Technology

Writers Laura Wagner, Kelsey McKinney, Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford, Albert Burneko and Chris Thompson all tweeted today that they have resigned from Deadspin, the sports-focused site owned by G/O Media.

A quick refresher: G/O Media was formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, and before that as Gawker Media. It took on its current name and current leadership earlier this year when Univision sold the unit to private equity firm Great Hill Partners, who appointed former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller as its new chief executive.

Since then, the relationship between G/O Media leadership and the editorial staff has been rocky, as you would have learned by reading Deadspin itself, particularly an in-depth story by Wagner in August about how employees were unhappy with &a lack of communication regarding company goals, seeming disregard for promoting diversity within the top ranks of the company, and by repeated and egregious interference with editorial procedures.&

A few weeks later, Deadspineditor in chief Megan Greenwell resigned, saying that G/O Medianew editorial director Paul Maidment was directing the staff to stick to sports coverage — a decision that she argued wasn&t dictated by traffic, since &posts on The Concourse, Deadspinvertical dedicated to politics and culture and other topics that are not sports, outperform posts on the main site by slightly more than two to one.&

Apparently Maidment repeated that edict in a memo earlier this week, which was leaked to The Daily Beast, and in which he said, &Deadspin will write only about sports and that which is relevant to sports in some way.&

The Deadspin homepage was subsequently filled with non-sports content, and editor Barry Petchesky tweeted that he had been &fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports.&

At the same time, Deadspin also posted a story criticizing auto-playing ads on the site, declaring, &We, the writers, editors, and video producers of Deadspin, are as upset with the current state of our siteuser experience as you are.& The post is no longer live, but the criticism reportedly prompted advertiser Farmers Insurance to pull the campaign.

This all appears to have prompted a mass exodus from Deadspin today. The Gizmodo Media Group union also issued this statement:

Today, a number of our colleagues at Deadspin resigned from their positions. From the outset, CEO Jim Spanfeller has worked to undermine a successful site by curtailing its most well-read coverage because it makes him personally uncomfortable. This is not what journalism looks like and it is not what editorial independence looks like.

&Stick to sports& is and always has been a thinly veiled euphemism for &don&t speak truth to power.& In addition to being bad business, Spanfelleractions are morally reprehensible. The GMG Union stands with our current and former Deadspin colleagues and condemns Jim Spanfeller in the strongest possible terms.

We&ve reached out to G/O Media for comment and will update if we hear back.

We&ve aggregated the worldbest growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you&re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can&t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VPof growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curvemarketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

What are some new, advanced SEO strategies?

Our community ran an SEO masterclass in which we discussed Googlealgorithm updates and shared advanced practices for writing blog content in a data-driven manner.

Tactics for turning blog visitors into leads

Based on insights from Nat Eliason from Growth Machine.

SEO traffic can sometimes be a vanity metric if you&re not converting it into lead flow. Here are three ways to convert blog visitors into leads:

1. Prompt blog readers with quizzes to help them identify the product/plan thatbest suited for them. Then require their email address to see results. Follow up with drip emails.
2. Create &BuyerGuides& — downloadable PDFs with nice visuals that help readers figure out how to accomplish their goals (e.g. &paleo cooking starter kit.&) Again, require an email for them to download the complete guide.
3. Pixel your blog visitors and retarget them with Facebook ads. Have the ads send visitors to landing pages that match whichever blog content category initially drew them to the site.

How to (re-)target business customers with Facebook ads

Based on insights from Nima Gardideh of Pearmill and Julian Shapiro of Demand Curve.

Most people use their personal email address on their Facebook/Instagram account. So if you&re collecting business emails during your user onboarding process, Facebook can have a hard time matching those emails to the corresponding Facebook profiles when creating custom targeting lists.

Here are a few tricks around this:

Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced abruptly — though the timing was certainly not accidental — that the platform would soon disallow any and all political advertising. This is the right thing to do, but italso going to be hard as hell for a lot of reasons. As usual in tech and politics, no good deed goes unpunished.

Malicious actors, state-sponsored and otherwise, have and will continue to attempt to influence the outcome of U.S. elections via online means, including political ads and astroturfing. Banning such ads outright is an obvious, if rather heavy-handed, solution — but given that online platforms seem to have made little progress on more targeted measures, itthe only one realistically available to deploy now.

&Not allowing for paid disinformation is one of the most basic, ethical decisions a company can make,& wrote Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a tweet following the news. &If a company cannot or does not wish to run basic fact-checking on paid political advertising, then they should not run paid political ads at all.&

One of the reasons Facebook has avoided restricting political ads and content is that by doing so it establishes itself as the de facto arbiter between &appropriate& and &inappropriate,& and the fractal-complex landscape that creates across thousands of cultures, languages and events. Don&t cry for Mark Zuckerberg, though — this is a monster of his own creation. He should have retired when I suggested it.

But Twitterdecision to use a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel doesn&t remove the inherent difficulties in the process. Twitter is just submitting itself for a different kind of punishment. Because instead of being the arbiter of what is appropriate, it will be the arbiter of what is political.

This is slightly less fraught than Facebooktask, but Twitter will not be able to avoid accusations — perhaps even true ones — of partisanship and bias.

For instance, the fundamental decision to disallow political advertising seems pretty straightforward and nonpartisan. Incumbents rely on traditional media more and progressives tend to be younger and more social media-savvy. So is this taking away a tool suited to left-leaning challengers? But incumbents tend to have bigger budgets and their spend on social media has been increasing, so could this be considered a way to curb that trend? Who this affects and how is not a clear-cut fact but something campaigns and pundits will squabble about endlessly.

(Update: The Trump re-election campaign has already called it &yet another attempt to silence conservatives.&)

Or consider the announcement Dorsey made right off the bat that &ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed.& Voter registration is a good nonpartisan goal, right? In fact itsomething many conservative lawmakers have consistently opposed, because unregistered voters, for a multitude of reasons, skew toward the liberal side. So this too will be considered a partisan act.

Having unofficially provided some guidance, Twitter will put out official guidelines in a few weeks, but ithard to see how they can be satisfactory. Will industry groups be able to promote tweets about how their new factory is thriving because of a government grant? Will an advocacy organization be able to promote a tweet about a serious situation on the border? Will news outlets be able to promote a story about the election? What about a profile of a single candidate? What about an op-ed on an issue?

The difference between patrolling the interior of the politics world, and patrolling its borders, so to speak, may appear significant — but itreally just a different kind of trouble. Twitter is entering a world of pain.

But at least itmoving forward. Itthe right decision, even if ita hard one and could hit the bottom line pretty hard (not that Twitter has ever cared about that). The decision to do this while Facebook is dismantling its credibility with a series of craven, self-interested actions is a canny one. Even if Twitter fails to get this right, it can at least say ittrying.

And lastly, it should be said that it also happens to be a good choice for users and voters, a rare exception to the parade of user-hostile decisions coming out of the big tech and media companies. Going into an election year, we can use all the good news we can get.