The Weekly Bulletin | April 16, 2024

Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities

Author

Vahe Arabian
April 16, 2024

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

WordPress has unveiled a new performance plugin designed to significantly enhance website load times, aiming for near-instantaneous loading.

The plugin employs several advanced techniques, including preloading assets and optimizing images, to achieve this goal. Additionally, it provides various customization options for users to tailor performance enhancements according to their specific needs.

More details can be found here.

Pre-rendering and delaying ad load is already hard to do, and to date, specific best practices' first priority has been repeated by the Google Chrome advocacy team to help with LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). Speculative Loading is the protocol designed to be a catch-all with the hopes of site speed performance, but there could be a chance it interrupts ad loading.

Upon the initial test led by our lead developer Abdelrahman Elshiekh, he states, "The plugin helps predict where the user will hover to provide a better user experience. It can help boost site performance and improve the user experience for site visitors. But the speed score is still the same".

In conclusion, continue to adopt the best practices provided by https://web.dev/ and use the Speculation Rules plugin for testing purposes until it gets integrated into a core WordPress update.

Monetization Week

SODP POSTS

Success in news publishing often boils down to scale and speed. Publishers need to push out large volumes of content and do it fast. However, they often find themselves hamstrung by the shortcomings of legacy content management systems that lack the specialized capabilities required by news publishers.

Then, there’s also the matter of cost. Legacy content management systems are expensive and come with additional costs of upgrades and integrations.

This has opened up a space for specialized CMS platforms dedicated to news publishing that not only provide advanced capabilities to help news publishers meet the demands of the news cycle, but also help them manage costs.

Labrador CMS is one such solution that has been making waves of late.

We dig deep into this CMS platform to understand how it works, and whether it lives up to its promises.

Displaying relevant ads to users without disrupting the user experience (UX) has always been a challenging tightrope for publishers to walk.

Showing too many ads or ads that are too prominent can disrupt a user’s browsing experience, while also impacting page load times. On the other hand, displaying too few ads, or ads that users barely notice can impact revenue negatively.

RollerAds is an ad network that helps publishers negotiate this tricky path by leveraging push notifications to generate extra revenue on top of what publishers already make from other ad formats such as banner and video ads. It does this without impacting the user’s browsing experience, while promising better clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates.

Join us as we weigh in on RollerAds’ pros and cons and try to understand how well it delivers on its promises.

JOB BOARD

➡️ The Athletic is looking for an Associate Newsroom SEO Editor to join its audience team. (Remote, US). SEE MORE

➡️ Vox Media is looking for a deputy editor to serve as the right-hand to the Editorial Director. (Remote, US). SEE MORE

LOOKING TO HIRE?

With over 15 years of experience driving substantial growth in user acquisition, engagement, and revenue across global markets, Tania González is looking for the next opportunity to bring her expertise in audience development, strategic partnerships, and multichannel marketing to a new team.

Tania is a former Global Director of Audience Development, Social Media & Analytics at WIRED. SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Google Search will continue to evolve in the direction of Search Generative Experience. That’s according to Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai. READ MORE

➡️ Axios changes strategy in response to AI: more events, a $1K/year membership program, and more subscription newsletters. READ MORE

➡️ Google says it will reduce some user access to California news sites. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ John Shehata on LinkedIn:

One of my favorite Google Discover reports at http://gddash.com is comparing a specific Content Category to the rest of the competitor data set (over 1 trillion impressions). For example "/Sports/Team Sports/Soccer" category in Google saw a drop in impressions around March 26th. Now you evaluate if it is only your content or it is discover overall. Content Categories "content classifiers" are based on Google Ontology of 2000+ categories and subcategories.

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP