WaPo Will Use Google Tech To Speed Up Its Mobile Site; Examining Facebook's Sour Relationships

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Back To Basics

The Washington Post will use Google’s Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology to speed up mobile website loading, Jack Marshall reports for The Wall Street Journal. Seventy percent of the Post’s traffic comes from mobile devices, and 63% percent of overall traffic comes from the mobile web (compared to 7% from apps). PWA speeds up load times by pre-loading content on user devices (Facebook announced a similar product last month). “Our goal was to create the fastest mobile news site possible,” said Shailesh Prakash, CTO for the Post. “A lot of publishers have spent time making their apps very fast, but the mobile web is where the growth is.” More.

The Frenemy Of My Frenemy Is My Frenemy

Facebook wants to shore up relationships with industry stakeholders (e.g., agencies, publishers and telcos) that have become more antagonistic to the social giant. One way it can make good with those actors is by taking a more active position on ad blocking. Telcos like ad blockers because they bring down data usage and costs, which Facebook proposes to do itself through internet expansion projects and new data centers. “Facebook’s troubled dealings with the telecoms call to mind its uneasy relationship with publishers,” writes Lauren Johnson at Adweek. More.

Place Your (Alpha)Bets

Twitter’s board of directors meets tomorrow and a potential sale is on the docket, per unnamed Recode sources. After an anemic year for Twitter stock and LinkedIn’s $26 billion-plus sale to Microsoft, a sale has its appeal. Given its large base of logged-in (and cross-device) users, who are the likely buyers? SunTrust analyst Robert Peck singles out Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, Disney, Bloomberg and Fox. Google, too, would make a great deal of sense.

The Publisher Grind

“Publishers, under growing financial pressures in recent years, have increasingly blurred the lines between their organizations’ editorial and business sides to generate more money,” writes New York Times reporter Sapna Maheshwari in an article about the website Entrepreneur, which opened a new revenue stream by turning into a gateway for small business loans. From sponsored content to live events (both of which the Times has enthusiastically embraced), editorial is asserting itself more in the revenue-driving areas of the publishing world. Or, to be more exact, publishers need editorial integrity to be elastic enough to extend into money-making endeavors because the web has proven insufficient to support expensive reporters.

Search High And Low

Things have gotten complicated for China’s largest search engine and its ads business. After a student died trying an experimental cancer therapy advertised on Baidu, the Chinese government upped its regulation over paid search ads. As a result, organic search rankings have become more important, according to an Ad Age column. More.