by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
From humble beginnings in 2004 as a daily email targeted to men in New York City, lifestyle destination Thrillist has grown steadily and has evolved one city and one topic at a time.
Today, the site operates in over 30 markets, including a few outside the United States like London and Amsterdam, and attracts more than 15m unique visitors each month. Thrillist.com is one of three properties owned by Thrillist Media Group (TMG); the others are ecommerce site JackThreads and tech site Supercompressor.
Not content with steady growth of core businesses, earlier this summer, TMG CEO Ben Lerer was out and about talking to potential investors. The result was a US$54m investment from German publisher Axel Springer, Oak Partners and SBNY (formerly Softbank) in late September. To appeal to investors who were interested in either content or commerce, but not both, TMG decided to split Thrillist and JackThreads as separate businesses, with Axel Springer being the lead investor for the content site.
This week, it became clear how Ben Leher, now the CEO of Thrillist and chairman of JackThreads, plans to spend some of the new capital. Building on the company’s history of continuous geographic expansion, Thrillist is now expanding its vertical coverage beyond food and drink to include health, entertainment as well as sex and dating.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
By David Darby
This spring ushered in momentous change in the media distribution and consumption landscape. Novel content delivery methods offer publishers exciting opportunities for engagement, but also exposure to clear risks and dizzying complexity.
| Consumers have faster access to quality content as a result of the growth in mobile delivery. Standing in line at the grocery store, we can raise our smartphones to easily discover and read compelling news articles as the line inches forward. But when mobile content is discovered via Facebook feeds, an Apple News app, or similar gated spaces, publishers must weigh the gain in reach against a loss in control.
Now with this month’s launch of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), publishers have new reason for excitement, concern, and a bit of confusion.
How does your garden grow?
Facebook, of course, owns the most acreage in the world of “walled gardens”. These self-contained web environments direct and control a user’s content navigation with the goal of meeting so many of their needs, they won’t see a reason to leave.
And it’s a rich plot of garden to hoe: the longer a user stays on the site, the more data Facebook collects, allowing it to more accurately target users with the ads that power the company’s US$12bn annual revenue. |
by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 6, 2015 |
By guest blogger, Chris Carr, MerlinX Development Manager at MerlinOne
In the closing scene of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a crate containing the Ark of the Covenant, recovered in a great adventure, is wheeled into a cavernous government warehouse and piled among a sea of other identical crates. The irony is not lost on the viewer: The priceless artifact is about to vanish, once again, perhaps to be discovered by some future archaeologist in another few thousand years.
This is the precise scenario that unfolds every day in countless publishing organizations. At some point an organization amasses enough files and documents that finding what you need, let alone knowing what you have, starts to feel very much like archaeology. This is the point where most organizations start to look into digital asset management (DAM). Whether that point is reached once you amass tens or hundreds of thousands of files or more depends on the organization, but the day invariably arrives.
Indeed, storing and finding assets was the primary focus of the earliest DAM systems—and is still a core function—but along the way DAM has evolved, matured and learned a few tricks. Let’s look at a few of the roles DAM has taken on along the way.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 4, 2015 |
By Steven Wise
Hyperlocal journalism is a concept that has struggled for more than a decade to prove its viability as a profitable business model. Yet the potential for citizen-driven news continues to inspire new efforts in the space.
‘The magic of hyperlocal sites,’ according to Mark Potts, founder of the pioneering Backfence.com, ‘is that they provide a forum for community members to share and discuss what’s going on around town.’
Pott’s site shut down in 2007, two years after launch, joining a list of early hyperlocal content casualties that includes the demise of CitySearch and Microsoft Sidewalk in the 1990s. After so many flame-outs, the 2013 collapse of the much-heralded hyperlocal content site Patch.com may have come as no surprise to many. What’s truly remarkable is, after downsizing and retooling, Patch is back and becoming an example of how hyperlocal content can work.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 3, 2015 |
By Gretchen McLaurin
Content marketing is about engaging your customers about your products – informing, not selling. According to a Smart Insights survey, it is the most commercially important digital marketing trend in 2015. This modern form of storytelling, done well, helps establish your credibility by providing detailed curated information, increasing opportunities for customers to land on your website and ultimately spend money.
The marketing industry has always engaged in a quality versus quantity debate. Using multiple avenues, it is possible more content may be better to increase traffic, boost your brand, promote conversations and assist customers. Whether reading blogs, how-to guides, or industry whitepapers, customers use content marketing to make decisions about the products and services that suit them. When this content is shared via social media, by customers who share links, pins and tweets to spread the word about products that interest them, it increases visibility of your site.
According to polling by Ascend2 and reported by eMarketer.com, spending on content marketing reached US$145bn so far this year and is estimated to double to $300bn in the next four years. Simultaneously, in a ranking of impediments to achieving marketing goals, a lack of content creation resources, writers, bloggers and infographic producers, is cited by marketers worldwide as the top problem (and has been since 2012). While many marketers are struggling to identify the ROI of their content marketing efforts, there is consensus that content marketing is an essential means to engage customers. Companies are turning to the booming freelance economy to help fill this gap. –
Today, the site operates in over 30 markets, including a few outside the United States like London and Amsterdam, and attracts more than 15m unique visitors each month. Thrillist.com is one of three properties owned by Thrillist Media Group (TMG); the others are ecommerce site JackThreads and tech site Supercompressor.
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