What do Tom Petty, Gregg Allman, and AOL Instant Messenger all have in common? These are three of the bright lights that went out last year. As we look ahead to the brand new year, we took stock of what happened in 2017 and some of the media and marketing losses that came with it.
Ad-supported Medium
Last January, Medium founder Ev Williams declared that digital medias ad-supported model needed fixing. 50 redundancies a little over half a year later, Williams produced a subscription model that directed fees to whichever press platforms they liked and gave a refund if they weren't happy.
Yahoo News Digest
When you think about incredible design, Yahoo isn't the first thing that pops into your mind. It probably isn't even the tenth. Except for its News Digest app. In total, the award-winning app had around 10 million downloads. It could have been great, except for the fact it aggregated news instead of serving up Yahoo content, so it was shut down by Verizon not long after finalising its acquisition of Yahoo.
Lifestage and Groups
Facebook undeniably saw some blunders in 2017. Lifestage was just one of its mobile product mishaps. Designed to be a Snapchat competitor, Facebook built Lifestage to encourage people to share video, but it was shut down in less than a year.
Facebooks other attempt to turn one of its features 'groups' into its own independent app failed after several bugs stagnated user growth. Lifestage and Groups were shut down within the same week.
Written by Max Willens, 29 December 2017, published on Digiday.com. Read the full article here.
