Our top stories of 2018

Our top stories from the year

Our biggest hits of 2018 included an autopsy of Go90, a deep look inside specialized agencies, and the numerous casualties following Facebook's deprioritization of news. Thanks for reading us this year.
Looking ahead to 2019: We'll be at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. Sign up here to get news and views from the event delivered straight to your inbox, along with exclusive invites to Digiday events.

Digital media’s rough 2018 creates uncertainty for 2019
The tone for 2018 was set early on. At the beginning of January, Facebook used the annual media and tech gathering in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show to break the news to publishers: It was effectively breaking up with news be deprioritizing news in the, yes, News Feed. The move wasn’t a shock — this was one of our forecast items in last year’s Year in Preview issue — but it still landed with a thud, with one publishing executive giving the bleak assessment to Digiday that they were “losing hope.”
LittleThings shuts down, a casualty of Facebook news feed change
Facebook’s recent algorithm change has claimed a casualty. LittleThings, a 4-year-old site that scaled an audience by sharing feel-good stories and videos on Facebook, shut down, putting 100 out of work, after Facebook decided it wanted more user posts and less publisher content in its news feed. The change, announced in January, had a “material” impact on LittleThings, said Gretchen Tibbits, president and COO of the company, and killed 75 percent of the site’s organic reach, the company told Business Insider

Pivoting to nowhere: How Mic ran out of radical makeovers
In 2016, the video team at millennial-focused news site Mic was forced to float a bunch of crazy ideas in meetings. Facebook Live video was just entering the media world’s consciousness, and BuzzFeed’s infamous exploding watermelon video had turned Mic executives green with envy. Suddenly, the publisher’s video team was asked what its live video strategy was. When it didn’t have one, its members found themselves scrambling to come up with ideas for a stunt of its own, eventually landing on a widely ridiculed video where it tried to lift a small toy house out of Central Park using balloons.
‘Never had a chance’: Inside Verizon’s $1 billion bad bet on Go90
As far as launch parties go, Verizon’s September 2015 event for Go90 had it all: a Kanye West concert, a live performance of Funny or Die’s “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis, celebrities ranging from John Legend to Shaun White — and a legitimate sense of optimism that Verizon’s ambitious new mobile video play could be the next big thing in digital entertainment.
‘We wanted people to know we were big’: How Defy Media went from YouTube heavyweight to abrupt shutdown
Life was good for Defy Media in early 2017. The digital media company behind YouTube heavyweights such as Smosh and Clevver had just raised a $70 million Series B round the previous fall. It was scouting snazzy production facilities to move into in Los Angeles, and it had just hired the design firm Collins to redo its logo heading into that spring’s NewFronts.
GDPR mayhem: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe
The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation’s enforcement May 25 has hurled the digital media and advertising industries into a tailspin. Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources. Ad tech vendors scrambled to inform clients that they predict steep drops in demand coming through their platforms from Google. Some U.S. publishers have halted all programmatic ads on their European sites.

Digital agencies struggle with a new market reality
Digital agencies, once fast-growing upstarts stealing business from lumbering incumbents, are at greater risk of slipping in relevance themselves in a fast-changing market — and are now scrambling now to add other services, like strategy, consulting and even media in order to keep growing.

‘The food chain has changed’: Responding to DTC boom, specialized ad agencies are cropping up
When the creative agency Gin Lane brought men’s shaving brand Harry’s to market in 2012, a formula was born. Founders Nick Ling, Gin Lane’s CEO, and Emmett Shine, the creative director, sat down with Harry’s founders Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield to hear their reason for existing. For the then-direct-to-consumer brand, the questions were about what they were trying to solve — and what customers they were targeting.

Confessions of a new mother in an ad agency: ‘It’s all lip service’
Even as agencies try really hard to course-correct when it comes to diversity and inclusion, many have fallen behind when it comes to working with parents. With parental leave a hot topic across other industries, agency staffers frequently bemoan that agencies haven’t seemed to have caught up: The nature of the business itself makes it near impossible to sustain a job with long hours and unpredictable demands.

‘Welcome to #Hustletown’: How hustle culture took over advertising
“It’s this underlying tone at work that hustle is good and struggle is good,” said Olly Rzysko, a consultant who recently quit the industry after 13 years, most recently heading digital at Primark. “I’ve seen people apologize for not posting on LinkedIn often, I’ve seen basically KPIs put against tweets and hustle.”