“farewell outline. we have all been laid off.”
twitter.com
twitter.com
Marketing and events, two mainstays for specialty news, have evaporated, and many online pubs don't have enough subscribers.
My adblocker catches the usual suspects, but I'm guessing these were not served from a third-party domain. I'm perfectly happy with ads that look like some effort went into them, and don't carry the numerous trackers that we now accept as part and parcel of real-time bidding networks.
They never had the Taboola/Outbrain chumbox as so many "reputable" publications do. They never had hideous Adsense ads breaking up the page.
It's too bad the site didn't have a clear identity; the topics were all over the place, and it didn't have a unique tone of voice.
Plus, I'm guessing media buyers were not pleased about having to actually create interesting looking ads that were closer to interactive sponsored content than a two-line Adsense ad they could A/B test to their heart's desire.
I was wondering just how many employees outline.com even had and if they could just run as is with a couple people.
Our CEO told us today that they're planning for it. I don't know yet, whether I will be on it, but I assume that I will.
And it's infinitely better than losing my job.
That's different than a layoff. I'd happily accept a reduction in pay and work hours over a 100% pay cut and temporary layoff, if that's what it took to keep my company alive during a temporary economic downturn.
A free market is very inept at solving this problem because no single company is going to make the long term investment required to foresee future recessions and implement a war chest sufficient to offer Kurzarbeit. But the state can think ahead and generate a public good from this kind of program.
Not quite, I think the government makes up for 60% or so of the income difference, but I'll have to look it up later myself.
That article also states that you can participate in training, which will actually give you the chance to maintain your income. Pretty cool, I think.
My read on the negligible positive is that those are mostly lifestyle and entertainment publishers. People already spent a lot of time on those properties naturally. Also community forums are still very active if they were active prior to this.
The thing to watch is who is able to carry their infrastructure through this with the lower ad rates. If you’re big spending on AWS, et al, you might start considering getting a little closer to bare metal.
Note that publishers with lower overhead and can hold out longer usually benefit from the earlier publisher shutdowns, as their ad impressions get soaked up by whoever else remains.
Having watched the publisher world back in 07-08 this is so far feeling very familiar.
I have a cxx role at a startup. We slashed our ad budget for the next 45-60 days until we figure out how deep our economic collapse is going to be; I suspect we're far from the only company.
The other thing about ecpms is most advertisers have a daily frequency cap for cookies. More browsing plus more ad slots does not necessarily equal that much more filled ad slots.
We're going to see a lot more ad-supported content companies fail as we destroy the ability to do cross-site targeting. (I'm not saying increasing privacy is bad; merely that this is an entirely-foreseeable outcome). Some sites will transition to paywalls; others will die.
Premier sites -- NYT, wapo, gawker family, etc -- will be able to do direct deals with advertisers. That takes both a dedicated salesforce, a draw, and frequent users. Mid-market sites like this will almost certainly not be able to do so.
See also Josh at Talking Points Memo's writing about transitioning to a mostly subscriber-supported model.
You sure? If it’s a supply and demand market, in increase in eyeballs can crash CPMs as the competition to get your ad to display craters.
Kinda like how a small decrease in traffic (say 10%) can turn a highway from gridlock to free flowing.
iow, you will probably get more views, but dollars will probably follow the economy.
Many online publishers will turn to paycuts and layoffs or even go out of business in the next few weeks
1. A patron's income is more directly affected, so he suddenly withdrew support.
2. Maybe they were teetering at the edge of financial viability and the onrushing recession will kneecap them in some way (maybe no one wants to advertise anymore, or something).
This wasn't a sudden change, it was the result of media companies putting their faith in social networks to distribute their content instead of trying to organically build their own audiences through say, email.
Social networks de-emphasized "news" links in their feed algorithms over the past few years, so that impacted the number of impressions those posts would receive. And beyond that, users weren't interested in clicking a link and then having to come back to FB to comment on the article.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/24/21192311/coronavirus-pa...
> Their main concern is that the Treasury Department has said it expects lenders to verify borrower eligibility, and take steps to prevent fraud, money laundering and protect customer information under the Bank Secrecy Act, sources said. Banks are worried they could face regulatory penalties or legal costs down the line if things go awry in the haste to get money out the door, or get blamed for not moving funds fast enough if they perform due diligence the way they would in ordinary times, the sources said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-stimul...
Another example of our crisis response failing us.
> Members of the group include JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) Citigroup Inc (C.N), Truist BankBBTVA.UL and PNC Bank PNCBNK.UL.
Yeah, not taking their word for it.
See links below for more information:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/04/02/small-bu...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/jpmorgan-says-its-not-ready-...
I work in-house now and we've been working with a bank to get an SBA loan for our company. We're in the fortunate position of being a good risk so we passed that part of the process, but are currently stuck in limbo, because the SBA failed to provide enough information to banks about how to actually enter a loan into the program once the applicant has passed the standard KYC/risk-assessment process.
So it will help companies with a stronger balance sheets who expect activity to support the staff they want to keep, for a while, who are willing to take the risk believing that the govt will follow through as it says it will.
Contrary to what the talking heads are saying re: the rescue/bailout bills: this is going to hurt like hell with no quick recovery likely.
My plan was to incorporate, take out a loan, and pay payroll with the entirety of it. Unfortunately it looks like the bill requires you to have been in business before February 15th with verifiable employees on payroll.
I'm really miffed, because putting unemployed employees on payroll at a new company isn't any worse than keeping existing employees on payroll at a business that doesn't have customers. In fact, if a new company is more productive and is working on solving problems that arise because of this virus, it seems more productive to solve the new problems than to keep the unviable businesses running.
I'll have to figure something else out...
Additionally, it's LIKELY that the company which was already established had product/market fit, proven tangible value, and paying customers. It's UNLIKELY that your "startup" will/would...especially if you're the type of person who would exploit such situation as you describe above.
The point of CARES is to keep existing revenue-generating businesses open, and their employees paid.
And quite frankly, as a former techie it's kind of disgusting that people in the tech community are complaining that their employee-free, revenue-free, 1-day-old startup doesn't qualify for a program intended to keep existing, otherwise viable businesses (absent COVID19) running and their employees paid. This is not the time for the tech community to launch yet another regulatory arbitrage startup that exploits everyone else.
I want to hire people. I'm probably still going to do this, but dip into my savings to do so.
There are huge differences. The obvious, but unstated, difference is the existing network of businesses that already work together.
Efforts to keep existing companies intact make sense. Efforts to encourage support creating new ones do too - but they aren't the same effort as they aren't the same effect (notwithstanding OP's contention that they are).