As with Facebook and Google, advertisers are increasingly doing their own work, too, using automated tools for targeting and buying advertisements [on Twitter]. Last week, Twitter said it would improve ways for advertisers to access its systems.
—Is Twitter Really Worth $10 Billion? - WSJ.com - story makes a great case (db)
#digitalmarketing Less than 10 percent of your social-media posts should promote your book or other commercial endeavors. It’s OK to pour it on when your book launches, but back off on the promotion after the first four weeks and do educational things like free webinars and Hangouts on Air. You need to make a transition from salesman to teacher.
You’re in a tough situation that I do not envy. You have to make some money off of me to pay your team of rockstar journalists. I know you’ve tried other models. Make me watch a video ad every five articles? Even at a healthy $50 CPM, that’s $.05 you get paid for my view, or $.01 for every article I’ve consumed. Those are some ugly economics right there. Can it be any wonder why Demand Media pays its writers a mere $15 per article? We have a choice to make: we can either continue this silly dance, or you allow me to pay as I go. Let me buy a $50 or $100 credits and charge them off for $.25 per article. If you charge me from article 11, and I triple the number of articles I read, that’s (20*$.25) or $5/month, $60/year from me. I know this isn’t a new idea, and you likely can’t make it work across all of your customers without radical cuts to your legacy business. But it’s inevitable. Moreover, it’s my best offer.
—Dear NYT.com: We Need to Talk … (Jokingly written but pithy piece on why NYT’s model — and by extension all such models — won’t work.)
The New York Times has been using a so-called “metered paywall” for more than a year to limit how many articles a non-subscriber can read. The paywall has been more of a nuisance than a serious obstacle, however, thanks to easy tricks to get around it.
Starting today, though, the Grey Lady is getting tough on the scofflaws by closing one of the more popular loopholes. As New York magazine reports, it’s become harder to zap the “please subscribe” ads that appear in front of a story when you’ve reached your monthly quotient of free stories. Until now, the most popular way to do this was to simply delete the end of the website address.
This easy trick, known to every college student, led some to deride the Times as a technological tyro. People in the news industry, however, say the Times deliberately chose to make the paywall “leaky” so as not to alienate casual visitors. …
I contacted Murphy to see if the New York Times will also begin to apply the meter to people who arrive at a Times story by way of social media — an increasingly important source of traffic for news outlets. Update: Murphy replied “not at this time.”
