Twitter Beats Out Facebook: Twitter is crowing about a new Compete survey that shows brands’ Twitter followers are more valuable than those on Facebook. Interesting! There are caveats galore to these types of surveys — Compete doesn’t state its sample size, for instance — but Twitter beat our Facebook across a range of metrics: purchase and recommendation intent included. The margin was 56 percent to 47 percent in purchase intent. Twitter also beat out Facebook as the favorite consumer source for receiving information about products. That type of research will come in handy for Twitter as it tries to become a large-scale media business. Its problem now is brands’ struggle to find ways to run large campaigns on the platform. Compete blog
Gawker’s Return from the Dead: Remember back when Gawker Media redesigned its sites in February? Bloggers fell all over themselves to flagellate proprietor Nick Denton and call it his Waterloo. His abandonment of the blog format for something more magazine-like was supposedly hated. Denton stayed the course, as Digiday wrote last month. And now, it seems like the move is working. Felix Salmon of Reuters tracks a page view rebound at Gawker sites over the past month. The stable of properties is now near its all-time peak — all the while sticking with its maligned format, designed in large part to cater to advertiser needs. Denton is all but declaring victory, although one commenter points to Gawker’s dismaying habit of using placeholder pages to drive pageviews. Reuters
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