Just when many people seemed to think it was dead, new ventures like Svbtle and Medium are trying to reinvent blogging by adding curation and other elements. How they plan to monetize their content, however, remains a mystery.
Fewer publishers are treating apps as a make-or-break business decision. Instead, a shift in the economics of app making means publishers can choose from a wider variety of app options that are tailored to the type of content they produce.
Many startups like Tumblr and Airbnb have become successful because they focused on filling a need that their founders had, and then turned that into a business, and there are a number of important lessons in that kind of approach for traditional media companies.
Marco Arment, one of the most creative publishers in the digital world, is trying his hand at one of the most conventional formats in the business — the magazine.
How much security is too much? Apple’s sandboxing rules for its Mac App Store are supposed to keep malware in check, but the developer of MPlayerX is charging that it prevents the video player from loading subtitles. MPlayerX isn’t the fist app to leave the store.
The reaction to Twitter’s restrictions on its API has focused mostly on whether the moves are unfair to third-party developers and apps. But what about the impact they will have on users? Twitter seems to care more about monetizing its network than what users want.
Facebook plans to introduce “read-it-later” features into its mobile app. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, because this was one of the core offerings of Spool, a tiny startup Facebook acquired earlier this summer.
Freemium can only offer the hope that customers will fall in love with your product and be willing to pay for it later. This is a scattershot approach to monetization. Rags Srinivasan argues that it’s time to take a deliberate and more targeted approach.
The popular iPhone client Tweetbot will now have an application for Mac, an exciting development for fans of the product, but an interesting development to come just as Twitter has announced plans to restrict third-party use of its API and keep Twitter users on Twitter products.
Many online media outlets continue to rewrite news without providing a link to the original source, but doing this is both rude and short-sighted: Linking is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet and a crucial part of the culture of the web.
