The Weekly Bulletin | November 28, 2023

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

Author

Vahe Arabian
November 28, 2023

Hi SODP community,

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

TIP OF THE WEEK

I've been interested in the digital publishing industry's adoption of WhatsApp Channels since its launch in June.

While inspired by Telegram Channels, WhatsApp's entry into the space is worth a closer look, given the size of its user base. While Telegram has 700 million monthly active users (MAUs), WhatsApp had around 2 billion MAUs as of March 2020 and more than 2.7 billion unique users.

A quick look at the screenshot below shows a.) how easy it is for users to start following a publisher and b.) some of the success that outfits like TechRadar (with nearly 250,000 followers) are already enjoying.

It's important to note that while WhatsApp has rolled out official support for publishers, users have used the platform as a news source for the past decade.

Let's look at how publishers can quickly get the most out of the platform.

WhatsApp content strategies to try:

  1. Highlight top/long-form stories: Use WhatsApp to provide a snapshot of your site's top stories or longer-form articles. This is a great way to drive direct traffic.

  2. Post explainers/summaries: Publishers have already been creating this type of content on TikTok with great success. The format aims to bring the reader up to speed on an issue with bite-sized stories.

  3. Repurpose content: Publishers with a presence on TikTok, Threads, Telegram, etc., can easily repost content (videos, photos or text) on WhatsApp with minimal friction.

  4. Leverage emojis: WhatsApp's emoji responses, introduced just last year, encourage anonymous participation from followers. You can leverage these to survey your audience or even hold quizzes.

SODP POSTS

14 Best Native Ad Networks for Publishers in 2024

Digital publishers looking to maximize their revenue should consider folding native advertising campaigns into their monetization model.

A study conducted in 2017 found that native ad campaigns could help publishers boost click-through rates (CTRs) by as much as ninefold. While the study is showing its age now, the fact that native ad spending has accounted for the lion’s share of the display ad market over the last five years suggests its findings still hold true.

In this article, we look into:

✅ What native ad networks are
✅ The types of native advertising
✅ Best native ad networks, and their pros and cons

12 Best AI Tools for Content Creation

Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, AI tools for content creation are not only here to stay but are set to proliferate in the future.

Months before generative AI captured the global imagination via the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, IBM released a survey of businesses that revealed 35% were already using AI while 42% were exploring it.

Five months later and another survey revealed that the overwhelming majority of US marketing professionals use generative AI tools in their work.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled our list of AI tools for content creations we think can help publishers and marketers level up their productivity today.

JOB BOARD

➡️ News Corp Australia is looking for an education editor for its Ed Media Ed Media – a business that specializes in creating B2B publications for the health and education sectors (Hybrid, Sydney, US). SEE MORE

➡️ Spotlight Delaware – a new collaborative nonprofit newsroom – is seeking a community-driven professional to join the team as the Director of Membership and Community Engagement (DE, US). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Google is deprecating the crawl rate limiter legacy tool within Google Search Console on January 8, 2024. Google said this feature is no longer useful because Google said it has improved its “crawling logic and other tools available to publishers.” READ MORE

➡️ Technical SEO basics and high-quality, helpful content should come before chasing SEO trends, say Google's Search Relations team. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ John Mueller on LinkedIn:

Large-scale analysis of cookie dialogs on 97k websites popular in the EU: "Indeed, 65.4% of websites ignore user choices when they explicitly reject consent and 90.2% of websites violate at least one of the requirements checked by our methods. Furthermore, we discovered that more popular websites are more likely to ignore user choices despite having more compliant cookie notice interfaces."

These are the highlights for last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP