Lewis DVorkin

AI-generated dreck posing as local news, aka pink slime journalism, is proliferating. The cost of making it is practically zero. The incentives for bad actors to create it range from money -- by delivering programmatic advertising and affiliate links to unwitting readers -- to political manipulation via misinformation and disinformation. And the platforms that distribute it don't care. John Biggs at The Media Copilot recently lamented this situation. "AI isn’t just stealing our jobs," he wrote. "It’s also going to steal the truth." It doesn't have to, though. Here are two things you can do to protect the truth: 1. Give your attention to real publications. Taproot Edmonton employs actual people who you can meet in real life. We live here and we care about this place. And we put our names on what we publish. You'll never be fooled by pink slime if you intentionally read and listen to work made by humans you know instead of just consuming the news-eque junk an algorithm may serve you. 2. Help real publications pay for those people. A $20/month subscription to ChatGPT can generate an awful lot of words; a full-time employee doing the work of finding stuff out and telling you about it costs considerably more. We don't put a paywall around Taproot's work because we don't want to live in a world where only those who pay get real journalism and the rest get pink slime. That means we have to fund ourselves by other means. If you have a business, you can now buy a business membership to Taproot. That lets you easily sign up all of your employees to receive Taproot's work, which in itself will help your organization better understand the community it serves. But you'll also be helping us continue to inform and connect the people who live in this place that we love. You can sign up for a business membership here: https://lnkd.in/gRWAm_Ay. And you can learn more about what this is and why we're offering it here: https://lnkd.in/gNc3yvAW If a business membership isn't right for you, you can become an individual member for $100 per year or $10 per month here: https://lnkd.in/g6yRVG77 As Mack Male said at Taproot Publishing Inc.'s event during Upper Bound with Katrina Ingram, AI helps our responsible local news outlet scale our ability to pay attention to our community. We're excited about the technology's potential to help us do the work. But humans report and write what you read. "While human-led AI is a boon, non-human-led AI is an existential threat," Biggs writes (https://lnkd.in/gDj55fEm). "We all need to be ready to fight it." I'm inviting you to join us in the fight. #yegmedia #edmonton #yeg #edmontonmedia #futureofmedia

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ROI is making it RAIN!!! (aka incremental revenue) No Seattle jokes please;) We are working with large scale publishers in News, Sports, Entertainment, Health, Travel, and Autos verticals. High volume, high frequency. STOP READIG NOW if you are not interested or incentivized by incremental revenue. Now that we have dropped nonrevenue incented/operation types, let's talk about increasing revenue. If you are selling 100% of your supply you are in a rare, probably non-optimized group. Most publisher do not and should not fill more than 75% of supply directly. Using the bottom 25% to leverage floors higher, increasing bids/ecpm. ROI allows publishers the opportunity to efficiently monetize 100% of their supply. Accomplishing this by selling unfilled outside of the direct adstack in a secondary auction or post-bid strategy. We will deliver real time market data on supply value, allowing publishers to understand supply value and flooring. Selling and optimizing your unsold is a simple and import part of a balanced programmatic strategy. ROI is the only company that is doing this and has been doing this from the beginning of programmatic. Let's talk, let's drive incremental rev!

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As we’ve begun building Oversubscribed Ventures, we’ve learned that the world of venture capital is way too mysterious and insular. We wanted to crack it wide open and make it accessible to everyone. So, we launched a new podcast, with Phil Schwarz. Some of you may already listen to our World’s First Podcast (and if you do, thank you!). The Oversubscribed Podcast takes a lot of what makes World’s First Podcast great and focuses on the business world. This is a business podcast for anyone and everyone who is curious about stories of success, failure, recovering from rejection, pivoting, and more. Why launch a new podcast? - The lessons that come out of talking to founders, executives, etc can apply to everyone, whether they’re starting a company or not; - We could add something to the (way too few but super impressive) female voices in the startup and venture world; and - We could inject our own personality and - admittedly - often inappropriate humor into the conversations (iykyk). We hope our Oversubscribed Podcast does all of this and more. Link below, and of course you can find it anywhere you can listen to podcasts. More to come! Link: https://lnkd.in/e2E6kynn

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There's a lot of wisdom in Tim Lynn's recent interview on The Hard Part with Evan McCann, but one bit (https://lnkd.in/g-r2nZ5H) particularly resonated with me as he explained what Startup TNT is doing: "It's sort of this cycle back into building the community, which then builds the companies, which then pay taxes, which then feeds the communities. That cycle is really where it becomes useful," he said. "It's not just a simple customer relationship. It's an entire ecosystem play. So that's tricky." This feels similar to what we're doing at Taproot Publishing Inc. When you buy a membership or an ad, or when you sponsor a roundup or the new Taproot Edmonton Calendar, you get something in return, but you're also contributing to a more informed and connected Edmonton region. It's an entire ecosystem play, as Tim puts it. The Taproot Edmonton team's work helps the whole community work better. Paying attention instead of just extracting it is not the easiest path. But we're not interested in easy. We're interested in being useful. Many thanks to those who already support that work. If you don't yet but want to, I'll put a couple of links in the comments. Also, the finale of Investment Summit IX is on June 13 if you want to see Startup TNT's ecosystem-building in action. Here's our preview:

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💡𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝘀 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 🤖️ As this great deck by Pip Bingemann explains: - 𝗜𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗰𝘆 = 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆: the fact that we have immediate data on what we do becomes a self-fulling prophecy as everyone does more of the same thing (what the data says is trending) - 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝘃𝘀. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀: we end up with mediocre thinking based on dashboard reporting and no Vision of what should be. 👉 Solution: use data to inform your Vision (not the other way around)

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At The Trust Project, we talk a lot about the "anxious middle" our research has found and the news avoidance that may result. ICYMI, Benjamin Toff's book dives into this subject and provides some interesting insights. He places the number of news avoiders at 8% of the U.S. population. I'd call that the hard-core. There are many more who loosely avoid the news, take time off from news or rely on their friends instead of a regular news source because of anxiety and distrust. To win them back and fulfill its core role in democracy, journalism must "redouble efforts to engage with the broader world," Toff urges. Agreed. See Politico's interview with Toff here: https://lnkd.in/gRAtrTpM

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I hopped on with Adam LaGreca at 10KMedia to go deep on incident response. We covered a variety of topics: 🛳️ Why pragmatism is important 📊 The fact that leadership want fewer, severe incidents, and don't view them as 'opportunities' ✨ How we're thinking about AI in incident response 🔮 Where we're headed in the future 🎧 Listen more in the link below!

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There are handful of folks in our ecosystem that consistently speak the truth and say what needs to be said. My friend, Dave Morgan, is one of them. In his most recent MediaPost editorial, Dave describes the epidemic of "strategic partner deals" (or a more a more cleverly-named version, "SPO deals") that are all secret code words for non-transparent volume-based rebates. There's nothing inherently wrong when commercial entities choose to trade margin for volume, but with extremely rare exception, these arrangements are anything but. -- Would anyone be surprised to hear that it's the norm for tech platforms to take margin not from their own pockets, but from the pockets of their publisher-side clients? -- Is anyone questioning that agencies generally pocket the rebates rather than passing them to their clients? TRUSTX is periodically asked to engage with an agency in a volume-based "SPO deal." Notwithstanding that we've not yet been able to determine what actual "optimization" of the supply-path is involved, we have no issue agreeing to reduce our own SSP margin once a buyer hits certain spend volume minimums. If we were to agree to such a volume-based rebate, our company policy is to send checks with transparent transactional reporting to the agency and brand directly. Sending a separate volume-based rebate payment ensures every party can validate that TRUSTX is paying from our own margin and not taking a penny from our publishers. Curiously, no agency has ever taken us up on this offer.

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It certainly does feel like everyone is waiting to see what happens next before making decisions. I mean that both personally and professionally and business-wise. I think the two main things they're looking at are politics (US election, the ongoing wars/conflicts, etc) and technology (AI's rapid development makes long-term bets really hard to justify, and short term bets feel potentially foolish). My approach to both is to just, not ask for permission or waiting for other people to act. Defaulting to action, and moving on from there. Am I missing any other shoe to drop/thing people are waiting on?

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What does it take for a startup to succeed in music-tech? More than Product-Market fit -- you also need Industry Market fit and Investor Market fit. I wrote about these patterns https://lnkd.in/gF4wBSfX

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This is a great article from Kevin Tian, founder of Doppel talking about how the company transitioned from detecting crypto scams to tackling digital threats like deepfakes and impersonations. Doppel uses AI to identify and remove harmful content, aiding in the protection of campaigns and organizations. With today’s environment and rapid growth of AI and deepfakes, Doppel is critical to help maintain election integrity. Tian highlights their effective partnerships with platforms to enforce content takedowns and their high success rate in removing policy-violating material. #cybersecurity #stayvigilant #AIrisk #deepfake #hireVets

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Right now, the bestseller "Substack Mastery" is being published, chapter by chapter, on this site. At no cost. I love writing on Substack; it's a great environment, the readers aren't trolls or frauds, and I can be confident of genuine engagement with my posts. What are you waiting for? Go, check it out. Learn how to use Substack for profit and fun. For free!

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Good episode of 'Search Off The Record' covering a confusing topic for site owners and SEOs -- hreflang and internationalization. Includes... LDCP - 'Language demotion, country promotion', the lang attribute in html (and if Google cares about it), when and how to use x-default, the 'hreflang magic trick' (which I have written about several times), how only canonicals are reported in GSC (and why that can be frustrating for site owners/SEOs), why hreflang can work faster when provided via html (versus sitemaps), learn if hreflang used for discovery, and more. #google #seo

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The best white board pitch I ever saw was by a senior YouTube exec ~2010. They drew a standard long-tail graph, and then put a vertical line through the left-side of the tail. "Today, 20% of TV viewership is on the big 4 Networks, the other 80% is cable. We're going to see an explosion of niche content - gaming, vlogging, painting, skiing - literally anything. Plus, as pressure grows on the cable bundle, we'll see everything remotely niche that's already on TV move to the internet." They then drew a second vertical line through the 'cable' section of the tail. "YouTube's goal is to be the 80% of the 80%, because in a $150B global TV ad market, that's a $100B business for us." That was it. One drawing and 30 seconds of voice-over to map out a multi-decade, $100B strategy. So crisp. And as YT now nears $40B in revenue, clearly quite prophetic.

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The Rebooting has partnered with WordPress VIP to conduct research into the state of product at publishers during an u certain and challenging time. We are looking to find out how pricier leaders rate their organizations and where they are placing their bets as the landscape keeps shifting. https://lnkd.in/es_Pdfbp

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