Saturday's economy & business stories
Sony Entertainment CEO resigns to focus on Snap
As Snapchat's parent company prepares for an IPO this spring, Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is stepping down to focus full-time on his new job as chairman of Snap the company told news outlets on Friday. He will stay on for six months to help his replacement, Sony Corporation CEO Kazuo Hirai, learn the ropes.
Lynton and his wife invested in the ephemeral messaging app in 2013 and he's since been a close mentor to co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel. Lynton quietly became chairman last year.
Despite efforts to turn things around at Sony's entertainment division, Lynton had to deal with a lack of movie hits and a devastating email hack in late 2014.
Between the lines: While Spiegel has managed to lead the company rather successfully despite his young age, it's no surprise Snap is bringing on an experienced media executive like Lynton to help steer the ship—and instill confidence in bankers ahead of its IPO.
Slow your pre-roll: Short videos becoming less popular
Analytics firm Parse.ly finds that user engagement for posts with short video is significantly less than short-form posts, slideshows and long-form posts.
Why?
- Auto-play: Visitors are silencing or pausing videos because of the disruption
- Slow load times: Videos take longer to load, causing viewers to bounce
- Market saturation: Publishers are scrambling to create more pre-roll inventory
Digiday spoke with several publishers who echoed Parse.ly's findings, saying that short-form video views on Facebook have been cut in half, likely due to the fact that video is becoming cheaper to produce.
Smart take: The drive to create scalable video stems from business needs, not reader demand. Publishers can place high premiums on pre-roll ads because they sell out so quickly, particular among larger brands. The New York Times, for example, won't even offer advertisers the ability to geo-target pre-roll because it sells out so quickly at the national level, usually by the end of the summer.
What's next: Publishers will invest in alternative post formats.
AOL dives (back) into live video
It'll have a standalone live video app, and will livestream video on other AOL sites, like The Huffington Post, as well as other live platforms, like Facebook Live, Live Instagram stories and Twitter Live.
Taking on TV: The livestreams will mostly be interviews with A-List celebrities, like Ryan Gosling and John Legend. It will total more than 75 events-per-month and four hours of live programming each day, according to AOL.