WebProNews

FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

Update 2:  Now Cleland says, "If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers, that's not true. That's not going to happen today, not ever." (via)

Newsday Writer Leaves Due To 'Pay For Access' Decision

Here’s an interesting twist on the ‘pay for access to conten’t dilemma that faces the newspaper industry these days. Newspapers who do this may actually lose a writer or two! While it’s not likely that staffers at any newspaper are looking to just walk out the door to another job because there really aren’t any but you may get some that are going to walk n principle.

YouTube Forms New Content ID Partnerships

YouTube has announced several new partnerships with broadcast video delivery and management companies - Harmonic, Telestream, and Digital Rapids. YouTube says these partnerships will make it possible for many media companies to provide them with reference files for their content at about the same time it is being produced.

The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook

There's no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones. However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter

Back in June, Hubspot shared data, which indicated that about one and a half percent of all tweets were retweets. I'd be surprised if that number hasn't increased in the last few months. More people are adopting Twitter and becoming familiar with the Twitter culture. More tools have come out, which cater to the easy re-tweet. More sites have adopted retweet buttons, such as the one from Tweetmeme. I seriously doubt people are retweeting less.

Content Scrapers Not a Big Deal?

If you write for the web, whether that be on a blog or any other content site, there is a good chance your content has been scraped at some point, if not on a continuous basis. The good news is that it's probably not that big of a deal. At least that is what Google's Matt Cutts imples. Answering user questions as he so often does, Cutts took on the question, "Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?"

Newspaper Publishers Divided Over Paid Content

So the big guys like Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller have already told us that paid content for newspapers is the wave of the future.

Diller States That Paid Content Is On The Way

Remember not so long ago when Rupert Murdoch was espousing the future of paid content? It is unavoidable was the cry but there has been not much said since. That is, until Barry Diller stated his version of the story at the Goldman Communacopia conference as reported by the Business Insider.

Gap Widens Between Transactional and Content Site Visits

Interesting data from Hitwise indicates that content-driven websites get a whole lot more traffic than transactional-based ones. To put a number on it, that would be 73% more. Robin Goad of Hitwise shares the following graph comparing sites in the Shopping and Classifieds, Business and Finance, Travel, Entertainment, Computes and Internet -Social networking and Forums, News and Media, and Lifestyle categories. This is in the UK, mind you.

Facebook Lite Sparks Mixed Reactions

Depending on who you listen to the Facebook Lite offering that was inadvertently sent to many Facebook users is everything from a direct frontal assault on Twitter to a speed enhancer. Since this product was not even supposed to be released as it was it may not really matter what it really is because it’s not really ready to even ‘be’ quite yet. Two takes came from Mashable and TechCrunch and they are very different.