Facebook Works On Its Publisher Relationship; Twitter Gives Up On Dashboard

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The Face Of News

Facebook introduced its Journalism Project, a program to build news media inroads and collaborate with publishers on product development. The social platform has been hammered recently for undervaluing publisher concerns and promulgating “fake news” during the election. Among the pledges here is to help publishers innovate around business models, including subscriptions and new ad formats. “We’ll … keep working on monetization options for partners, such as expanding our live ad break test to a wider group of partners, and exploring ad breaks in regular videos,” writes product director Fidji Simo. More at Recode.

On Second Thought…

Six months after launch, Twitter has binned its Dashboard product, a platform management suite for businesses. “Twitter intended to make things straightforward for businesses to get in on the ground floor with a scheduling tool, drafted posts, multiple account management and more,” reports Marketing Land. Dashboard failed largely because third-party account management services work well through Twitter’s API. It underscores a perception that Twitter chronically fails to follow through on product development. Eyebrows were still raised by the recent departures of its CTO and VP of product. More.

Around The World

A startup called Globality hopes software to connect brands with smaller, regional agencies for one-off projects will fill a market need. It’s an increasingly common task that remains a headache, writes Alexandra Bruell for The Wall Street Journal. When clients run international campaigns, they often default to the local outpost of their global agency. Globality instead wants to link them with specialized local shops. The startup charges the winning agency 15% of the project budget. “Our mission is to make globalization work for more businesses,” says Globality CEO Joel Hyatt . “We will bring buyers and sellers unprecedented access to new business opportunities.” More.

Like Looking Into The Past

Ad fraud is hitting China especially hard. A big part of the problem is Chinese companies still use ad tracking rather than third-party verification to measure fraud and viewability, which boosts campaigns on paper even if the results are terrible. “Brands and agencies feel scared to work with ad-verification services,” says Marin Zhang, CEO of verification firm Adbug. “The question is: Do you want to report back to the headquarters with strong KPIs even though they are fake, or verified ones showing that all of your historical campaigns are shit?” More at Digiday.

But Wait, There’s More!