‘Whole New World’ for Publishers as Google Finally Scraps First Click Free

Google’s decade-plus First Click Free program sounded innocuous enough. In the Alphabet Inc. unit’s perpetual effort to keep the open web free, Google promised a search throughway to news pages. If publishers wanted to be easily found, they found little choice but to accept the ...

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Can Tony Haile’s Scroll Create A Large New Market For Paid News?

Tony Haile has a big idea. It’s his second big idea, but he believes it will be bigger than the first one. The 40-year-old founder of Chartbeat Inc., one of the established standards in analytics in the media trade, left his now-eight-year-old company last year to focus on what has become ...

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Yahoo: Who’s Ready To Take On A Legacy Digital-Native Media Turnaround?

Which picture would you like to see on the wall of digital media history alongside that all-time classic, Time Warner’s Jerry Levin half-smile as he brought new partner, AOL chief Steve Case, into the fold as the companies completed their $160 billion merger in 2000?       As ...

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Newsonomics: With New Roadblocks for Digital News Sites, What Happens Next?

At BuzzFeed, a 32 percent miss in 2015 revenue and a halving of its 2016 revenue target, according to the Financial Times. At Mashable, a massive layoff after the company failed to sell itself. At Yahoo, an upcoming sale of its news-producing assets, portending great uncertainty for journalists ...

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Newsonomics: Setting the News Table for 2016

How can we set the table for 2016? Advertising woes continue — deepen, actually. Whole new forms of storytelling open up and go mainstream more quickly. Virtual reality joins the harsher realities. Hundreds of millions in new investment develops alongside an equally strong belief that legacy ...

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What a Quartz Sale Might Look Like, and Why

Companion article: What Are They Thinking: Quartz Redesign Lays Out a New Home Page ‘Welcome Mat’     Is Quartz the next digital-news start-up to be bought? In the continuing roll-up and old media investment in digital news start-ups, Atlantic Media’s Quartz may be next in line. ...

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What Axel Springer’s Big Business Insider Buy Means

Axel Springer is in business. The massive and growing Berlin-based media company won the business-news franchise it had sought, as the sale of six-year-old Business Insider to Springer was announced this morning. The announcement came in the early morning hours, Eastern time, an unusual hour ...

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Newsonomics: Eight Questions (And Answers) About Nikkei’s Surprise Purchase of the Financial Times

Is Nikkei the new Axel Springer of Asia? Is $1.3 billion as ridiculous a price as the $5 billion Rupert Murdoch paid for Dow Jones? How did the turn from Berlin to Tokyo happen in 15 minutes? Will Japanese lessons be the first order of business at One Southwark Bridge beginning next week? ...

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Newsonomics: How Much is the Financial Times Worth, and Who Might Buy It?

  Updated post on Nikkei’s purchase of the FT Complete archive of Newsonomics FT coverage   If you wanted to buy a top business news publisher, which one would you choose? Assuming the marketplace offered you choice, would you go the newer-media route, buying a Business Insider ...

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Nine Takeaways from the Verizon–AOL Deal

It’s easy to quickly label yesterday’s Verizon purchase of AOL as one aging utility buying another. One superannuated phone company buying a web company that’s gotten long in the tooth. Two companies of slowing revenue growth looking for updated identities and finding ways to compete with ...

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