Inside YouTube’s big bet on Red

YouTube is spending millions of dollars to buy original content for YouTube Red. A year in, YouTube Red reportedly has 2.5 million subscribers, which means it has a long way to go. But don’t count out the site that’s become a global cultural force. This article is from the third issue of Pulse, Digiday's new magazine examining the shifts driving digital media and marketing.

‘Platforms are not forever’: Hearst’s Troy Young on platform-publisher relations

Troy Young, president of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, said social platforms need to share more of their financial success with publishers because creating great content is expensive. The good news, he said, is that platforms are paying more attention, creating teams to work more closely with publishers as content becomes a point of differentiation for them. If they don't, publishers like Hearst will deprioritize them. "What you’re seeing is little bit of boldness to say we deserve a bigger piece of revenue," he said.

Get the agency trend report from Digiday Pulse

We asked agency VIPs at our October Digiday Agency Summit which trends are sticking and which are turning out to be just sound and fury. Here's the inside story on everything from platform spending to diversity quotas.

The Counterpuncher: The Guardian’s new CRO Hamish Nicklin is on a mission

For our latest issue of Pulse, Digiday's print quarterly magazine, we spoke to The Guardian's new CRO, Hamish Nicklin, about his plans for the publisher's commercial mission. "We’re chasing the wrong things," he says. "The idea of bombarding people with ads for the sake of scale, at cheap costs, is a bit rubbish. It doesn’t work for advertisers or consumers, or publishers. We’ve forgotten what really matters."

The definitive Digiday guide to what’s in and what’s out for 2017

It's almost 2017. And that means it's a time to look ahead. So here's the annual Digiday guide to what will be in and what will be out for next year

Instagram’s Eva Chen: ‘Fashion’s always been over the top’

Eva Chen left media to work full time at Instagram as the platform's head of fashion partnerships. Chen has become somewhat of a social media mogul, and, here, she shares insights on the impacts Instagram has had on the fashion calendar, influencer culture and brands' relationships with customers.

How to get big without sucking: Under Armour has grand ambitions

An unfettered hunger for success goes some distance toward explaining Under Armour’s meteoric rise over the two decades. The brand has continuously disrupted the sports-apparel market, with 26 consecutive quarters of 20 percent-plus growth. It has offered surprising competition to global behemoths like Nike and Adidas by continuously investing in newer categories, consistently pushing the envelope in terms of its marketing and amassing the world’s largest connected fitness community with over 190 million users. But growth often comes at a cost, and with a degree of sacrifice. As Under Armour sets its sights on new international locations, new categories and connected fitness, the Baltimore-based brand is facing increasing headwinds.

Media deals that should happen in 2017

OK, so maybe 2016 wasn’t the “bloodbath” that Vice pichman/CEO Shane Smith predicted. But it did have its share of big deals, chief among them Verizon’s gobbling up of AOL. We asked industry insiders for their takes on the deals that absolutely should happen in the next 12 months. These aren’t predictions that they will happen; in fact, they’re so logical that they probably won’t.