Ad blocking is the nemesis of the news and ad industries. But, despite growing efforts by publishers to combat the practice, it’s probably not going away any time soon.
Market research group eMarketer today estimated that 27 percent of internet users in the UK—more than 14 million people— will be using ad blockers by the end of next year. That’s up from this year’s estimate of 20.5 percent and nearly double the estimate for last year (14 percent).
“There’s no doubting that ad blocking is now a very real issue for advertisers,” eMarketer senior analyst Bill Fisher said. “Next year, over a quarter of the people they’re trying to reach will be willfully making themselves unreachable.”
The prediction mirrors other reports that ad blocker usage is growing. Last year, Adobe and Pagefair released a report that found that nearly 200 million people around the world use some form of ad blocker, costing publishers $22 billion in lost ad revenue in 2015.
Given how much money is at stake, it’s not surprising that some publishers have started to push back. Some prevent ad-blocking users from reading their articles altogether. Others, including WIRED, require readers to “whitelist” their sites to make ads viewable or else pay for a subscription. French newspapers Le Monde, L’Equipe, and Le Parisien have all experimented with ways to curtail ad block users, as have US publishers such as The New York Times, and Forbes. In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Axel Springer have gone so far as to challenge major ad blockers in court, so far without success.
At the same time, some publishers at least are trying to show their audiences that they’re sensitive to concerns over tracking and the frustration and irritation of intrusive ads. In part, this has meant seeking to prioritize other ways of making money, such as advertorial—so-called native ads—and subscriptions. Because, hey, they’re better than pop-up windows.
Says Fisher, “The good news is that numbers like this have forced those within the industry to think long and hard about what it is that they need to do better.”
Apple’s aptly named newsreader, Apple News, is expanding its digital walls to embrace the world beyond the biggest news publishers. The company is announcing new tools today so any creator can design stories for a tailored News experience. Smaller, independent publishers will now be able to publish their stories on News with new web-based tools alongside bigger names like The Atlantic and, full disclosure, WIRED.
For Apple, this is a somewhat expected shift. The company first launched News last fall with several partners from major print and digital publishers with custom pages. As of January, News featured 100 different publications ranging from big ones like CNN to smaller ones like The Awl. But while Apple touts an immersive experience where News pages can look authentically like those from a specific publisher, not every organization has the means to create customized pages for News, opting instead for a more RSS-like feed.
Readers today, however, look far beyond a traditional newsstand when browsing what’s happening around the world. To keep up with those demands, Apple has to ensure its digital newsstand includes more than just the big names. Now Apple hopes anyone who makes stuff on the Internet (and wants to be on News) will be able to make their own stylized pages featuring, say, customized fonts and embedded visuals with tools to convert pages to the so-called Apple News Format. To what extent Apple will be monitoring who signs up to publish on the site (and what publishers choose to publish) remains to be seen.
Apple is also announcing a new analytics dashboard today, so that publishers who do decide to share their stories in News can get a better picture of who has viewed those stories. While Apple said in October that nearly 40 million people have used News, publishers have expressed frustration around the user experience and lack of data shared with them so far. At times, news organizations have been able to download digital files to access some data about stories and channels. For media companies, analytics are crucial, as data is used to determine the size of a reader base, who stories reach, and how they reach them—all of which helps those publishers sell ads.
In recent years, publishers have come to terms with sharing their stories across distributed platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, but access to data about readers remains crucial. Facebook’s Instant Articles allows publishers to track analytics with popular services like comScore and Omniture. Snapchat, meanwhile, touts access to a coveted demographic: millennials and teens. With its new AMP project, Google has partnered with services to ensure that news publishers get the data they need. Now Apple has learned and will be sharing more detailed analytics in a dashboard-like format to appease publishers. The company expects to publish data from comScore beginning in the spring. After all, if Apple News operates like a black box, the very publishers it needs will have little use for it themselves.
For the advertising industry and the publishers who depend on it, ad blocking has become a very real problem. So much so that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a digital advertising trade group, has created a primer on how sites can best block the ad blockers.
The IAB has come up with its own catchy acronym—D.E.A.L.—as well as a freely available ad blocking detection script to help publishers stymie potential threats to their revenue streams.
While there are no reliable figures about how many people use ad blockers today, the consensus in the industry is that the threat is growing. Much of the web, after all, runs on ads. So as more consumers use ad blockers, the more it theoretically cuts into publishers and advertisers’ revenue.
How does the IAB say publishers should D.E.A.L? Its recommendations are ultimately pretty simple. The D.E.A.L method, it says, encourages a publisher to detect a blocker; explain the value of advertising for the publisher to the reader; ask the reader to either turn off their ad-blocker or pay for the content, and then lift the restricted access if the reader complies.
The problem is that readers’ issues with ads may run deeper than such an approach suggests. Readers are frustrated with intrusive ads as well as pesky trackers and even dangerous malware that can piggyback on ads. The IAB has tried to deal with these problems by offering recommendations on how advertisers and publishers should clean up their ads with lean, encrypted, non-invasive alternatives. But, for the most part, those changes have yet to be seen. “We’re still very early on,” says Scott Cunningham, the senior vice president of technology and ad operations at the IAB.
The IAB outlines other tactics for confronting ad blocking, as well: offer tiered experiences (so a reader can read, say, three articles per month with the ad blocker turned on; demand payment from readers (like, say, a subscription); reinsert ads around the blocker; and pay visitors for their time with ads (like, say, offering game credits).
Whether any of this works to undermine ad blockers remains to be seen. Readers aren’t happy with the ads being served up—and how they’re being served. As a range of publishers—including The New York Times and WIRED itself—wrestle with ad blocking, the question is ultimately whether publishers and their readers can reach a place where everyone feels like they’re on the same team.
Metrics matter to media companies. They affect the way a publisher measures its audience, the way it sells advertising, and the extent of its bragging rights. The only problem is that almost everyone in the business is unhappy about the lack of sophistication of today’s most commonly used metrics.
Today, BuzzFeed said it’s going to change how it measures itself. Specifically, the company said it will no longer rely on web publishing’s old standby, the “unique visitor.” Instead, in an effort to look at itself more holistically, BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen says the company will embrace a range of metrics, from time spent with a piece of content to what it calls “content views.”
“Even two years ago, when we all lived in a simpler media landscape, we believed there was no ‘one metric to rule them all,’” Nguyen wrote in a blog post. “Today that is even more true.”
For BuzzFeed, abandoning the unique visitor makes sense. The company, after all, publishes a whole lot of content all over the Internet—not just on its website. It may publish a so-called listicle on BuzzFeed.com, for example, but then a food video directly on Facebook or Snapchat. While BuzzFeed may be able to track “uniques” on its website, app, and certain parts Facebook and YouTube, Nguyen says, it can’t for Snapchat, Instagram, Yahoo, Tumblr, Vine, and other parts of Facebook and YouTube.
“We estimate that our current comScore metric of about 80 million [unique visitors] represents less than one-fifth of our actual global reach,” Nguyen says.
For BuzzFeed, the claim that its actual audience is significantly bigger sounds reasonable. But as Recode‘s Peter Kafka has written, BuzzFeed’s unique visitor growth has indeed slowed. A cynic might say that BuzzFeed is trying to change the conversation by creating a new way to showcase its growth.
But that wouldn’t be entirely fair. It’s a fact that the media industry is no longer simple. It can’t be measured by one metric. And advertisers know it.
With dozens of new hires, MTV is getting serious about its future by seeking a return to the glory days of MTV News.
The company has hired more than a dozen high-profile journalists to help the network better cover culture, music, and politics. Unlike its heyday in the early 1990s, however, this iteration of MTV News will be seen and heard well beyond the confines of your TV. Grantland’s Alex Pappademus and Molly Lambert, The New Republic‘s Jamil Smith, and writer Ana Marie Cox will all be a part of the reinvigorated news team aimed at the web, your phone, and your eardrums via podcasts, as well as your television. The team will be run by the now-shuttered Grantland’s founding editor, Dan Fierman.
I feel bad about taking the media spotlight off Kanye on his big day, but here goes: I work at MTV News now https://t.co/DUMFMonyrn
— PAPPADEMAS (@PAPPADEMAS) February 11, 2016
News was once a core part of MTV’s identify. Starting in the late ’80s, MTV was known for its pop culture and politics coverage thanks to journalists like perpetually aging hipster Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren, who co-hosted the televised forum where an audience member famously, and presciently, asked President Bill Clinton whether he wore boxers or briefs. Since then, however, news has given way to the unreality of reality shows like Jersey Shore.
Under new president Sean Atkins, MTV seems to be interested in addressing its dwindling TV viewership in part by bulking up a multi-platform news division that offers a clear editorial vision. The plan also seems to be an effort to compete with newer upstarts like Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed, all of which have found a young audience hungry for news and entertainment coverage.
Whether MTV News can recapture the audience and cultural cred it once had is an open question. Unlike the ’90s, however, you’ll have a whole bunch more ways to tune in—all in the hopes that you’ll want your MTV all over again.
In an amazing feat of technological prowess, The Boston Globe has embedded tweets on the front page of its newspaper today.
Well, okay, they didn’t actually figure out a way to make JavaScript work on paper. But printing tweets on the front page of a major US newspaper is no small nod to the influence Twitter exerts over media and politics today.
The front page of the February 4, 2016 Boston Globe. The Boston Globe/Newseum
The tweets are included besides two stories about sparring candidates in the 2016 election, notably the latest Twitter beefs between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as well as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Twitter has been one of the primary ways that candidates have sought to get their message out on social media, skipping traditional media and presenting their own narrative (and spin) directly to voters during the campaign. That’s nothing new—and news organizations (including WIRED) embed candidates’ tweets in online stories all the time.
Now that disintermediation has come full circle, with candidates’ tweets now appearing on dead trees. Welcome to newspapers—and, well yes, presidential campaigning—in 2016.
The Huffington Post will soon be the largest digital media organization to unionize in the US.
The news organization’s management has agreed to recognize the Writers Guild of America, East today, paving the way for the editorial staff to vote to unionize.
“Assuming a majority, we will recognize the union,” Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, said. “We look forward to a great relationship with our union.”
The Huffington Post is not the first digital media organization to vote to unionize. In the past year, writers at Gawker, Vice, and the Guardian US have all unionized in an effort to gain more transparency over pay, benefits, and worker’s rights.
The Huffington Post’s organizing committee first sought recognition from the company’s management last year, citing “overwhelming support” from staff members. “The unionization of The Huffington Post’s editorial staff is another example of our newsroom practicing what we preach,” the committee said today.
Media companies have long been union shops, and many traditional news institutions remain unionized. For new media companies like The Huffington Post, however, organizing remains a relatively new phenomenon. But in a tumultuous industry undergoing constant change, unions may prove to be at least one way to find a little bit of security.
The New Republic is up for sale. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who bought the century-old “in-flight magazine of Air Force One” in 2012, has apparently found out that running a media business takes more than enthusiasm and deep pockets.
“After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and vision at The New Republic,” he wrote in a letter to the staff posted on Medium today.
When Hughes purchased the magazine in 2012, he promised to “aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism” while also supporting the money-hemorrhaging magazine financially.
In 2014, however, Hughes’ commitment came under fire after his efforts to remake the business led to the resignations of two top editors, leading to a mass exodus of editorial staffers and contributors. At the time, CEO Guy Vidra said TNR was transitioning from a century-old magazine to a “vertically integrated digital media company.” The magazine’s print publication schedule was cut from 20 issues a year to 10, and its headquarters was relocated from Washington, D.C., to New York City.
For Hughes, transitioning TNR into a digital powerhouse proved to be a greater challenge than he expected. “I will be the first to admit that when I took on this challenge nearly four years ago, I underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate,” Hughes wrote today. “The unanswered question for The New Republic remains: can it find a sustainable business model that will power its journalism in the decades to come?”
1 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile discovery feature. Nuzzel
2 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile search function. Nuzzel
3 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile Add Favorite function. Nuzzel
4 / 4
Nuzzel’s new site. Nuzzel
Related Galleries
Handy Gizmo Tracks Your Gestures to Remind You to Take Meds
The Man Behind the Unexpected Beauty of Gray’s Anatomy
Holy Moses These Fake Nuns Totally Grow Weed
1 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile discovery feature. Nuzzel
2 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile search function. Nuzzel
3 / 4
Nuzzel’s mobile Add Favorite function. Nuzzel
4 / 4
Nuzzel’s new site. Nuzzel
Related Galleries
Handy Gizmo Tracks Your Gestures to Remind You to Take Meds
The Man Behind the Unexpected Beauty of Gray’s Anatomy
Holy Moses These Fake Nuns Totally Grow Weed
5
Social news service Nuzzel has a captive audience. Tech journalists and venture capitalists are big fans. But that’s a small crowd.
Nuzzel works by suggesting stories to users based on how many times they’ve been shared by those they follow on Twitter. For example, if you follow a bunch of venture capitalists, you may find a story about Jack Dorsey or Square today in your Nuzzel feed.
The model makes a lot of sense—if you use Twitter. The problem is that a lot of people don’t use Twitter.
So to solve this problem, Nuzzel is launching a new version of its service today that it has dubbed Nuzzel for Everyone. Twitter users can still sign up and get a customized feed, but non-Twitter users now have a way to use Nuzzel, too. Anyone can download Nuzzel or open the website to find feeds built off of what people are talking about on Twitter. But now you yourself don’t have to use Twitter to see them.
“If you’re a regular person, one of the other billion-plus people online, if you can even find one celebrity or community feed on Nuzzel that’s somehow relevant to you, I think that would be a massive shift for a lot of people,” says Nuzzel founder Jonathan Abrams, who previously founded early social networking site Friendster.
Users can now subscribe to Nuzzel-created feeds that follow relevant Twitter users—anything from a feed about libraries made up of librarians and archivists on Twitter to football to LGBTQ politics. You can also follow the Nuzzels of other users built off their own Twitter feeds, like Marc Andreessen or Steve Martin.
For Nuzzel, this shift marks a significant attempt at expansion after landing a new round of $1.7 million in funding from investors like Salesforce CEO Marc Beinoff. But, as with any app, even if you build it, people won’t necessarily come. Nuzzel’s competition ranges from Facebook and Twitter itself to news-specific apps like Apple News and Flipboard. But Abrams believes Nuzzel’s simplicity sets it apart. The news is right there waiting for you; you don’t have to go through the labor of curating your own feeds. “I don’t think regular people are ever going to do that,” he says.
Getty Images
After a tumultuous year, Gawker Media—known for its gossip, commentary, and sharp takes on the news of the day—is refocusing and reorganizing for 2016. In two internal memos released today, Gawker founder Nick Denton and executive editor John Cook revealed plans to sharpen the focus of the site’s seven main verticals, including Gawker.com and Gizmodo, while killing sub-sites and laying off several employees.
“In today’s crowded and confusing digital media world, you should focus on your strengths and have a clear message for your audience,” Denton said in an internal memo. “That’s especially true for a self-funded digital media company like Gawker Media Group.”
The most dramatic shift for the company will come to its flagship site Gawker.com, which will be moving away from covering news and gossip more generally to focusing on politics, specifically the 2016 presidential election and related campaigns. “The shift in focus will necessarily mean that certain kinds of stories that Gawker has trafficked in in the past will go by the wayside,” Cook said in another memo.
One Thousand Flowers
As part of the reorganization, the company is laying off seven staffers. “We can’t reshape the site’s focus without shifting personnel,” Cook said. The restructuring comes just two days after former Gawker writer Dayna Evans published a scathing look at the company’s treatment of women. One of the laid-off staffers, Jason Parham, was known at the site for being one of the site’s more visible advocates for inclusion. The company said that it will be creating six new jobs where they’re needed.
While Gawker.com shifts to cover politics, changes are coming to other popular verticals Jezebel and Gizmodo, as well. Sister site Jezebel, known for its coverage of women’s issues, will “become the primary voice for celebrity and pop culture.” The site will also be launching a health, beauty, and self-care section. Tech site Gizmodo, meanwhile, will now include coverage from science site io9.
The company will also be shuttering a number of niche sites, like Gawker’s weather blog The Vane; Jezebel’s Kitchenette; Jalopnik’s Fight Club; Defamer; and Valleywag. “We have taken a hard look across the whole network at our strategy with subsites. In many ways, we let 1,000 flowers bloom, a strategy that resulted in some successes, like Adequate Man, but also bred confusion among the readers and a thicket of different editorial rabbit holes,” Cook said.
‘Looseness with Budgets’
The question in all of this, of course, is, well, why? For Gawker, the latest restructuring follows a tough year for the company. Over the summer, it lost both its executive editor and Gawker.com’s editor-in-chief following Denton’s decision to pull a controversial story. The company also remains engaged in a lengthy and costly legal battle against Hulk Hogan. The trial is set to begin next year.
In one memo today, Cook also suggested that the company may feel some stress in its proverbial wallet. “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all felt some measure of looseness with budgets over the past year as we rapidly expanded and moved into our new space. The fact of that matter is that we need to tighten up, and make sure that we’re strategic and focused in how we deploy our resources,” he added.
The company also seems to be cutting back on development costs with its proprietary blogging platform, Kinja. “On the technology front, we will no longer seek to develop Kinja as an open blogging platform, given the competition that exists from technology companies devoted entirely to that challenge,” Denton said. For Gawker, an independent media company without outside financing to fall back on, restructuring, refocusing, and cutting back may make the most sense when the future remains unclear.
In the hopes of attracting new longterm subscribers, The New York Times is now offering college students digital subscriptions to the paper for $1 a week.
“In July, the Times tested the $1-a-week offer and found the students had a very positive response to the deeply discounted rate,” the company said in a statement. The subscription will include access to NYTimes.com as well as full access to its smartphone apps.
For the Times, attracting college students is key to locking in a subscriber base that’s grown up thinking of their phones as the primary medium for consuming news. During the company’s last earnings call, chief executive Mark Thompson noted that so-called education subscriptions had made notable progress, contributing to The Times’ digital subscription growth. The thinking is, if college students are willing to sign up for $1 a week and like what they get, at least some may stick around even after they’ve graduated and have to start paying full price.
Like much of the legacy media world, The New York Times continues to adjust to changing reader habits. The Times passed a milestone of more than 1 million digital-only subscribers earlier this year, but it still depends heavily on revenue coming from its print business. As print continues to decline, it will need to continue to grow its digital subscription business to succeed.
The company says that in the past students have been able to sign up for a digital subscription for $7.50 per month, 50 percent off the standard rate. So an extra $3.50 less might not seem like a big deal. But for college students on lean budgets, $1 a week seems like it’s about as cheap as the paper can get without offering it for free.
VICE may have a reputation as an edgy media bad boy, but these days its business couldn’t be more mainstream. From the web to YouTube to HBO, Snapchat to print (yes, the magazine still exists!) to JetBlue, the VICE brand has become ubiquitous. So it’s only natural that VICE would seek to extend its presence to a full-time home on television.
Today VICE officially revealed that it’s partnering with A+E Networks to launch its own cable channel, VICELAND, in early 2016. The company says the channel will reach around 70 million homes.
“This network is the next step in the evolution of our brand and the first step in our global roll-out of networks around the world,” said Shane Smith, VICE co-founder and CEO.
VICELAND will premiere with shows like Gaycation with Ellen Page and Ian Daniel and Huang’s World with Eddie Huang. The other titles all sound very VICE-ish, including VICE World Of Sports, Black Market, Weediquette, Flophouse, and Party Legends.
The development of many of the shows and the channel as a whole has been guided in part by Spike Jonze, the writer and director best known for Jackass and Her. “We wanted VICELAND to be different, to feel like everything on there has a reason to exist and a strong point of view,” Jonze said.
As a key part of its strategy, VICE is promising to bring that point of view to the channel’s ads, too.
“Drawing on VICE’s history as an innovator in branded content online, VICELAND plans to work with brand partners to re-imagine the nature of the television commercial too—making the commercial time a valuable extension of the entertainment programming itself,” the company said in its press release. This is what is known as the “agency model,” in which the creators of content work with advertisers to give the ads themselves a similar look and feel. And VICE has been a pioneer of this approach, at least in its current incarnation.
That said, cable channels with “a strong point of view” aren’t exactly new. Nor are ads meant to double as entertainment. VICE may bring a new sensibility to the way it tells stories. But a cable channel that runs infomercials? As a business move, what’s striking about the new VICE channel is the decision by a “new media” company to go in a direction that’s demonstrably old.
Today old media giants like Disney, NBC, and CBS are preoccupied with trying to figure out how to capture the fickle attentions of younger audiences— what new media upstarts like VICE, BuzzFeed, and Snapchat do best. By embracing a more traditional medium, VICE is evincing an awareness that just because it’s been part of the movement that’s caused old media to scramble, disruption alone doesn’t reach every possible audience member. Companies that can afford to do so will try to reach as many people as possible on as many mediums as possible. Today’s media industry offers no certainties. So anyone who can is trying to do it all.
Getty Images
ESPN is shutting down the much-loved sports and culture site Grantland.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise,” the company said in a statement posted on its site.
Grantland was launched by veteran sports writer Bill Simmons in 2011. It gained a loyal readership with a number of high profile journalists like Wesley Morris, Zach Lowe, Katie Baker, Andy Greenwald, and Alex Pappademas joining its ranks to become well-known for their distinctive points of view on sports and culture and the consistently high quality of their work.
ESPN said in May of this year that they would not be renewing Simmons’ contract, leading to an exodus of writers following his departure. The company’s sudden suspension of the site, however, took many by surprise.
“Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun,” the company said in its statement. “Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality.”
The shuttering of Grantland will affect around 40 employees. ESPN will honor existing contracts, and it will have conversations with individual writers to see where they might fit in with other parts of ESPN.com. Some may choose to leave ESPN, following other writers and editors who have left since Simmons was pushed out in May. Departures in recent weeks may have contributed to the decision to shutter the site now. Grantland staffers who don’t have contracts but were full time employees will likely be laid off.
In addition to concerns over staff departures, ESPN appears to have wanted Grantland to move away from pop culture. Once that decision was made, it became less apparent why Grantland sports content should be separate from the rest of ESPN.com. ESPN offers longform sports journalism in its magazine as well as on ESPN.com. Grantland on its own was apparently never profitable.
Though readers continued to come to the site after Simmons was forced out, its audience overlapped readily with that of ESPN. In fact, ESPN.com was the number one driver of referral traffic to Grantland compared to any other single source (including Facebook), a source tells WIRED. For ESPN, having all of its sports content live under the ESPN brand may be a way to sell more valuable ads by consolidating eyeballs.
ESPN remains committed to FiveThirtyEight, the sports and politics site helmed by Nate Silver, and The Undefeated, a site devoted to black culture that has experienced its own turmoil. It’s unclear whether the company imagines those sites one day also being folded into ESPN itself, or if the company sees them as offshoots to attract a different audience to ESPN (and parent company Disney’s) doors.
On Twitter, writers, editors, and fans were critical of how ESPN handled the site suspension.
Well that’s the first time I’ve ever found out I was laid off via Twitter
— Michael Baumann (@MJ_Baumann) October 30, 2015
ESPN’s handling of @Grantland33 and its staff post-Simmons has been, to be blunt, a train wreck. That staff deserved much better.
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) October 30, 2015
“We’ve got the best NBA writer alive and a rare collection of diverse—for this industry—talent. What’s next, boss?” “Set it all on fire.” — Jared Wade (@Jared_Wade) October 30, 2015
Oh christ. Just seeing the Grantland news. ESPN is the worst.
— Foster Kamer (@weareyourfek) October 30, 2015
The world of virtual reality is going to take us to places we’ve never been before—across the globe, or to new, unimaginable planets. Or maybe it will just help you read the New Yorker. Who can say for sure?
Big change at @atavistmag, a long time coming: We’ve ditched our mobile apps and are all-in on the web. Here’s why: http://t.co/bynuPyvzNL.
— Evan Ratliff (@ev_rat) September 23, 2015
Five years after its launch, The Atavist Magazine, a digital magazine created by startup Atavist, is killing its native app.
In a post today, cofounders Evan Ratliff and Jefferson Rabb explain their latest decision as a bet on the web. “Our idea was to create a new kind of magazine, specifically designed to be read on phones and tablets,” they write in a post today. “So when we sat down to create our publication—and the publishing software behind it, the Atavist platform—there was only one logical place to start: in a native mobile app.”
Five years ago, a native app seemed like the best way to design and showcase their stories. But since then, they say, “the web caught up.” “Not only was there very little we could do in a native app that we couldn’t do on the web, but the structures of the native app environment made it nearly impossible to design well for both,” they write.
Apple and Amazon’s app stores presented their own difficulties and delays in allowing new features to be smoothly integrated, they say, while readers are ultimately choosing to find, share, and read stories on social or the web. “In an era where stories are increasingly found and shared through social media, discovery in the app store was a nightmare of its own,” Ratliff and Rabb say. “We were reaching a readership often 50 to 100 times larger on the web than what we could in the app.”
Only A Handful of Apps
Atavist’s decision to move away from a native app is consistent with what’s happened to some other digital first upstarts that have tried to launch an iPad magazine or app. The aptly named The Magazine, an experiment on iOS, folded. Circa, a news app on Android and iOS, shut down earlier this year. The Daily, an iPad-only magazine created by News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, didn’t last two years. Apple itself shuttered its Newsstand app, which relied largely on users finding individual publishers inside of the app.
Directing readers to native news apps ultimately remains a challenge. Readers only want—and check—so many apps. According to a Forrester report earlier this year, 85 percent of a person’s time spent on a smartphone is in only a handful of apps. While native apps may be possible for large publishers such as The New York Times or BuzzFeed, who can drive their audiences to their platforms, or for aggregators like Flipboard or Longform, Atavist says, most of the rest of the publishing world must rely on the web—or social apps that drive users back to their sites.
And yet those very social apps where people do spend their time, like Facebook and Snapchat, are increasingly hoping to draw audiences to articles they host natively. Facebook launched Instant Articles earlier this year, and Snapchat launched Discover to give readers a native news experience. Apple News’ launch last week now means another platform will host stories too. (Google and Twitter are rumored to be working on a similar “instant” alternative, though Re/code reports they won’t host publishers’ content.) Atavist acknowledges that in the future they may look to those alternatives. But the web isn’t dead just yet.
Business Insider appears to be handling its business.
Re/code reports that the digital upstart is nearing a deal with German publisher Axel Springer that would value the site at around $560 million. If the deal closes on those terms, it would price Business Insider at more than twice the value of storied newspaper The Washington Post, which Amazon head Jeff Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013.
The details of the deal are not yet clear nor confirmed. An earlier report in the German Manager Magazin said Axel Springer was willing to pay 500 million euros (around $555 million) for a controlling stake in Business Insider, which would mean the company’s valuation could be even larger in that case than an outright sale, as Re/code notes. (Neither Axel Springer nor Business Insider would comment for this story.)
The news comes at a time when an increasing number of old-school publishing and broadcasting titans are investing in digital upstarts. NBCUniversal has invested millions in BuzzFeed and Vox Media. (Vox has meanwhile acquired smaller upstart Re/code.) Hearst has funneled funding to <a href="http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/hearst-invests-21-million-in-