Smart Car Flop, YouTube Video Ads, Paywall Criticism

The Content Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today:

Smart Car’s Crowdsourcing Flop on Facebook

Here’s yet another example of crowdsourcing gone awry: Smart USA, which makes smart cars, asked its Facebook fans to create a story about a car using comments. Some fans didn’t read the above comments, and others didn’t see the previous comments because of the delay on the site.

YouTube’s Mobile Video Ads

Mobile users viewing YouTube videos will now start to see ads popping up on the content, according to AdAge. However, just like on YouTube, 65 percent of these ads will be skippable.

For now, the ads only show up on Android devices, but Google is planning to put them on iPhones as well.

Metered Paywalls and the Merit of Journalism

Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram wrote a piece against the notion that metered paywalls are going to bring back genuine investigative journalism.

He argues that while the paywalls might help papers, they won’t bring papers back to where they used to be. In addition, the claim that only people who pay for papers will want to see “real journalism” is assuming and inaccurate.

Storyful Crowdsources News Verification

And here’s another gem from Mathew Ingram of Gigaom: Storyful, a company that was founded in 2010 and relied upon media companies to verify social media news, is now crowdsourcing this verification process.

He point to NBC, which did a similar project with Breaking News, and NPR’s Andy Carvin, who was using his Twitter account to send out news about Libya and Egypt. With more and more people willing to collaborate and jump in to get the correct information, Ingram says that the news consumers will only benefit.

Why Magazines Should Follow in Content Marketers’ Footsteps

Some people believe that content marketing is killing traditional publishing. Lyndsey of NewsCred tries to prove that magazines should actually look to content marketers for pointers and act more like them in order to save their businesses.

She says that one area that magazines fail in is that the editorial and marketing/sales sides don’t collaborate enough.

“Publishers need to focus on their business model,” she writes. “High quality journalism is fundamental but building a sustainable and profitable company is critical too. In an age where brands are competing with and besting publishers, the content and business can’t exist separately anymore.

Media Companies Donating to Obama

It looks like the media corporations are hoping for an Obama-run White House for the next four years. According to The New York Times, the top media entities, including Time Warner, News Corporation, and Comcast Corporation, have donated far more money to Obama than they have to Romney.

Surprisingly, the Rupert Murdoch-run News Corp. has given $58,825 to Obama and $2,750 to Romney, which can maybe be attributed to Murdoch’s criticism of the latter. In terms of revenue overall, however, the GOP has $186 million, while the Democrats have $124 million.

Mobile Buyers and Reactions to Ads

Astudy by the Online Publishers Association concluded that smartphone users who purchase content react more positively to ads on their devices than users who don’t.

ClickZ reports that “79 percent of content buyers took an action after seeing a smartphone ad, compared to 39 percent of non-content buyers.”