Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Opens Advertising, Goldman Eyes Groupon’s Korean Site
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Pinterest Will Open Promoted Pins to All Advertisers Following Success of Beta Program (TechCrunch)
The company announced today that its Promoted Pins program, which it made available in beta to certain brands eight months ago, has performed “just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” and it will make the program available to all advertisers on January 1.
Grading Street Fight’s 2014 Predictions (Street Fight)
At the end of each year, Street Fight invites staffers, friends, and luminaries from the industry to share their predictions for what’s in store for the coming year. Today, we take a look back at some of the predictions for 2014 to see who nailed it and who missed the boat.
Goldman Wants In On Groupon’s Ticketmonster Deal (Crain’s Chicago Business)
Groupon could get help from some familiar faces as it looks to offload a stake in TicketMonster, the Korean daily-deals company that it bought in late 2013. According to a new report, Goldman Sachs is considering a deal for some or all of TicketMonster.
Will 2015 Be a Breakthrough Year for Community News? (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: We saw some promising signs of local news sites getting their mojo in 2014. But is it a lasting, growing trend? To get a peek over the horizon, we went to top experts in community news — publishers, editors and others who are involved in producing, analyzing and critiquing it.
In Advertising, It’s About Who Gets Credit for the Sale (New York Times)
Advertisers don’t want to waste money on ads that fall flat, and popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo want to prove that ads on their sites actually do lead to sales. So an entire sub-industry has emerged in the ad world to study consumer purchases and figure out which ads should get credit, or attribution, for the sales.
It Was a Merry Mobile Christmas (Recode)
Smartphones and tablets accounted for more than a third of online sales on Christmas Day and 57 percent of all online traffic. While more people browsed on smartphones, more purchases were actually made on tablets, which accounted for 18.4 percent of online sales versus 16.3 percent for phones, IBM said.
2015: The “College Experimentation” Year Of Mobile Payments (GigaOm)
Ralph Dangelmaier: 2015 is about experimentation because tech companies are trying to displace the old card swipe system that facilitates a huge chunk of commerce in the U.S. These experiments will have ripple effects that change the underlying mechanics, rules and alliances of the payments industry. Here’s what you can look forward to in 2015.
The Rental — Not “Sharing” — Economy Exploded in 2014 (ReadWrite)
Ritika Trikha: The year 2014 ushered in a new wave of what is often wrongly thought of as the “sharing economy.” It’s more accurately termed the Rental Economy — a collection of changes that have empowered anyone to loan out goods and labor at the touch of a screen.
Web Store Unloads Old Items Offline (Wall Street Journal)
For Europe’s largest online retailer, Zalando, the end of the holiday shopping rush opens a new sales window in the real world. In addition to hawking fashion virtually, the six-year-old German Internet company also operates two large outlet warehouses where it unloads slow-selling items at discounts of as much as 70% off. (Subscription required)
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