Are you tired of changing your business because some programmer has tinkered with an algorithm? They say it’s for the sake of the users, but we all know it’s to increase their ad revenue. LinkedIn recently changed how they promote content on their site. They say they want to make our feeds more relevant and…
Bo Sacks distributed an article by Peter Bale titled, “New book by Jeff Jarvis uses lessons from media’s print history to frame the digital future.” It reminded me of a rather cynical communist I used to work with who said, “Freedom of the press, for everyone who can afford a press.” Jarvis says the era…
As the AI wave threatens to reshape industries and disrupt the publishing business, publishers can gain a competitive edge by training their own large language model (LLM) with a distinctive voice and point of view. This article explains why this is a crucial strategic choice to make right now, explores the merits of this strategy,…
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…