We’re all about attention. Here are a few stories from the week that captured ours.
The ‘terrifying’ moment in 2012 when YouTube changed its entire philosophy
Business Insider | Jillian D’Onfro | July 3 (**holiday weekend**) (6 min read)
“After bouts of data collection and analysis coupled with countless meetings, YouTube re-jiggered its search-and-discovery algorithm on March 15 to make watch time, not views, the determining factor in what videos to recommend.”
Share of Attention: Advertising’s Newest Time-Based Metric
AdExchanger | Marc Guldimann | July 6 (3 min read)
“Viewability doesn’t have the granularity required to be the pricing metric for a transaction in its own right.”
How screens make us feel
Columbia Journalism Review | Lene Bech Sillesen | July 6 (12 min read)
“Print and online readers of a heart-wrenching true story display equal empathy and emotional engagement, regardless of the medium in which they read.”
It’s 2015 — You’d Think We’d Have Figured Out How To Measure Web Traffic By Now
FiveThirtyEight | Sam Dean | July 7 (10 min read)
“The days of the cookie and its intentional privacy features (or tracking flaws) may be numbered.”
Public and Personal Sharing
The Guardian | Kevin Stevens | July 7 (5 min read)
“Whether public or personal sharing, the content being interesting is the biggest driver for Guardian readers.”
Copyranter: Everybody’s definition of ‘branded content’ is wrong
Digiday | Mark Duffy | July 7 (4 min read)
“Everything wants to be ‘content’ now: news, ads, marketing, cat videos, porn, infographics, white papers, Brooklyn, etc.”
How to be an Awesome Journalist on the Internet
Medium | ReadThisThing Team | July 8 (3 min read)
“Use Twitter. Lots of reporters don’t, and it’s the best tool out there for growing an engaged audience around your work.”
Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
The Verge | Josh Dzieza | July 9 (15 min read)
“People share content that confirms something they believe or that they want people to believe about them.”
7 things you need to know about how Millennials watch video
theMediaBriefing | Rick Gibson | July 10 (7 min read)
“Their devices of choice are overwhelmingly mobile; their appetite for content is little short of voracious, and the context for their viewing highly social and conversational.”
BONUS:
The First Chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman
The Wall Street Journal | Harper Lee | July 10
Right now someone is explaining @Chartbeat to Harper Lee
— Mike Rosenwald (@mikerosenwald) July 10, 2015