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Medium plans to start letting more and more authors publish paywalled articles. And to determine how they get paid, the blogging platform has selected a fairly unorthodox method: claps, which are, basically, Medium’s equivalent of a Like.

A couple weeks ago, Medium replaced its “recommend” feature — a little heart button at the end of each article — with a “clap” button that you can click as many times as you want (much like how Periscope lets you send broadcasters an infinite number of hearts). The site wants people to send authors claps to show how much they enjoy reading each article.

Medium pays authors by dividing up every individual subscriber’s fee between the different articles they’ve read that month. But rather than doing an even division between articles, Medium will weight payments toward whichever articles a subscriber gives the most claps to.

Americans spent four hours and 43 minutes a day (!) watching live TV and shows on their DVRs in the third quarter of this year. That’s down from four hours and 46 minutes in Q3 2012.

Comcast, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, said 70 percent of its subscribers watch stuff on demand, and that TV shows account for 40 percent of its usage. (If you factor in pay-TV channels like HBO, the number jumps up to 60 percent.) So once you do factor in on-demand usage, you see a different story. Nielsen said that there has been a small increase in the number of people watching live TV, and a significant increase in the number of “timeshifted” TV watchers — people watching on either DVRs or VOD.

while Comcast, Nielsen and some of the TV networks are trying to figure out how to change this, right now timeshifted TV is much less valuable for them than live TV. (Hence the warm reception for Twitter’s “we’ll bring our viewers to live TV” pitch.)

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

The primary reason we’ve seen our best open rate climb ever upwards has been an ever-increasing focus on list hygiene.

It’s natural that curiosity-based subject lines would become more powerful as the inbox gets more crowded.

Scarcity, on the other hand, is a powerful tool but is best used conservatively as its impact diminishes the more it’s put into play. And while scarcity is a great driver of sales, it is often less effective at driving your overall open rate up.

Personalization is shown to increase open rates for most users, and may work well when combined with targeted automations such as birthday deals and post-purchase follow-ups.

try to communicate the benefits of your promotions, or call attention to specific deals.

Subject line researcher shows you the effectiveness of different keywords. Search for a word or phrase, and we'll compare your terms to all subject lines ever sent through MailChimp. Then we'll list related terms and phrases, and use a 5-star rating system to show you how each one performed.

David: AMP has become a major component of Google’s push to become the presentation layer of the internet (h/t Cindy Krum, Mobile Moxie) and complements the moves they’ve made with featured snippets and Knowledge Panels.

I’ve always seen Knowledge Panels partly as a consumer-focused solution to the experience of the average SMB website and average enterprise store locator — both are overwhelmingly crappy.  

in accepting either AMP or Instant Articles, publishers relinquish their most critical asset, subscribers, to the duopoly.