FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

On Monday the LinkedIn announced a new Follow Company button that lets individuals follow a brand or company page. The feature is essentially an expansion of functionality that was already in place, but from within the network itself. Now companies can allow individuals to follow them from outside the LinkedIn ecosystem by clicking on a button embedded in their websites.

According to the blog post by LinkedIn product manager Mike Grishaver announcing the new feature, AT&T, Starbucks, Sony and American Express, among others, are already u More...

Barnes & Noble today announced a new $199, 8GB Nook tablet. The pricing and configuration put it right in line with Amazon's Kindle Fire.

Meanwhile, the company has dropped its Nook Color pricing as well, from $199 to $169. The move clearly targets the Kindle Fire, but it's also an attempt to open the throttle on device and content sales even further. Both were up significantly, according to third-quarter financials.

Where B&N's new Nook More...

The year, as it always does, has flown by and we're already in the midst of compiling our annual list of the top innovators in the magazine business and the markets that intersect and influence it—the Folio: 40.

We're excited to announce that starting now, you can have a hand in how the list turns out by nominating a colleague—either at your company or from another one—that has had a meaningful impact on a product, company or even market.

We're looking for nominations in the following categories:

C-Level Visionaries
Top execs that transform culture, company or markets

Industry Influencers More...

The sale of Ziff Davis Enterprise to online marketing company QuinStreet Friday raises some interesting and, on the surface, worrisome thoughts on the role brands and content play in connecting buyers and sellers.

I should mention that we don't yet really know how QuinStreet is planning to incorporate ZDE's brands into its operation. The company declined to offer any details in that regard. What we do know is ZDE employees are in the dark as well, with the bulk of them helping transition the brands before their positions are phased out. As many as 100 of More...

More than a few magazine and media executives spent the holidays putting the finishing touches on deal closures. We're only 3 weeks into January and there's been a flurry of M&A action—from decently big deals to small.

Here's a recap:

Today of course Meredith announced it's buying Allrecipes.com from Reader's Digest Association, advancing a deep dive strategy into the food vertical as fast as RDA is pulling away from it, having also bought Everyday With Rachael Ray from them. The deal closely followed Meredith's More...

The MPA released full-year 2011 PIB numbers today and, as individual consumer publishers already know by now, the third and fourth quarters were not very kind.

There were some exceptions among specific titles of course, which I'll get to in a bit, but in 2011 overall advertising revenues were flat and pages fell about 3 percent compared to 2010.

In the first quarter of 2011, pages jumped 2.5 percent and revenue was up 6 percent compared to same period 2010. In Q2, in hindsight, you can see the slide beginning. Pages were flat at a .3 percent gain over same period 2010 and revenue was up only 2.4 percent.
More...

As far as inflection points go, this is a good one. In a Reuters story, the Financial Times Group says it's expecting content revenues (subscription and single copy sales) to at least equal, and possibly overtake, print advertising revenue for the first time this year.

During the London portion of the Reuters Global Media Summit, FT CEO John Ridding acknowledged the rough advertising climate, which has put extra pressure on digital to perform. The FT's online operation, says the report, now accounts for 30 percent of its revenues.

In the first half of this year, the group More...

HP and Condé Nast are partnering in an on-demand, digital-to-print pilot program that will allow readers to, via a desktop printer widget, download selected content and print it from home.

At this point, says a Condé Nast spokesperson, the publisher is determining the kinds of content that would be appropriate for this delivery mechanism. Recipes from Epicurious, for example, might make sense, but the publisher is still trying to figure out how content from, say, Glamour might work in this setting.

In announcing the program, HP says Allure, Details, Epicurious, Glamour, Golf Digest, Self and Wired will participate in the pilot.

HP is trying to More...

Much has been said about the publishing life cycle of news content online and in print. At Forbes, where we're kept apprised of the brand's new print and digital developments by chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin's blog posts, we can see how important analytics and audience development have become in content creation.

Dvorkin argues that the top-down "caste system" of traditional newsrooms has been outmoded by the way content is consumed and shared digitally. "The self-imposed newsroom caste system has run its course," he says More...

Maybe it's a true vote of confidence for magazine apps, despite recent reports of their sales drop-offs. There are now more than a few digital newsstands in production or existence, but are we watching a market being made or fractured beyond recognition?

That might be an irrelevant question. Like their physical world counterparts, publishers could simply populate specific newsstands with apps until sales performance dictates resource allocation. Or, since we're talking digital content here and presumably cheap and easy distribution, the outlet might not matter so much as making sure all bases are covered.

In the meantime, Apple More...

Time Inc. recently teamed up with UM, a marketing agency, and EmSense, a firm that studies quantitative neurometrics while people shop and look at advertisements, to strap electrodes to iPad owners. Literally.

The three companies just completed a study to determine how iPad users are interacting with advertisements in magazine apps-in this case, Time Inc. ones.

EmSense brought the science, measuring neuromatic responses of 180 iPad owners through a combination of EEG readings, eye tracking, surveys and one-on-one interviews.

Key findings have revealed that user int More...

We've all heard by now the merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek—tricked you, didn't they?—into The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, which everyone's already ignoring for the more fun variations of 'NewsBeast' and 'BeastWeek', etc. (How many games of rock-paper-scissors it took during that "coffee-mug toast" to determine the brand name order we'll never know.)

Speculation is now focusing on how the JV is going to More...