter the product and moving into Twitter the company and the platform,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tells WIRED. “It’s about helping define the future of the mobile landscape and building an application developer’s platform for the future.”
Inside Bloomberg Media’s digital video business (Digiday)
“What we are seeing now is a new ubiquity of video, especially on desktop,” Paul Marcum told Digiday. “Users are increasingly accepting video as an integral part of their experience.”
…Bloomberg fetches $75 CPMs for its video ads…
The homepage now prominently features the latest Bloomberg videos and a live stream of Bloomberg TV, while news articles more often include video content, like repurposed television clips.
In addition to making better use of its TV content, Bloomberg Media has a 20-person team making digital originals.
“I don’t think [autoplay] is in the best interest of Bloomberg or the advertisers who are taking out these pre-rolls that are just launching automatically. Leaving the user with a bad impression is not good business.” -eMarketer analyst Paul Verna
In August, Bloomberg measured 64 million video streams across its digital platforms, of which roughly 2.8 million were prompted by autoplay.
Bloomberg has forged a number of key partnerships with publishers like Yahoo, MSN and The Telegraph, which distribute some Bloomberg videos to their own audiences. Marcum couldn’t disclose how much traffic these partners drive or the financial terms of agreements but said they provide “a significant overall lift” to Bloomberg’s video business.
Inside Instagram’s Secret Barter Economy’ Influencers swap photos for helicopter rides and champagne (AdWeek)
How paid social has changed social media management (Digiday)
The Someecards formula for shareable native ads (Digiday)
If you’re trying to get people to like and share your native ads, here’s a tip: Make them funny, and maybe add a touch of honesty.
Yahoo Finally Reveals How Much Money Tumblr Can Bring In Ads; Predicts $100 million (AdWeek)
Do Mothers Need Some Time Away from Social Media? (eMarketer)
Half of US mother social media users surveyed—those ages 18 to 64 with at least one child under 18 in the household—said they felt pressure to create an image that their lives were perfect on social networks. This was especially true among younger mothers—whose peers are more likely to access social sites.
The California Sunday Magazine sets out to win the West (CJR)
The Daily Scroll is a roundup of my favorite media reads Monday through Thursday. All excerpts are copied-and-pasted, except for the intro.
Social Meditation 