New Merchants Selling On Pinterest; The State Of New York Times

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Search And Pintent

New merchants and platforms are selling on the Pinterest site and app – including Bloomingdale’s, Wayfair and Shopify. Pinterest commerce chief Michael Yamartino writes in a blog post that Pinterest users who convert on shoppable pins are often new to the brand or retailer. Read it. Adweek’s Lauren Johnson follows up with Yamartino, who says he sees Pinterest as a discovery service more than a social platform. More.

Gray Lady #HumbleBrag

Dean Basquiat, executive editor at The New York Times, pens a note to readers about the company’s 1 million digital-only subscribers. “We still employ as many reporters as we did 15 years ago – and our ranks now include graphics editors, developers, video journalists and other digital innovators who are making our digital offerings ever richer. … They are not deskbound aggregators, either.” Reality check: The Awl says it’s layoff season in media circles.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

The Ad Age staff looks back at Ad Week and sees an industry that is torn in half by ad blocking and fraud, with technology as the solution on one side, and creativity and transparency on the other. Considering the surfeit of “solutions” that are hitting the market – disable content for ad-block users, shift to native, cut back on tech vendors, refocus on creative, etc. – it’s clear the next few years will be marked more by trial and error than clean-cut best practices. Read it.

And Yet…

While many view native advertising as a solution to ad blocking, it’s not immune to ad-block software. The Journal’s Mike Shields distinguishes between sites like BuzzFeed and Forbes, which produce sponsored content for their own channels, and tech vendors that automate across scores or hundreds of feed-style sites. For the native programmatic networks, there are still snippets of code that blockers can identify. Shields takes a cross-section of leaders in the emerging space and asks what their publishing partners are most concerned about. Read on.

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