I thoroughly enjoyed this post:

On Netflix, the artwork is personalised based on your viewing history. An Uma Thurman fan will see the classic Pulp Fiction poster showing Uma, but a John Travolta fan will be shown a different image.

Fortune Cookie Advertising is exactly what you’d expect, and it works because “when [customers] see the ad on the back, they are likely to feel they received it for a reason”.

A Chinese podcast called “How to Make Your Voice More Attractive” has 218,000 paying subscribers. Overall, the market in Chinese self-help subscription podcasts was worth $7.3 billion in 2017, compared with just $314 million for all advertising-funded podcasts in the US.

Tony Pierce looks at seven iconic movie posters designed by Tom Martin and tells the story behind them:

While at Universal, one of the most unique design challenges Martin faced came from Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg.

The assignment? Create a logo that could brand both the movie and the fictional theme park in it.

“We visited the set during the production and saw some of the dinosaurs and props,” says Martin. “They were actually going to have branded products, merchandise in the store in the film. They needed a logo to put on the items in the gift shop.”

One of my favorite YouTube channels, Every Frame a Painting, has decided to call it a day. The two creators have shared a postmortem on Medium that’s full of some advice and a look behind-the-scenes at what went into making the videos:

Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it, rather than keep on making stuff.

The existing videos will, of course, remain online. But there won’t be any new ones.

The following is the script for what was supposed to be the final episode, voiced by both Taylor and myself. We were never able to make it. But we think it may be useful to some of you making your own work on the Internet, so we’re publishing it here.

Ken Yeung, writing for VentureBeat:

Medium is hoping to sweeten the pot in order to get you to become a paying member. The publishing platform provider said that members will now be provided an audio version of every “exclusive, member-funded story” along with some additional selections chosen by the company’s editorial team. More than 50 stories are now available as audio versions, with more being added in the future.

Medium has launched a new membership program. It’s $5 and I feel like Ev Williams and I would get along really well:

We invite you to join us as a paid member and to help support an ad-free platform that delivers the right type of content: the type that can only be created when independent writers and publishers are rewarded based on value rather than clicks. Medium will remain free and open for anyone who wants to share ideas with the world.

Like the idea but for an awesome music website you may be reading right now? We’ve got a similar plan and motto.

Medium will be laying off a third of their employees:

Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get…well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.

That’s a big part of why we are making this change today.

I don’t see much here about what this new approach will be, and without knowing that, I have to remain skeptical. The bigger issue is how most ad-driven media on the internet has worked for decades. It incentivizes clickbait by measuring clicks and page views when advertisers should be more concerned about attention and influence. Online publishers have to make a lot of difficult decisions about what kinds of advertising they want to run, and most of the times they’re completely beholden to what those buying the ads want from them. So you get multiple interstitial pop-ups, impossible to close full screen ads, and other bullshit that advertisers think work because they’re measuring the wrong things. How many times have you accidentally clicked on a mobile ad because of how intrusive it was?

Anecdotally, we’ve seen higher click-through rates on our banners and feed sponsors than I was ever seeing with the horrific ads we were forced to run on AbsolutePunk. But even with that it’s because of our supporters that this website is able to keep running. I still believe readers helping to fund the publications they love will play a big part in the future of online publishing.

Ben Stiller, writing on Medium:

I got diagnosed with prostate cancer Friday, June 13th, 2014. On September 17th of that year I got a test back telling me I was cancer free. The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify.