Should we always defer to the lawyers when writing terms and conditions? No. Sometimes their overprotectiveness ruins opportunities. (If you’d rather watch and listen, here’s a link to the podcast version.) I have a contact who wants to be on this show, so he wanted me to send him one of those links where you…
I like to model best practices when I can, so that I set a positive example and don’t just talk about stuff. I do that pretty well with my print newsletter, but I forgot a few things when I started my “Something I Learned Yesterday” podcast. You have to capture the viewer’s attention in the…
Brian Morrissey linked to an article by Mark Stenberg on Adweek about how the Associated Press is trying to diversify its revenue stream. Like every other publisher. But in AP’s case, the’re coming from a different starting point. They get 80% of their revenue from licensing – which is crazy high – and they only…
You can listen here. Google’s Antagonistic Relation with Publishers
On The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrisey and his guests wondered what will replace email. They made a few salient observations. Email was never meant to be a content delivery platform. Using it that way is a bit of a hack. You can’t embed a video player in an email. You can’t even control fonts very…
I don’t often comment on book publishing, but Bo Sacks recently distributed an article called “The Imitation Game” by Ken Liu, and it caught my attention. The article is about whether AI will start writing all our bestsellers, and Ken’s somewhat tentative point is that an algorithm looking for the most likely “token” given a…
Charlotte Tobitt wrote an interesting article called “How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group,” which Bo Sacks distributed recently. It’s not one of those annoying mystery articles. She gets to it right away with three things: “Friendly friction; personal phone calls, and positive reinforcement.” The first example is from…
ELLE and Poool have optimized ELLE’s paywall to increase conversions. It’s an interesting story that publishers should know. ELLE’s paywall strategy came out of three strategic challenges. Diversify revenue Enlarge the audience Make them younger I’m very interested in how they made people younger. ELLE worked with Poool, which is a French startup that focuses…
A few episodes back I applied the Gartner Hype Cycle to AI. (I’ll provide a link below to that article.) I thought we were still climbing towards the peak of expectations, but there are signs we might already be heading towards the trough of disillusionment. At least with large language models. In fact, I might…
Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn from Jay Schwedelson with an interesting ChatGPT prompt, as follows. Repurpose the Newsletter below into a: Top 10 Checklist 7 Pitfalls to Avoid List Quick Start Guide with 8 Bulleted Ideas Linkedin Post with Less than 100 Words Twitter Post with Less than 280 Characters Blog post with…
(See the video version at the bottom of this post.) Today marks the 50th episode of my “Something I Learned Yesterday” podcast, so … I guess I’ve learned 50 things. And if you’ve been coming along for the ride, so have you. So congrats. Bo Sacks distributed an article by Matt Turner titled “A top…
Last week Bo Sacks distributed an article with the compelling headline, “Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO.” That piqued my curiosity because I have said that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s business. Once people can simply get an answer, rather than getting a list of homework to do, they won’t be following…
Summary: AI that can answer questions is making lists of search results seem quaint. The nature of search is about to change radically, but Google has to protect its ad business. Competitors don’t have that burden. It sounds ridiculous to say that Google might be displaced. Google has been the 800-pound gorilla for a long…
On the “People vs Algorithms” podcast, Brian Morrissey recently mentioned that we should view the reaction to AI in the context of the Gartner Hype Cycle – which was new to me. It’s a graphical representation of the phases of adoption of and reaction to new technologies. Phase 1 is the Technology Trigger. This is…
Our minds are very complex, and our choices are often influenced by strange factors. In this article I want to touch very briefly on the psychology of persuasion and focus particularly on cognitive biases. I can’t do justice to the topic in this short space, but I’d like to pique your interest by mentioning a…