Gold Mountain California News Media has acquired several local newspapers from Brehm Communications. 

They include the Hi-Desert Star, Desert Trail, Desert Mobile Home News, Big Bear Grizzly and Lake Arrowhead Mountain-News, according to Hi-Desert Star. The Yucca Valley printing facility is also included. 

News Media is also purchasing six BCI newspapers published in the Sacramento area: the Auburn Journal, Folsom Telegraph, Roseville Press-Tribune, Placer Herald, The Loomis News and Lincoln News Messenger.

“This transaction is bittersweet as our family has been in the newspaper business for over 102 years; however, we felt it was time to pass these amazing publications and employees to a new home,” said Ryan Schuyler, president and CEO of BCI. “We believe the new owners will carry on the important mission of community journalism for years to come.”

Streaming services and games are becoming more and more intermingled as streaming players pursue various synergistic benefits. 

For starters, streamers are now helping to drive the growth of movies, live-action and animated TV shows and anime content inspired by video games. 

Game-based originals created specifically for subscription-based video-on-demand (SVOD) streamers — which were mostly nonexistent until the past few years — have been creeping up of late. There were five in 2019, one during the pandemic-hampered production year of 2020, and seven in 2021, according to Ampere Analysis. 

Netflix has led the trend, commissioning originals and striking  streaming rights deals for game spin-off series including “The Witcher,” “Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness” and “Arcane: League of Legends” and “Carmen Sandiego,” and movies like “Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild,” “The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf” and “Arcane” (in Netflix’s top 10 for six consecutive weeks, after a theatrical run). 

Others are also moving in this direction. For instance, this week,  HBO/HBO Max released a trailer for “The Last Of Us,” a game spin-off series set to debut next year. 

Obviously, the objective is to use series and movies to leverage built-in game fan bases to attract significant new numbers of subscribers and enhance retention. And for streamers, it’s also an opportunity to create new, owned franchises that differentiate them from competitors in an increasingly competitive market, notes Ampere. 

At the same time, Netflix and others are pushing into creating their own games. 

This week saw Netflix announce that it will build its own from-scratch game development studio, in Helsinki, to complement the content specialties of the three established game studios it’s already acquired. 

Netflix, which launched its game initiative in 2021, has 31 mobile games now, and has targeted 50 by year-end, including a first game based on its blockbuster original series “Stranger Things.” 

But according to Apptopia, fewer than 1% of Netflix’s 221 million subscribers are engaging daily with games on the platform. Owning game studios is part of a push to ramp up gaming engagement so as to drive those streaming subs — presumably for Netflix’s coming ad-supported tier, as well as the existing no-ads plans. 

To maximize their appeal, Netflix’s games are both free for subscribers and have no ads. And at least as long as increasing subscriptions to support consumer and now advertising revenue is the strategic/financial priority, it’s unlikely that Netflix will incorporate ads per se in the games. 

But gamers have become more accepting of ads in free games —especially those that offer “rewards” for watching, or are playable. And knowing that Netflix was totally open to capitalizing on brand integrations in original content (such as the Eggos integrations in “Stranger Things” ) even before it abandoned its once-staunch vow against traditionally-formatted ads in its streaming content, my guess is that it may not be so long before some sort of less objectionable ad formats make their way into its games.   

The metaverse is already encouraging that direction, by making it ever more possible to position brand promotions as “experiences.” 

Case in point: The “Tonight Show”-themed game created by NBCUniversal to showcase the immersive capabilities of Samsung Galaxy devices, and promoted on-air by the show’s host, Jimmy Fallon. 

Shoppable functions — including in-game purchases — are also undoubtedly in the strategic sights of all of the streaming players. 

Another piece of recent Ampere research underlines why Netflix and media companies now staking their futures on streaming are likely to expand their business models to rely on game-based ecommerce, as well as streaming subscription fees and other types of streaming-based advertising, sponsorships and integrations. 

The study found that although U.S. consumers report spending five times more time per day watching video than playing games, the per-hour revenue generated by gaming is significantly higher than revenue from SVOD subscriptions and slightly higher than advertising and other revenue realized from broadcast TV (see chart at top of page). 

That’s because although many gamers play free-to-play games without spending, others monetize heavily and frequently. 

Given the accelerated battle for the limited number of minutes of consumers’ attention, “the rate at which captured minutes are monetized acquires greater significance,” points out Ampere Senior Analyst Louise Shorthouse. “In terms of consumer spending, gaming offers better returns per hour, and so represents an opportunity for media groups looking at how to monetize their IP efficiently. Rather than branching out into other video formats, it is logical that platforms are considering games content — although although the expertise needed to succeed is vastly different.”

Ecommerce software platform Miva, Inc. is partnering with TargetBay, a customer experience management firm, to offer a new email and SMS marketing app for merchants using Miva.

BayEngage, the new app, combines the two platforms -- allowing merchants to automate their email and SMS communications throughout the customer journey, Miva says. 

The app provides access to over 300 email templates, a stock image library, segmentation capabilities, and other tools.

The goal is to help Miva’s merchants “decrease customer acquisition costs, save valuable time, and drive conversions,” says Brennan Heyde, vice president of product at Miva. 

TargetBay’s plug-and-play tool allows Miva merchants to “send email & SMS campaigns in 1-click and merchants can get instant access to all email marketing and SMS marketing features,” adds Pon Pandian, CEO and co-founder at TargetBay. 

Swiss luxury fashion house Chopard is showcasing its new My Happy Hearts collection -- hearts that can be worn on their own or stacked as accessories -- using Snapchat’s AR (augmented reality) try-on lens. 

Chopard worked with media agency Keyade and creative studio Busterwood to launch the try-on lens, which leverages Snap’s AR technology to enable Snapchatters to discover and virtually try on the new creations via their mobile cameras. 

Through the lens, Snapchatters can try on and layer different combinations of necklaces, earrings and bracelets from Chopard’s collection, with the ability to visit the jeweler’s website directly from the Lens. This allows consumers to have a sneak peek before they purchase.

The global campaign is now available for Snapchatters to experience in France, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and the Middle East.

Chopard is leveraging Snap’s video advertising offerings as well, using Snap Ads and Collection Ads to reach the Snap audience. 

A study the company conducted with Publicis and Alter Agents found that 80% of shoppers felt more confident in their purchases after incorporating AR in their journeys. In addition, 75% of shoppers said they believe AR is the future of shopping, and 66% of shoppers using AR are less likely to return their purchases.

The Chopard lens is available via Snapchat’s Lens Carousel and on Chopard’s public profile on the app.

Netflix users in Argentina have flooded social media with protests about the streamer’s rollout of a crackdown on password sharing. 

Up against declining subscriptions and a sinking share price, Netflix this year began accelerating its efforts to boost revenue by squelching the widespread, and up to now little-challenged, practice of sharing passwords to let friends and family get a free ride. Netflix has estimated that as many as 100 million subscribers worldwide engage in this practice. 

After early-year tests of an “add extra member” approach in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru created confusion and frustration, Netflix announced in July that it would initiate a different, “add-a-home” approach starting in August in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.  

Under the policy, each Netflix account, whatever the plan it is on, includes just one home where the service can be used on all devices for the core subscription price. Members of that household can also watch Netflix on tablets, laptops or mobile phones when outside the main home, although there are apparently limits on that. Use by additional homes must be purchased for an extra per-month fee that varies by market.  

When the policy kicked in last month, thousands of users in those countries were logged out of their Netflix accounts on their smart TVs, and told they would have to pay an extra fee to enable use by additional households. 

That set off an uproar in Argentina, in particular — which is Netflix’s fourth-largest market, with 4.5 million subscribers as of 2020, according to Comparitech estimates. 

Many Argentinians threatened to cancel the service, posting anti-Netflix memes and hashtags that went viral — including #ChauNetflix (#ByeNetflix), a takeoff on Netflix’s promotional #CheNetflix promotional campaign on Twitter, noted Rest of World. 

Netflix has again confirmed that it is testing password sharing policies in Latin American countries (which have high rates of sharing) with the goal of optimizing their approach and pricing, but has not commented on how many subscribers in Argentina or elsewhere have cancelled as a result of the new fees. 

Argentinians are up against soaring inflation and general economic woes. Because Netflix subs are priced in U.S. dollars, their cost effectively rises as the country’s peso loses value; and Argentinians also face restrictions on using U.S. and other foreign currencies, Global Emergent Media Lab member Joaquin Serpe told Rest of the World. 

In Argentina, Netflix’s added-home fee is the equivalent of $1.50, versus $2.99 in other countries, but government taxes on foreign transactions push the fee up to $2.62 now, and inflation will push it up further, notes the report. 

In other words, in addition to higher-than-average sharing rates, it’s possible that Netflix may have chosen Argentina and other countries under particularly intense financial stress, where subscription pricing and average revenue per user (ARPU) are already low, to learn under worst-case scenarios before rolling out elsewhere.

Podcasts are big business. And some are inflating their popularity in a new way: paying mobile ad firms to display ads for their podcasts in mobile games. Gamers not only get rewarded for clicking on the ads, but the move downloads a podcast episode to their phones.

That’s according to a new report by Bloomberg News, which utilizes research from Deep Sea, a fraud-detection company. The added Web traffic translates into ad sales. One company, iHeart, company has reportedly spent some $10 million since 2018 on the practice, which has produced about 6 million unique listeners per month.

“For years, millions of daily visits to ad-monetized publisher destinations have likely been generated this way. In these situations, advertisers have no idea they are paying to reach a user who is being compensated to interact with the publisher’s content,” according to DeepSee. 

There are standards rewarded ads — and how they should be identified to advertisers. Rewarded video / interstitial ads actually can, and should, be identified using the “rwdd” attribute within the “Imp” object of a bid Request, writes DeepSee.

The researcher added it hopes programmatic ad buyers will be able to prevent “serving ads to users without genuine intent in the content.” The inflated numbers may give a skewed idea of who is listening to the ads, since advertisers don’t know the context in which the page is loaded.

The Jun Group is the company most podcasters use for the practice. Jun CEO Corey Weiner defended the practice to Bloomberg as a form of “corporate self-promotion. … Every publisher, every content creator, has invested in marketing to promote themselves since the dawn of time, and this is just another way of doing it.”

Separately, podcast advertising grew 2X faster in 2021 (+72%) than the total internet ad market, according to the IAB U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue study. The report credited three factors: more listeners, the share of ad revenue served via Dynamic Ad Insertion has almost doubled in two years to 84%, and growing investment across more ad categories.

Eric John, vice president, IAB Media Center, said: “Buyers will expect advanced brand-safety solutions, audience targeting and measurement, and we look forward to working across the ecosystem to create standards that serve creators, listeners, publishers and brands.”

In the latest twist on "What exactly is a retailer, anyway?" Macy's is introducing a digital marketplace (officially called Marketplace) on its website. The new platform, which it first mentioned last year, offers a "curated assortment of new brands, merchandise categories and products."

That's what all ecommerce sites offer. What makes this different is that the items are sold not by Macy's but by third-party merchants and brand partners. Macy's says the launch is a logical next step as it establishes itself as an omnichannel retailer.

Marketplace is also an example of how fluid retail business models have become. In one sense, it takes Macy's a few steps closer to an Amazon model of ecommerce. It will deliver the much-larger assortment shoppers have come to expect from online shopping platforms.

Yet it's also a few steps closer to what department stores used to be, adding 20 product categories with 400 new brands.

The New York-based company has been working on the platform for a year. "Seamlessly integrated into Macy's digital shopping experience, Marketplace gives our customers access to an array of expertly curated products — from apparel and beauty to home improvement, toys, pet products and more," said Matt Baer, chief digital and customer officer at Macy's, in the announcement.

Product categories include electronics, with big names like LG and Samsung; beauty and wellness, with L'Occitane and Mary Ruth's; and toys, with Magna-Tiles.

Once upon a time, department stores did offer many more categories. There was a toy department, a shoe department, and plenty of floor space devoted to appliances, electronics and home design.

But in the last few decades, ecommerce and specialty retailers chipped way at those offers. By adding them back through this marketplace, Macy's can reassert the breadth of its assortment. And by curating the selection, it can -- one hopes -- avoid the "endless aisle" dreariness of other sites.

It's an uneasy balancing act. Last fall, activist investor Jana Partners wrote a letter to Macy's board, urging it to spin off its e-comm business, as Hudson's Bay Corp. did with the ecommerce arm of Saks Fifth Avenue.

Those deals make plenty of sense from a stock market point of view. Ecommerce businesses are fast-growing, while department stores are in decline.

But for omnichannel retailers, the ecommerce part of the business model is the essential ingredient.

At that time, Macy's hired an advisor to study Partners' proposal. In February, the retailer said it had considered the idea of a spin-off and rejected it.

"We are more confident in our path forward as one integrated company," said CEO Jeff Gennette in its announcement. "The Board's review reaffirmed our conviction that we are pursuing a robust strategy, and it provided us with greater clarity on several initiatives that could be further accelerated to unlock additional value for our shareholders, which we are pursuing."

In today's news, Macy's says online and mobile users will likely feel only "minimal differences" in the marketplace shopping experience, beyond a notification that a third-party seller will ship the item.

It also says the effort will increase its commitment to diversity, with 20% percent of marketplace sellers and brands from underrepresented enterprises.