Audience Engagement Digital Publishing
2 mins read

Vox Media’s gorgeous “visual” podcasts, Pinterest capitalising on the social commerce boom, and more: The Media Roundup

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Playboy debuts new NFTs: Playboy Rabbitars

Here’s a story to make you choke on your cereal. Playboy is set to release a series of 11,953 rabbit characters as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called Playboy Rabbitars. The Rabbitars will be available for purchase for 0.1953 Ethereum (about £580) in a series of sales over the next week.

They’re not the only publisher whose NFT schemes have hit industry headlines this week. Entertainment newsletter Dirt funds itself with the sale of sets of NFTs, which act in place of a subscription.

If this is all too much for a Friday morning, I don’t blame you. Buying NFTs is far from a straightforward process, and support is limited outside of crypto evangelist circles. Publishers have ended up in trouble before with overcomplicated ideas (remember Civil), so I personally doubt this will become mainstream any time soon.

So should you experiment with NFTs? If there are people out there willing to spend that kind of money, perhaps you have little to lose…

Vox Media has built a visual way to experience podcasts. It’s accessible to deaf audiences — and gorgeous

For their new show More Than This, Vox Media set out to create a podcast that could also be seen and felt. The result is an immersive transcript that’s accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. I doubt many publishers will have the budget to bring this kind of project to life, but it’s lovely as some weekend inspiration.

How Pinterest is capitalising on the social commerce boom

A look at some new features Pinterest is launching to encourage users to shop via its platform. It’s not surprising to learn that time spent on Pinterest increased during the pandemic. What I find refreshing is their approach that, rather than broadening their remit, the platform believes it is important instead to continue catering for what users ask for.

Financial Times files £34.5m loss in UK for 2020, but states ‘small’ profit globally

It’s sadly not a surprise to see that the FT – the largest business newspaper in the UK – was hit hard by a series of lockdowns last year. Digital events income, strong ad performance and branded content sales helped reduce the print circulation losses but wasn’t quite enough to offset them.


This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here: