Join us Dec. 1-3 in Nashville for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
The New York Times used to crow about the performance of its About unit, which it bought for $410 million in 2005. Not so much anymore. PaidContent has the news that About is reorganizing its operations. Business Insider claimed it is laying off its editorial team, which is apparently not the case. NYT brought in executive Martin Niesenholtz to run About, which is now regularly tagged as “troubled,” replacing Cella Irvine. The downfall of About was speeded by Google’s Panda algorithm update that hit so-called content farms hard. It’s hard to see a future where the NYT is able to turn around About, considering it is a legacy business built on search optimization at a time when Google is hellbent of fighting the spam that clogs its results.
More in Media
Reach CEO touts Google AI deal as a template, steps up pressure on OpenAI over scraping
Digiday spoke with Reach CEO Piers North about his plans to make its Google AI content deal a blueprint framework for other LLM deals, and its recent cease-and-desist letter to OpenAI.
Social commerce edges past SEO at The Independent for the first time
The Independent’s social-commerce revenue edged past its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September, CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London this week.
Ownership, control, margins: the brand playbook for microseries is still taking shape
Creator-led microseries are hot, and brands want in, but everyone’s still figuring out the structure of the deals and the content itself