mickwe
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I appreciate what Outbrain have built - they move a LOT of traffic around these days - and its effort to keep out spammy content/clients, but Outbrain still has a way to go on the value creation end for readers. Removing spammy content is a far cry from selecting quality/relevant/timely content. I realize they're striking a delicate balance between the buy side and the reader side, but the product would be stronger - and ultimately, the company more valuable - if a human curation element were integrated more heavily than it currently is.
I also think Outbrain's Scribit acquisition last month was interesting in terms of serving brands in content creation and content creators for licensing. What does it mean for Outbrain's direction?
I didn't read Newsweek's cover as a lame effort to get social media buzz on that hashtag, but rather an admirable nod toward the force that doomed it. Chris Sacca nailed it: "Like using your final breath to ID the killer." https://twitter.com/sacca/status/282869555402006528
Mad Mimi already does the super-easy-to-create-gorgeous emails thing. And while I can see list discovery working for some interest-based topics, list owners may not be so thrilled about their competitors' emails being plugged by their ESP.
"forcing change on an industry led by people whose very job-security is tied to resisting it can be a tall order. Both publishers and advertisers employ teams of staff that would rather their premium ad sales not become commoditized." My thought exactly... on the publisher end, these are *sales* people and will push back hard internally that they'll get higher CPMs, it's a relationship business, etc. etc., and on the buying end the agencies will simply refuse to work with them. The whole edifice has to fall, but it's about time it did.
Eli must appear earlier and more often in future WITNs.
Don't think it's true that commerce can't do content, but the most successful examples to date seem to be closely tied to the products being sold, as opposed to a general informational resource. Look, for example, at Etsy's amazing videos, where you learn to appreciate both the craft and the craftsperson - and find yourself much more likely to buy the product:
http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/video/
There are plenty of examples of companies whose content does a good job of generally covering their particular field. But most of these are services companies, not retail.
@_anuj Ground Truth includes a lot of crowdsourced data alongside the Googlers on hiking trails and snowmobiles. Integrating it all is definitely, as you say, a huge challenge for both Google and Waze.
LOVE
really interesting, thanks for the thoughtful post
ETFs are not an asset class - they're products to invest in certain asset classes (and more recently, certain active strategies). And their growth hasn't been due so much to their novelty in creating baskets of securities - open end mutual funds do that too - but rather their low cost and tax efficiency.
So in your graphic, ETFs have mainly been focused on just one of the asset classes under the left umbrella - not a parallel to the multichannel idea of the right umbrella. Agree that intent-based ad buying would be terrific, but I don't think the ETF comparison works.
@emmetgibney In theory, yes. But in practice shareholders can still exert a ton of pressure and make his life miserable - and his company's stock worth a lot less - if he's viewed as antagonistic.
@PerservedKillick What's not to like? How about many thousands of upset new shareholders breathing down management's necks - so much for running the company however they like. And I believe Zuckerberg sold only what he needed to pay his huge tax bill.
I understand why you group these professional services together, but I think in the end each faces a very different challenge to broad disruption. For higher education, it's probably resume power, for medicine it's the need for physical exams for proper diagnosis of many ailments, and within finance the various services have different challenges - a payments startup, for example, has to do deal with regulatory challenges in the U.S. that make first disruption from Silicon Valley unlikely.