Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp has announced that his blogging platform will start to build in paid for advertising from May 2nd, despite him telling the Los Angeles Times that “we’re pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomachs,” back in 2010.

Dressed in the CEO uniform of hoody and jeans, he told the AdAge conference in New York that “you’ve already seen our ad unit”  - the Radar section of the dashboard, which currently highlights popular posts, and gives 120 million impressions a day. Karp also admitted that he had been “an idiot” for for his previous comments on advertising.

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A new one click payment system, called Paycento, could allow webs users to pay for content with one click using Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

It could prove a major boon for newspapers and other content providers looking to simplify the selling of paid content as the idea is that it will cut out any form filling. Read More »

An entertaining rant recently appeared from internet sceptic John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine, who believes the internet is out to put him out of business (he might be right) and where he compares it to nothing more than a giant photocopier that is stealing the life from his magazine.

Called ‘Internet con men ravage publishing’ he accuses those who give free content away, he points to the Guardian and others, of being  ideological radicals and internet boosters who are doing nothing less than promoting the death of print. Read More »

The Billboard Hot 100, the main US pop chart, is to start using social app stats in building its weekly list. In addition to digital download sales, the chart will now also include data from Spotify, Rhapsdy, Rdio, Slacker, Cricket’s Muve Music, MOG.

Interestingly, data from YouTube is not being utilised, despite the vast amount of music stored and accessed via that service. It is likely that this is because it would be hard to properly decide what was a ‘legitimate’ music video to be included (for example, would it have to be on an official artists Channel,) and whether the listener was actually from the US, where the Billboard Hot 100 is based. Read More »

The New York Times has given an update on its paywall and overall digital subscription numbers with the number of digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of paper, and the International Herald Tribune, hitting 390,000 at the end of the fourth quarter. That’s up 20%, or by almost 70,000, since the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Including the Boston Globe the New York Times had a total of 406,000 paid digital subscriptions. Read More »

Yesterday, I blogged on how The New York Times paywall was working as its digital subscriber numbers grow.

Today the Financial Times has issued an update on how its paywall is going from strength to strength and has broken through a significant barrier. Read More »

The New York Times put out a press release yesterday, the big headline of which was that it has recorded a slight rise in the print circulation of the paper’s Sunday edition, but the real story was that its total digital subscriptions are on the up. Read More »

I wrote earlier this year that News International was rethinking its anti-social media paywall policy with regards whether it would introduce a paywall for the Sun modelled on the one employed by The Times.

It had intially been reported that The Sun would follow in the footsteps of the News of the World, which saw its traffic plummet after its paywall went live, but that turned out to be the least of its problems. Read More »

Brands should be careful not to fall off the balcony of cool – broadening the debate surrounding memes and whether brands should engage with consumers whilst being on-trend.

This is an ambitious blog post. I am aim to identify some things brands and marketers should be aware of when placing a brand at the very apex of cool, I aim to tell you a little bit about memes and I aim to inform you of why my theory of the balcony of being on-trend should be constantly at the forefront of all of our minds(!). Read More »

Other than the aggregation engine that is the Huffington Post few online only sites have managed to achieve mass market success and now Slate, one of the oldest online only magazines, has swung the axe and cut some of its most high profile staff.

Coming on the day when yet another newspaper announced it was putting up a paywall, this time the Newsquest-owned Herald in Scotland, is that another nail in the coffin of free web content? Read More »