Year in Preview: Brands will get insular in 2017

People have marginalized hateful speech on social media for a long time but this recent election cycle is something of a validation of our uglier impulses. This has become challenging for brands especially as they find themselves being involuntarily dragged into hot-button ideological issues like immigration and politics. In that sense, 2017 could be the year when brands become insular and real-time riffing falls by the wayside.

Year in Preview: Hello, zero-margin agency

Zero margin agencies are coming. After DDB and McDonald's signed a low-margin deal this year, more of these deals will follow. “It’s agency terminology to refer to these things as zero margin, from an advertiser perspective it’s a heavily incentivized performance-based contract,” says Tom Denford, chief strategy officer at consultancy ID Comms.

Year in Preview: 2017 will be the year that platforms pay up

Facebook's paying for live video and Snapchat's evolving the terms of its publisher compensation in 2016 were signs that the platform giants will pony up for content. But it's not out of altruism. What platforms care most about is scale. And only a select few media companies that have the scale and point of difference will benefit -- which means others will continue reconsidering investing in platform initiatives that have no clear payoff.

Introducing Issue 4 of Digiday’s magazine

Pulse is now part of a new Digiday membership model. Our offer: Pay about $1 a day ($395 a year) and we’ll give you a magazine with insightful, unique content; monthly data reports from our summits; member events in New York City and beyond; and an exclusive, monthly newsletter from our editors on what’s coming next in media and marketing. Last week, we held our first Digiday Pulse subscriber meetup at our offices, where we held a talk with NowThis president Athan Stephanopoulos and heard on top trends for 2017 from Digiday editors.

Inside the Turner Sports-Bleacher Report romance

When Turner Sports bought Bleacher Report in 2012, it made the smart decision to leave the upstart sports site alone. Since then, Bleacher Report has grown to 500 million monthly video views and an engaged audience across platforms. Revenues have also tripled as the company continues to chase a diversified, platform-centric media business. None of that would have happened without Turner willing to invest in Bleacher Report while also giving it the freedom to experiment.

#ImWithHer: Inside the Clinton campaign’s social strategy

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Clinton’s social media team is good at alternately playing offense and defense when Donald Trump attacks her, turning the Republican presidential candidate's own social bombast into media coverage against him. The team is also good at combining social with field grassroots operations through data. "It’s in many ways the secret weapon of the Clinton campaign,” said a marketer who is very close to the Clinton team.

Josh Topolsky on his new startup: ‘There’s a new generation that is not that interested in Facebook’

Chasing scale has overwhelmingly driven digital publishing, but veteran tech journalist Josh Topolsky believes there's a sustainable digital model for thoughtful journalism that doesn’t require joining the race for scale or doing Facebook’s bidding. For his forthcoming site The Outline, he wants to explore video, gaming and inventive uses of text to tell stories. "What people want is evolving and what we’ve done hasn’t evolved along with it," he said.

Funny Business: How Matt Bellassai went from BuzzFeed intern to social media star

Four years ago, Matt Bellassai was an editorial intern at BuzzFeed. Today, he has a People’s Choice Award, just completed a 30-city stand-up comedy tour and is working on his first book -- not exactly the standard trajectory for someone who originally wanted to be a magazine writer. But that’s simply the nature of the times, where anyone with a fresh or interesting voice can quickly become a star by uploading videos on the web.