Are You Getting Tired of Political News?

Many of the top influencers in media, technology, and finance use Nuzzel to save time and stay informed. That’s why Nuzzel was named one of the Best Apps of 2016 by the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the Google Play Store.

Recently we have begun to receive feedback from some Nuzzel users who want to filter out certain types of content from their Nuzzel feeds and emails.

Here is a small set of examples of this type of feedback:  (there is a lot more!)

Based on this feedback, today we are announcing a new keyword filtering feature available in Nuzzel’s mobile apps and web site.

We are also launching Nuzzel Pro, our first premium subscription offering. The keyword filtering feature is one of Nuzzel’s first Pro features. Existing Nuzzel functionality remains free, and the Nuzzel Pro subscription option will allow us to develop new advanced features for our power users.  Other Nuzzel Pro benefits include an ad-free experience, and a dark mode option in our iOS and Android apps. More Pro features will be coming soon, and considered based on feedback from our users.

For more information about Nuzzel Pro, see http://nuzzel.com/pro

Have a suggestion or request for a Pro feature? Please let us know at feedback@nuzzel.com.

(Read more about Nuzzel Pro in NiemanLab.)

Nuzzel Brings Newsletters to 1.2 Billion Messenger Users

Nuzzel has integrated two of the hottest technologies for news delivery and consumption: newsletters and messaging bots.

Nuzzel already offers personalized news discovery and curated newsletters to many of the top influencers in media, technology, and finance, via web, mobile, push, and email.

Now Nuzzel has extended our innovative newsletter platform to provide distribution of daily newsletters to the 1.2 billion users of Facebook Messenger. Nuzzel’s new bot for Messenger allows subscribers to any of Nuzzel’s curated newsletters, or “Best of Nuzzel”, to receive top stories in business, technology, and media directly via Messenger every morning.

All Nuzzel newsletters will now be available for subscription via Messenger, in addition to email, with no additional work required by the newsletter curator.  This new distribution channel can be used by publishers, marketers, or individual influencers to expand their audience.

The Nuzzel bot for Messenger will help busy people get their day started with top news stories, that can be shared with friends and colleagues.  This is a great way to start conversations and stay informed.

Find the Nuzzel bot for Messenger by searching for “Nuzzel” when using Messenger.  Our “Best of Nuzzel” newsletter will send the day’s five best stories in business, technology and media. To subscribe to a specific Nuzzel newsletter using Messenger, click the “Send to Messenger” button on any Nuzzel newsletter page.

For more information, visit nuzzel.com/fbmessenger

Introducing Nuzzel Newswire

There’s now a new way for businesses to promote their content to top industry influencers in media, technology, and business.

Nuzzel Newswire lets you easily place a promoted story in newsletters received by the influencers and busy professionals who rely on Nuzzel to solve their overload and discover important news. You can use Nuzzel Newswire to promote news articles, press releases, blog posts, and more.

Businesses spend thousands of dollars on noisy old-school press release distribution services to promote content that few people will actually read. Nuzzel Newswire is a modern alternative that provides more direct access to  an audience of key business influencers.

Nuzzel has always been focused on solving peoples’ overload, and connecting them to just the stuff they really need to know about.  That is why Nuzzel is used by important journalists, editors, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and venture investors.

Visit http://nuzzel.com/newswire to learn more about Nuzzel Newswire.

(Read about Nuzzel Newswire in TechCrunch.)

Big Improvements to Nuzzel Newsletter Curation

Email newsletters are hotter than ever.  But many people and businesses have started email newsletters only to eventually give up on them because it was too much work, or they didn’t know what to write about for each issue.

When Nuzzel launched our newsletter curation platform in 2016, we helped solve these problems by recommending great and relevant content from Nuzzel, and offering the fastest and easiest way ever to curate a newsletter.

Now we are making it even easier to switch to Nuzzel for curating email newsletters, by offering three new features that we received many requests for.

As of this week, the next phase of the Nuzzel newsletter platform will now support:

#1 - Customization
#2 - Non-daily schedules (including weekly)
#3 - Bulk upload of lists

Customization:

Our new customization features can be used to easily change the colors and logo used in an email newsletter, to match existing branding:

New scheduling options:

When Nuzzel’s newsletter curation platform launched, it was focussed on daily newsletters.  Nuzzel is now making it much easier to curate newsletters that are weekly or using custom schedules.

Bulk List Upload:

Nuzzel supports importing contacts from phones, Gmail, LinkedIn, or uploaded CSV files. Nuzzel newsletter curators will now have the choice to invite a list to subscribe to their newsletter, or simply add previously opted-in lists as subscribers to their newsletter.

Check out Nuzzel’s newsletter platform at http://nuzzel.com/newsletters.

Don’t trust Facebook for traffic – Create a newsletter!

This morning my Nuzzel feed was full of stories about Facebook’s latest announcement: Facebook is changing their newsfeed algorithm (again!) to focus on posts from friends and family rather than content from publishers and pages.

You can read more about this news in The New York Times, TechCrunch, Recode, WSJ, The Verge, Nieman Lab, Digiday, Huffington Post, or Mashable.

This news should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with Facebook’s history, but seems to be a shock to some in the media world, after Facebook courted publishers to participate in their Instant Articles system.  Many publishers were willing to have their content subsumed into Facebook’s world in exchange for an expectation of significant continued free distribution.

History of Facebook changes

Facebook has a long history of changing the rules and tweaking their algorithms to suit their own priorities and clamp down on applications or publications that have grown fast via Facebook.  These include apps from companies like BranchOut, Socialcam, and Zynga in 2012, or viral publishers like Upworthy in 2014.  Facebook also partnered at one point with publishers like the Washington Post on their “Social Readers” that featured “frictionless sharing”, only to disable and eventually abandon these features.

Prior to this morning’s announcement, publishers were already seeing risk in their dependency of Facebook for distribution.  According to a recent report covered in the Financial Times, media companies publishing to Facebook were reaching 42% fewer people in June 2016 compared to January 2016.  The changes announced today will probably make this slide even worse.

Facebook is also currently prioritizing Live Video content in the News Feed, to compete with Periscope and Snapchat.

Email newsletters provide direct engagement

So if Facebook cannot be trusted for reliable distributions, and most Internet users are not active on Twitter, what is the answer?  Many media companies have been turning to email newsletters.

Contrary to what some people think, email is far from “dead”.  Reuters reports that American worker spend over 6 hours a day reading email, which is seven times what they spend on Facebook.  Subscribing to an email newsletter does not require an app or a Twitter account, and a presence in a readers’ inbox is not something that is controlled or filtered by Facebook.  This is why McKinsey reports that email newsletters receive 40x the engagement of Facebook or Twitter.

Email newsletters are the best way to build an audience you can reach consistently, and you can curate a newsletter using Nuzzel in only a few minutes per day.

Nuzzel’s network of newsletters – the easiest way to curate a newsletter

In May, Nuzzel launched the world’s first network of newsletters.  This new platform allows brands or influencers to curate a daily email newsletter in only a few minutes per day.  You can read more about Nuzzel’s curated newsletter platform in Fast Company, MediaShift, or Medium.

Imagine if the top 1 million brands and influencers on Twitter created Nuzzel newsletters, each with only 100 subscribers.  (Or imagine 100,000 newsletter curators with 1000 subscribers each.)  This could create an aggregated newsletter platform reaching 100 million inboxes each day.  As desktop and search traffic decline, this newsletter network could be a massive-scale alternative to Facebook for delivering relevant content to a large audience.

The future of engagement

Helping people curate newsletters in only a few minutes per day is just the first step towards building the world’s first network of newsletters.  This platform will also enable new network effects between newsletters, curators, and readers. Publishers are interested in increasing engagement between journalists or brands and their readers, and a newsletter can be a great platform for building this type of engagement. A consistent presence in a readers’ inbox, combined with interactivity features and the immediacy and intimacy of email are a great starting point for allowing and encouraging communication between readers of a newsletter and the newsletter creator or other readers.

Learn more about Nuzzel’s curated newsletters

Check out Nuzzel’s featured newsletters or create your own using the Newsletter Dashboard. Contact us if you have any questions!

A New Kind Of Newsletter

Even though the online news industry is now being disrupted by new technologies like social media and mobile, email is not dead. In fact, email newsletters are currently hotter than ever.

One reason that email marketing is so powerful is that 95% of a celebrity’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers won’t see what they post on Facebook or Twitter. McKinsey reported in 2014 that email is actually 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter for reaching people. And Harvard Business Review just reported that email is the best way to reach Millennials.

However, most influencers, celebrities, experts and organizations don’t produce their own newsletter, because operating a newsletter like The Skimm requires hours of work each morning.

Nuzzel now offers a new easier way to create newsletters, and a new channel for influencers to reach their fans.

Nuzzel newsletters are automatically generated social newsletters based on your Nuzzel feed. Newsletter subscribers receive a daily email containing the top 5 stories from an influencer’s Nuzzel feed. No install, setup, or account is required to subscribe, just an email address.

Nuzzel solves the hardest part of creating and maintaining a newsletter: discovering and curating compelling content day after day.

Nuzzel newsletters will include great relevant content, with no work required from the newsletter owner every day. The newsletter owner can also promote anything they want in their newsletter, and see analytics on their subscribers.

To get started with Nuzzel newsletters, go to http://nuzzel.com/newsletter or contact us for help.

See more about Nuzzel newsletters in NiemanLab, The Next Web, VentureBeat, and Gigaom.

Nuzzel Now Supports AMP

Nuzzel is pleased to announce that both Nuzzel for iPhone and Nuzzel for Android now support Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a new open standard for mobile news articles led by Google.

Nuzzel users can now experience instant loading in our mobile apps of any news articles that implement the AMP HTML format.

In our tests, an example New York Times mobile web page that took approximately 3 seconds to fully load, loaded in less than 500 milliseconds in the Nuzzel app when using the AMP version of the article, without even using a cache.

Nuzzel is one of the initial technology partners of the AMP project.  More info on AMP is available at https://www.ampproject.org/.

Why We Need A Faster Mobile News Experience

The accumulation of years of cruft and bloat that has been tolerated in desktop web pages is now creating a poor experience on the mobile web.  As Felix Salmon wrote in the Guardian, “Advertising is making the mobile web almost unusable by clogging up our bandwidth.”  Many mobile news sites also contain large numbers of huge Javascript libraries for advertising, analytics, and tracking, which slow down page loading.

In “The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites”, The New York Times recently reported that “more than half of all data came from ads” on the top 50 mobile news websites.  This is why some mobile users are now trying ad blockers.  The New York Times further reported “For a number of websites that contained mobile ads with a lot of data, web page data sizes decreased significantly and load times accelerated enormously with ad blockers turned on.”  Other users are responding by using “reader” mode in browsers such as mobile Safari to strip out all ads, navigation, and Javascript.

AMP provides a fast experience for readers without eliminating all of the branding, advertising, and analytics that support the business needs of publishers.

Why We Need An Open Standard

Nuzzel believes in the power of the open web.  Proprietary formats and closed platforms are a step backwards.  News articles should look great and open quickly in all mobile apps, not just in a few.  These technologies should not be limited to a small set of publishers.  Mobile news articles should load fast for everyone, from all publishers, and in apps from Nuzzel, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pocket, Gmail, and other leading mobile companies.

Nilay Patel wrote in The Verge that “Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles are a sad refutation of the open web revolution,” but it does not have to be this way.

It is also unrealistic to expect the long tail of global news publishers to publish and republish their content into an endless array of proprietary content management systems.  The technologies of the web can be extended via AMP to support a truly open system.

Summary

Here are four options for how mobile news content will be distributed to online readers:

1. News readers suffer through a bad experience of slow and bloated mobile news articles.
   
2. Internet users resort to ad blockers and “reader” modes to cope, eliminating all publisher branding and ads.  This is perhaps beyond the technical abilities of some users.
   
3. Selected publishers make a Faustian bargain, relying on proprietary platforms, requiring a lot of extra work on the part of participating publishers.  Many publishers are excluded, and many reading experiences in other apps are still not optimized for mobile.
   
4. Both publishers and the app ecosystem unite around an open standard like AMP.
   

At Nuzzel, we think #4 is the best option for everyone, and we are excited to be an early supporter of the AMP format.

See more info on Nuzzel and AMP at Fortune, Re/code, and Business Insider.

Nuzzel announces new investors from the news industry

Nuzzel has been backed by top Silicon Valley tech-industry investors like Andreesen Horowitz, SoftTech, Homebrew, Lowercase Capital, Max Levchin and Naval Ravikant.

We are pleased to announce the following new Nuzzel investors from the news and media world:

• Matter, the media-focussed startup accelerator and fund backed by Knight Foundation, KQED, McClatchy, Associated Press, A.H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Public Radio Exchange, and Google News Lab
  
• Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, board member at Business Insider
  
• Arturo Duran, Managing Partner at IVA Ventures, former Chief Innovation Officer at Digital First Media
  
• Craig Forman, partner at NextNews Ventures, board member of The McClatchy Company, former Tokyo Bureau Chief at The Wall Street Journal
  
• Jim Friedlich, CEO of Empirical Media, former VP at Dow Jones, former board member CNBC International
  
• Andrew Miller, former CEO of the Guardian Media Group
  
• John Paton, founder and former CEO of Digital First Media, board member at The Guardian and El Pais
  

Nuzzel’s mission is to connect everyone on the Internet with the content that is that is most important to them, in a simple experience on web, email, or mobile.  We accomplish this through a unique approach based on social curation.

As we have solved overload problems for news consumers, we realized that there are also opportunities for Nuzzel to help publishers.  The intersection of social and mobile platforms represent both challenges and opportunities for news publishers.  Nuzzel can help connect the right news readers with the hundreds of pieces of content that news companies are publishing each day.

“As an investor focused on the future of media and news, I haven’t seen a more elegant user experience in this space than I have with Nuzzel.  Nuzzel will be a key part of the news ecosystem of the future.” – Corey Ford, Managing Partner of Matter

“As CEO of the Guardian I saw many new digital products innovating in the news/content space. Few cut the mustard. An exception however is Nuzzel which successfully declutters my newsfeeds and surfaces only relevant content.”  – Andrew Miller, former CEO of the Guardian

“We are investing because Nuzzel’s technology is a big step forward in speedily finding and presenting the news and information that is most useful and relevant.” – Craig Forman, partner at Next News Ventures, which also includes Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and Jim Friedlich, chief executive of Empirical Media.

These new investors will help advise Nuzzel in our future partnerships with news publishers.

More coverage of our new investors in TechCrunch, Business Insider, and NiemanLab.

No, Mobile News Alerts Don’t Really Have To “Get On Your Nerves”

Last week, Julia Greenberg from Wired wrote an interesting story titled “All Those Mobile News Alerts Are Getting On Your Nerves”:

Mobile news alerts are becoming the norm. … Many of you hate them so much so that you’ve turned all alerts off. But even if you do get them, you don’t really like them.

So, publishers and news apps want to send news alerts to everyone. Julia Greenberg writes “for publishers, these kind of alerts are an unprecedented way of grabbing readers’ attention and distributing information,” and quotes Wall Street Journal Chief Innovation Officer Edward Roussel saying “The phone is the new battleground for the media.”

But readers and app users find most of these alerts noisy and annoying.  The reason is simple: most news apps’ news alerts are generic, not personalized. They are sending THE SAME alerts to everyone!

In the era of the Internet, social media, and smart phones, why are news apps and publishers using these new technologies to send the same content to everyone regardless of who they are and their specific interests?  Providing generic news headlines is something you could do over 100 years ago with printed newspapers!  Using a modern channel like mobile push notifications for non-personalized content is a huge waste of technology.

Two days after this Wired story, I was on the Macworld podcast.  During this episode of the podcast, host Glenn Fleishman told me “you are the only thing I allow besides text messages and one other thing to buzz my phone. I let Slack buzz my phone, I let Nuzzel, and text messages, and nothing else. And with the threshold of 7, almost everything that comes up is something that I do want to read.  I almost never think, Oh, why am I seeing that?”

Glenn from Macworld is not the only person who has told us that Nuzzel is one of the few apps for whom they’ve granted push notification permissions. Again, the reason is simple: Nuzzel’s news alerts are automatically personalized to each recipient.  Nuzzel determines an intelligent default alert threshold for each user, which they can tweak if desired, and then only sends news alerts for stories that have been shared by at least that number of friends.

Nuzzel does not send the same news alerts to everyone, only the most important content that matters to each user.  And Nuzzel does not ask users to do a lot of work by trying to enter all of the topics they are interested in.  Our social-based approach automatically handles relevancy and importance by harnessing social signals and the wisdom of crowds.

Our innovative approach to personalized news alerts is so exciting, we filed a patent application for it earlier this year.

Glenn is not the only journalist who uses Nuzzel news alerts. You can frequently see journalists making inside jokes on Twitter about what things are worthy of triggering Nuzzel alerts.

Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times has remarked that “a better metric than traffic, for an online writer, is whether your get a Nuzzel alert for your own stories”.

Owen Williams of The Next Web has written "Nuzzel has become the only news app that I actually let alert me on iPhone.“

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal wrote "Nuzzel alerts about trending New Yorker pieces are how I get excited to read those stories in print.”

What’s next for Nuzzel news alerts?  Right now, registered Nuzzel user can use our iOS or Android apps to get personalized news alerts from their main Nuzzel feed.  Soon we will be expanding this to let anyone with a smartphone get Nuzzel news alerts for any public Nuzzel feed, including both users’ public feeds, as well as feeds based on topics & communities.

Nuzzel Integrates With Slack So You Can Share Relevant News With Your Team

Nuzzel is pleased to announce that we have integrated with Slack, and now Nuzzel news alerts can be automatically pushed to Slack channels.

Slack users can take advantage of Nuzzel personalized news alerts by clicking on the “Add to Slack” button at nuzzel.com/settings, and selecting the desired combination of Nuzzel feed and Slack channel.

Nuzzel provides a highly personalized news experience by showing users the top news stories shared by friends, on web, iOS, Android, or email.

Nuzzel’s unique personalized news alerts are triggered only for the most important stories – those shared by a number of your friends exceeding an intelligent threshold.  These news alerts ensure that you’re not missing any important stories that are relevant to you.

The Nuzzel/Slack integration makes these alerts visible to anyone in your Slack channel, along with information about what triggered the alert, in real time.  This provides a convenient way for you and your team to stay on top of the news that matters – and stay ahead of your competitors.  

Once you’ve connected Nuzzel to a Slack Channel – it will be updated whenever a breaking story hits the threshold. It’s that easy!

More info from Slack,TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.