Social:

• Twitter ate Bluefin Labs, a firm selling TV-related analyses of social media statistics. Business Insider appears to have broken the story, and also scored a Twitter Powerpoint document justifying the purchase.

Publishing:

• Big brand Kimberly-Clark stuck a toe in the programmatic display advertising waters and found them inviting. "2012 was proof positive of the benefits in both driving efficiency and quality. We had very specific qualitative and quantitative goals. It’s blown through all of them." Gulp.
• IDG and Gannett are both taking the fewer-ads-means-better-exposure line of thinking, redesigning their sites around fewer, more special placements. Pressures pushing them include, according to the article: commoditized standard banner format media competition. Additional pressures include the desire to be perceived as participating in the fad of "native" ads; fewer premium ad sales relieving pressure to gum up the sites with additional inventory; and, notably, pressure from Google to reduce ad square inches to be better placed in organic search results.
• Digiday's Brian Morrissey complains about lazy news aggregators linking to his site's content, creating more impressions on their own sites versus the additional link traffic that subsequently rains down on his. (Everyone, please link to Brian's site lest he get miffed at us too.) His cri de coeur is backed up by some nice stats and a pretty chart. Not noted in his piece, though, is the development of major portals employing aggregation specialists to round up blog and trade rag posts. Seeking Alpha, for instance, dominates Yahoo's business news feeds, but having your content included in the feed requires them branding the content as theirs, with polite and seldom-clicked attribution links. When a small trade magazines break big stories, it is typically quickly coopted by big media, and the investment return is as quickly negated, additionally pressuring publishers to keep editorial staffs lean.