Digital publishing news for January 23, 2014
Chantal Restivo-Alessi is the Chief Digital Officer at HarperCollins. In an interview with FastCompany, she talks about the way data influences their digital publishing strategy and how data is double edged sword. “Digital changes our ability to acquire more data, which is good and bad. The good side is it gives us the opportunity to look at things that we do and also what we acquire in a different way. The bad thing is that the risk is you have too much noise and you need to make sure you’re identifying exactly what you’re looking for rather than being swamped by data.” In the interview, she talks about how data can explain sales performance and support strategies. Read the rest of the interview over on FastCompany.
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50% of Americans Own a Tablet or e-reader
eMedia Vitals Rob O’Regan has a new post about the Pew Institute’s new study that says half of Americans own a tablet or e-reader device. O’Regan writes, “American adults owning tablets rose to 42% over the holidays from 34% in September. The percentage of adults who own an e-reader (such as a Kindle or Nook) also jumped 8%, from 24% in September to 32% after the holidays.” The Pew survey was done on adults over the age of 18.
Google Connects Pub with Advertisers Through AdSense Direct
Google announced AdSense Direct earlier this week. It’s a new service to help smaller publishers connect directly with advertisers. FOLIO’s Caysey Welton writes, “Publishers will need to establish their own deals with advertisers, but once they do the transaction is as simple as sharing a link. AdSense Direct is similar to other solutions currently available to small publishers like iSocket and BuySellAds. However, this is Google’s first play to small publishers, and the company will take a 15 percent share of all transactions, which will be made through Google Wallet.” Have you used AdSense Direct?
SI Has Record Web Traffic
Sports Illustrated is lucky to have Richard Sherman as a contributor to the site. Sherman is a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks. After his team beat the San Francisco 49ers, he gave a bizarre post game interview that received a lot of media attention. MediaLife reports, “His postgame follow-up broke records for the publication. A column written by Sherman titled “To Those Who Would Call Me a Thug or Worse …” generated 4.3 million unique visits and 1.2 unique mobile visits on Monday, according to Omniture, giving Sports Illustrated Digital its highest-traffic day ever.”
Google Announces New Smartphone Crawler
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz has a new report on Google’s new smartphone search spider. Schwartz writes, “Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google to recognize that these sites are smartphone-optimized.” This could be huge for mobile visitor traffic.
