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Text Me? Ping Me? Communications Overload in the Digital Age - The New York Times

Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion, and Vows), and Instagram. A version of this article appears in print on December 13, 2015,

Yahoo: old media redux

At a time when much of the advertising industry is focusing on technology and data to reach ever more specific groups of consumers across the web, Yahoo has instead invested huge sums of money in content and talent geared to the mass market. “It becomes vanilla in a land of not 32, but 5,032 flavors,” said Rob Norman, the chief digital officer of WPP’s GroupM, the world’s biggest buyer of online advertising. “What Yahoo tried to do both with magazines and video was to be old media in the Internet age, and I suspect that that wasn’t the answer.” The result, advertisers say, is that Yahoo has gone out of fashion. And the money is moving away. Yahoo is predicted to take in about $3.4 billion in digital ad revenue this year, or only about 2 percent of the global digital ad market, down from 2.4 percent in 2014, according to eMarketer.

The commodification of content

To a platform supremacist, online media—traditional online media?—today is no more rational than print media seemed to the first online publishers. Newspapers wrote and printed hundreds of redundant articles a day because their trucks could only deliver so far; websites produce an enormous amount of duplicative content jockeying from the outside for space in search results or social feeds, or simply because they expect people to read their sites like papers, front-page first. Recontextualized within a platform, this level of duplication is easier to see as waste. Fifty embedded John Oliver videos become one Facebook video shared under a few headlines. A hundred slight acknowledgements of the same political gaffe are reduced to a trending topic link. What were heralded as novel and bold content strategies are reclassified as spam; territory where publications could fruitfully mine to subsidize whatever else they thought they should be doing is rezoned or reclaimed under eminent domain.

Apple Car Seen as Serious Competitor by Auto Executives - Bloomberg Business

“The key element is to make sure that when we’re working with them -- and we’re totally open to work with any of them -- it’s a real win-win,” said Didier Leroy, Toyota Motor Corp.’s European chief. “The carmakers don’t want just to become a kind of commodity, where somebody will only deliver an empty box and somebody will put in the box something which will be the real added value.”