LTO Links #34

reddit CEO trolled Trump supporters

Your weekly must reads

I'm getting married tomorrow and taking some time off to honeymoon! This will be the last newsletter for a couple of weeks.

LTO Links

Issue #34 |  

Advertising

Facebook’s Stumbles Expose Flaws in Its Plan to Rule Advertising

"Either way, many in the ad industry say it’s time to retire the idea that digital advertising is closer to perfect than other kinds of advertising."

Content

Venezuela’s Nemesis Is a Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama

"He is president of one of Venezuela’s most popular and insurgent websites, DolarToday.com, which provides a benchmark exchange rate used by his compatriots to buy and sell black-market dollars. That allows them to bypass some of the world’s most rigid currency controls."

How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study

"While some fake news is produced purposefully by teenagers in the Balkans or entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to make money from advertising, false information can also arise from misinformed social media posts by regular people that are seized on and spread through a hyperpartisan blogosphere.

...

'I did think in the back of my mind there could be other explanations, but it just didn’t seem plausible,” he said in an interview, noting that he had posted as a “private citizen who had a tiny Twitter following.'

He added, 'I’m also a very busy businessman and I don’t have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don’t think it’s going out there for wide consumption."

Data

Facebook Says It Found More Miscalculated Metrics

"The company publicly disclosed on Wednesday that a comprehensive internal metrics audit found that discrepancies, or “bugs,” led to the undercounting or overcounting of four measurements, including the weekly and monthly reach of marketers’ posts, the number of full video views and time spent with publishers’ Instant Articles."

How Google Analytics ruined marketing

"Traditional marketing allocates activities based on the strategies that comprise the traditional Promotion Mix: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity. Google Analytics replaced those “buckets” with these entirely new ones: direct, organic search, social, referral, paid search, email and display.

However, that shift in assumption has led to poor marketing because almost any strategy can be executed over any channel — and it is strategies, not channels, that have associated best practices and deliver results."

Social

While We Weren’t Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks

"Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment."

Reddit’s CEO regrets trolling Trump supporters by secretly editing their posts

"He swapped all mentions of his own username with the names of the pro-Trump group's leaders, meaning that expletive-laden posts aimed at him looked instead as if they were insulting the group's leaders."