FT Adding Subscriptions; Pinterest's Pin Sales

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Around Ads With Subscriptions

The Financial Times has reached a new high with subscribers at 629,000, a 5% increase year over year, according to The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade. Although the company continues to struggle with ad sales like most print publishers, the company has achieved profitability. Pearson, the parent company, said in its interim report that digital subscriptions are up 24%. Read more.

Pin Sales

Pinterest is playing around with a new feature called “related pins,” which could lead to its impending ad strategy, VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly reports. The new pins will also come with the option to give feedback. By giving a thumbs up or down, users can tell Pinterest whether they want to see more pins like that. Pinterest gets lumped into the social group, but it’s driving a fair amount of ecommerce, which differentiates it from the other giants like Facebook and Twitter. Read more.

A Facebook Debate

Rob Leathern, CEO of Optimal, takes to Business Insider to tell why he doesn’t feel the Forrester Report about Facebook is accurate or fair. He writes, “In the unfortunate all-too-common-lately style of high-level broad spurious insights without any detailed methodology, most of the actual ‘data’ is only available behind a paywall, but there was enough publicly available to see some of the major issues with it and then the benefit of reading the report compelled me to speak out here.” Read more.

Clickthrough Klout

Klout and Mass Relevance are forming a partnership that will allows broadcast networks to use tweets from “highly ranked” Twitter users during television shows or in paid campaigns. “The Klout score becomes another criterion for brands and broadcasters to filter and use tweets,” says Tyler Singletary, director of platform at Klout. “People who see content from Klout influencers are two times more likely to click through to an advertiser’s page.” Read more.

Consulting Consolidation

Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will acquire management-consulting firm Booz & Co. pending approvals from Booz stakeholders, GigaOm reported today. Although PwC plays heavily in the accounting and tax-services space, it foreseeably gains enterprise strategy consulting and digital-technology services strength in Booz & Co. As GigaOM’s Barb Darrow details, PwC does an estimated $32 billion in business annually; Booz’s estimated revenue is $1 billion. Read more.

Hero Ads

Bing Ads launched Hero Ads yesterday. (But of course they did.) MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan explains, “When asked if Microsoft considers the Hero ad unit a native advertising format, a spokesperson for the company said the industry seems to define native advertising as content that fits into the user’s experience. Call it what you will, but this broad-based ad unit offers links to a variety of content and information.” Read it.

Earnings