The Future Of Pinterest; Inside Google's Subscription Service

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Pindow Shopping

People are in a holding pattern when it comes to Pinterest. A leaked forecast showed revenue going from $170 million to $2.8 billion in the next two years. Garett Sloane reports for Digiday that advertisers are hesitant to put big budgets on Pinterest today, but also excited about the platform’s future. You can buy or build tech stacks and sequential targeting skills, but purchase intent is something a competitor like Facebook can’t replicate. Read on.

Nielsen’s Total Approach

Nielsen CEO Mitch Barns talked up Total Audience Measurement – Nielsen’s most daunting development project to date – during the ratings mainstay’s Q3 earnings call. Advertisers need apples-to-apples comparison across TV, digital, VOD and, ultimately, mobile and connected TV devices – and Nielsen wants to supply the tool set. It claims sell-in across most of the top 25 advertisers for its Digital Content Ratings product and, conversely, points to networks like CBS, which are incrementally measuring mobile and online viewing against standard ratings. More from Barns.

In The Red

YouTube’s new subscription service, YouTube Red, is receiving a ton of press, and The Verve’s Ben Popper has a deep dive. The coverage is mostly optimistic, noting Google’s ambitions to “eventually go head to head with Hulu and Netflix.” There’s a much-needed grain of salt here, though, as Red is at the same price point as Netflix, but where Netflix churns out massively popular original programming, Google’s main selling point is a YouTube experience free of pre-roll annoyance. More.

Messaging Means Business

Early office collaboration startups Slack and HipChat are contending with a growing number of smaller rivals, each hollowing out a discrete niche. Sean Captain at Fast Company reports on a small selection of those upstarts, and what the monetization are in this hot B2B sector. Read it.

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