We hear about audiences from stakeholders. We learn about audiences from analytics, demographics, and surveys. But hearing their feelings, hopes for your product, and motivations is an invaluable tool in shaping content, calls to action, and platform strategies. By exploring audiences in-depth, you can better, and more accurately, define segments.
One strategy — refreshing ad slots after a set amount of time — successfully leveraged existing web traffic to increase ad impressions. This revenue-boosting strategy typically requires an ad-savvy web engineer for implementation.
Ad Refresh Control for WordPress
In keeping with the vision of our GNI partnership — providing widely applicable solutions that are relatively easy to implement — 10up created Ad Refresh Control, a free, open source, WordPress plugin that empowers publishers to easily control the refreshing of ads.
Ad Refresh Control works immediately upon activation, enabling active view refresh for Google Ad Manager ad units without needing to modify any code. Active view refresh helps publishers recoup lost impressions by reloading a visible ad unit after a set amount of time.
Distributor is our free WordPress plugin that empowers content managers to safely reuse and syndicate content across websites within a WordPress multisite network or across the web using the REST API. Designed with an intuitive user experience, Distributor integrates both “push” and “pull” use cases for sharing content and media between sites.
The release of Distributor 1.6 — with a new setup wizard, improved push/pull management, clearer warnings to facilitate swift troubleshooting when issues arise, and Site Health Info integration, as well as added developer hooks — exemplifies our continued investment in making the plugin easier to use and empowering developers to tailor it to fit even the most complicated workflows.
Earlier this year, the feature length make|SHIFT documentary explored the history of modern advertising and the role open-source technology played in its evolution. The film highlights the brands, makers, and agencies — including 10up — who harness new technology, test new business models, and question the status quo in an age that gives consumers the power to determine how, when, and where they connect with brands.
A new make|SHIFT short film, clocking in at just under four minutes, highlights the critical role open source plays in creating the complex experiences consumers demand and features insights from myself, 10up’s President and founder Jake Goldman, and our CEO John Eckman.
Aiming to increase the number of women involved in leading and regularly contributing to WordPress releases, earlier this year WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden shared an official stretch goal of an all-women release squad. A May update on the 2020 release squads confirmed the realization of that goal for the WordPress 5.6 release.
With WordPress 5.5 released, the WordPress 5.6 planning announcement officially introduced the women leading the release, including 10up’s own Director of Open Source Initiatives Helen Hou-Sandì who will serve as Core Tech Lead.
This Thursday I’m participating in the CoRise Summit — a free global startup summit to CoLearn, Collaborate, and CoRise with the community. As a panelist in a session on Building Remote Teams and Company Culture (August 27 at 12:30 PM ET), I’m looking forward to sharing some of our insights on building and managing a distributed team.
I’m also happy to be a contributor to Remote Teams Work. It’s a new book out this month that provides strategic and practical guidance on establishing and running a successful remote team, including tools and methodologies, hiring and salaries, and creating a remote culture.
As more and more companies adjust to remote work and the value of distributed teams, hopefully they can benefit from the best practices we’ve seen and experienced.
WordPress 5.5 was released last week, featuring automatic updates for plugins and themes, lazy-loading images, extensible XML sitemaps, improvements to the block editor, and as always, supplemental under the hood security, performance, and developer improvements. As always, many 10uppers contributed to this release.
This latest release introduces a number of improvements to the block content editor. Highlights include inline image editing that lets you crop, rotate, and zoom photos within image blocks; device previews that show how content will appear to visitors with different screen sizes; and a Block Directory that lets you find, install, and insert third-party blocks in the editor, without ever leaving the page.
Tomorrow, August 13, 2020, 10up kicks off a free, four-part workshop series covering lessons and tactics used in the GNI Ad Revenue Lab to accelerate participating publishers’ advertising revenue.
The GNI Ad Revenue Lab, which kicked off in September 2019, is a Google News Initiative project conducted in partnership with LION Publishers and 10up to establish a web-based revenue optimization blueprint local news publishers can use as a reference point for website improvements.
As part of the Ad Revenue Lab, we have been working with seven hyperlocal U.S. publishers, like Long Beach Post, to provide and measure reader revenue-focused digital strategies, often testing new tactics. From ad viewability and fill rate optimization to article markup and sitemaps to Google AMP and the optimization of ads, images, and page speed, we’ve documented our findings and are now sharing them more widely.
As a leading contributor to WordPress and one of WordPress VIP’s longest-tenured Gold Agency Partners, 10up understands the carefully-crafted architectures and strategies that drive success on the VIP platform.
Today we are delighted to share that ClassifAI has been named a WordPress VIP technology partner. ClassifAI is our free plugin that leverages leading cloud-based services, like IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure AI, to augment WordPress-powered websites with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
WordPress VIP technology partners support enterprise customers using WordPress at scale by forging significant technology integrations for personalization, business intelligence, digital asset management, and, with the addition of ClassifAI, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
With a growing portfolio of clients and partnerships in higher education, we are once again thrilled to sponsor and participate in WPCampus, furthering the confluence of WordPress in academia. This year’s two-day remote conference kicks-off today, July 29, 2020; registration is free.
Presentations
On the schedule, you’ll find two 10uppers delivering presentations:
End to End Accessibility Testing
Traditionally, testing interaction has been a largely manual process because out-of-the-box automation testing tools can’t open menus, check ARIA states, click around, or test general UI and movement. Because of this, as sites age, they can quickly fall out of compliance and become slowly inaccessible.
In this session, Tim Wright, Director of Front End Engineering will discuss end to end accessibility testing. Learn how to create a long term accessibility roadmap and turn manual testing processes into lightweight automated scripts that can keep an eye on your project for years to come.
AI 101: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Educators Publish More, Faster, And Better
Artificial intelligence isn’t just for self-driving cars and science fiction. Learn how easy-to-integrate solutions can help educators publish more effective content, promote accessibility, and keep visitors engaged. In this special sponsor presentation, Phil Crumm, Vice President, New Client Strategy, will help educators, technical leaders, content creators, and marketers understand how machine learning and artificial intelligence can simplify content creation, accelerate authorship, and eliminate painful manual tasks.
Amy Grace Wells
Katie Wilkerson
Jeff Paul
Phil Crumm
Mike Bal
John Eckman