I joined Matt Bailey on his Endless Coffee Cup podcast
You can listen here. Google’s Antagonistic Relation with Publishers
Publishing
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Answering Brian Morrisey — what comes after email?
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…
When it comes to book publishing, can personalization beat quality?
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…
Engagement is the key to retention and renewals
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…
A paywall success story from ELLE
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…
Practical next steps with AI for publishers
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…
A killer ChatGPT prompt to extend the reach of your content
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…
Is Google in danger of being displaced?
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…
An intro to cognitive biases for publishers
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…
How to use ChatGPT for content creation
Summary: Six ideas for incorporating AI-powered writing into content generation workflows using ChatGPT. They are (1) get new ideas, (2) get keyword suggestions, (3) create a first draft, (4) check word choices, (5) summarize or expand content, and (6) integrate ChatGPT into a content management system. There was some conversation at the Renewd Summit earlier…
Introducing The Krehbiel Brand Involvement Matrix
Bob Hoffman thinks it’s a marketer’s delusion to believe that anybody wants to interact with your brand. I tend to agree with him. But my friends Lev Kaye and Leslie Laredo believe there are some situations where interaction is appropriate. How do you decide when? That’s the point of The Krehbiel Brand Involvement Matrix. It’s…
Publishers need to make the case that sneaking behind a paywall is theft
If I steal your car, you don’t have a car anymore. It’s a physical object. We can’t both have it at the same time. Everybody realizes that’s wrong. But if I make a copy of some digital music you’ve purchased, you still have it. So have I wronged you? I may or may not have…
Publishers need to train their own large language models
I’m assuming you’ve used ChatGPT. If so, you’ve probably run into its very annoying super ego. For example, you’re doing some research on nuclear power and it hectors you with grade school morality about the dangers of this and that. It’s quite annoying. But there’s a value in that. It shows it’s possible to layer…
Quadrant analysis for publishers
I’m a big advocate of practical tools: checklists, forms, and that sort of thing. When I was a VP of operations at a large association, I learned a lot about frameworks. This post is about one very simple kind of framework: Quadrant analysis. You’ve seen these before. It’s a 2×2 matrix where some value on…
Are micropayments the right solution for publishers?
Micropayments are the idea that won’t catch fire but also the idea that won’t die. Publishers are starting to take another look at micropayments because ad revenues are declining, and subscription revenues aren’t always making up the difference. Are micropayments a desperation move, or do micropayments belong as part of the paid content ecosystem? Advocates…