9 9.7% Favorite, Window Buyers and Podcasts Go Boom
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality
By Kaleigh Rogers from Motherboard
- “After removing all duplicate and fake comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission last year, a Stanford researcher has found that 99.7 percent of public comments—about 800,000 in all—were pro-net neutrality.”
- “With the help of his colleague Jeff Kao, Singel used machine learning models to identify more than 800,000 unique comments and analyze them, showing that commenters were firmly against repealing the rules, and these commenters spanned the country geographically and politically.”
- “He also found that unique commenters had a more nuanced understanding of net neutrality law than lawmakers may have assumed, including regularly mentioning the decision to reclassify broadband as a common carrier under Title II of the Communications Act of 1996.”
Pinterest is turning more of its window shoppers into buyers with newest features
By Kate Clark from Tech Crunch
- “The $12 billion company, which has 250 million monthly active users, has rebuilt the infrastructure behind its product pins with a goal of making the mobile app and website more ‘shoppable,’”
- “The three new features include up-to-date pricing and stock information on all product pins, with links that take pinners to the retailer’s website, plus a new ‘Products like this’ category under each fashion and home decor pin, which includes stylistically similar products that Pinterest thinks that user will like. It’s also added a new shopping shortcut within the app that connects users to similar products to a given pin.”
- “Pinterest has been trying to convert its users to buyers for a long time. Last year, the company launched Pinterest Lens, which lets users take a photo of something in their existing wardrobe or a cool pair of shoes they saw someone wearing on the subway, for example, upload it into the app and instantly view that product or similar ones.”
The Podcasting Revenue Boom Has Started
By Bob Woods from Strategy+Business
- “Podcasts have been around for more than a decade. But it is only in recent years that the financial and logistical infrastructure that supports podcasting as a business has been erected.”
- “The number of podcast listeners — defined as those who have listened to at least one podcast in the past month — surged to 78 million by the end of 2017, up from 23 million in 2013, according to the E&M Outlook.”
- “Now there are signs that established brands want a piece of the podcast pie, too, so names like Gillette, Mattress Firm, Ford, and IBM are showing up. Last December, Big Blue advertised on five different podcasts, and in April, in conjunction with its ‘Let’s Put Smart to Work’ campaign, IBM ads appeared on shows including Science Friday and Freakonomics Radio. Stuff Media, which in September 2018 was purchased by iHeartMedia for $55 million, has run ads on its popular HowStuffWorks podcasts from such major brands as Gillette, Dell, Lowe’s, NBC, and Pitney Bowes.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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