@Publish

Unwelcome news for marketers in France who aim to appeal to people on social networks: A majority of those consumers find such ads unpleasant, useless and poorly targeted.

Sixty-eight percent of web users polled said they found advertising on social sites “intolerable, “ and 59% said it was pointless because it did not reflect their interests or buying habits.

Moreover, ads on these sites seemed to be less effective than most other kinds of online advertising. Only 19% of web users polled by IFOP and Generix said they had ever bought a product or service as a result of seeing an ad on social media, compared to 60% who had made a purchase prompted by an email.

Here’s the problem with interactivity: There’s no evidence people actually want it in their stories. No one watches Mad Men or reads Gone Girl yearning for control of the story as it unfolds. Interaction is precisely what most of us don’t want during story time. The more we interact with a story, the more we have to maintain the alertness of the mind operating in the real world. We can’t achieve the dreamy trance that constitutes so much of the joy of story--and the power. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Finnegan’s Wake, for all its splendor as a kind of impressionistic word painting, repels readers because of its interactivity. Most critics think that Joyce was trying to get away from what he called “wideawake language” to re-create the chaos of dreaming life. Paradoxically, however, the sheer difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake forces readers to maintain a “wideawake” frame of mind as they attempt to puzzle their way through. They can’t slip into the waking dream of story time.

Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all.

When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now--and never will be--anything new under the sun.

Facebook reported $1.8 billion in advertising revenue, with mobile ads accounting for 49% of that sum—and roughly 44% of all revenue. At this time last year, the company generated only 14% of its advertising revenue from mobile.

Facebook now boasts 874 million mobile monthly active users, an increase of 45% year-over-year. And it remains the world's largest social network, with over 1.19 billion people using the service each month.

with the top 20 publishers seeing a staggering increase in social interactions (likes, comments, shares) of 288 percent between September 2012 and September 2013.

on average, referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170 percent throughout the past year.

Gawker posted the largest year-to-year growth in Facebook engagement, at 549 percent, followed by BuzzFeed at 495 percent. “Old media” stalwarts The New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corp. delivered strong performances, as well, seeing increases of 160 percent and 122 percent, respectively. The Huffington Post was the strongest performer for the month of September 2013, generating nearly 18.5 million social interactions from 15,839 published articles.

"We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens," Facebook CFO David Ebersman said

Facebook may be feeling the burn of alternative social sites like Tumblr and Snapchat that skew towards a younger demographic. But there is a glimmer of hope, Ebersman said: "We remain close to fully penetrated among teens in the U.S."

While the teen embrace of Facebook might be slackening, its Instagram unit has no trouble attracting a younger audience, with teen users rising five percent this year.

“A brevidade [dos artigos] não importa”, continua. “Quando se diz que o jornalismo online deve ser feito com textos curtos, é com base na ideia de que é desconfortável ler textos longos no computador. Mas já é mais confortável no iPad. E ainda mais no Kindle.”