Digital

Pluto TV and Verizon have activated their game-changing distribution partnership and revealed new programming details. Starting today, 100,000-plus hours of free, ad-supported programming on ViacomCBS-owned Pluto are available to Verizon customers. The service will come in the form of an app on Android mobile devices and pre-installed on Fios cable boxes and Stream TV and 5G Amazon Home Fire devices.

Average daily user growth spiked 34% in the second quarter, the company said Thursday, the largest jump in users ever recorded by the company.

Because of the disruption to business caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers plan to put more money into digital ads and decrease spending on TV during the upcoming holiday season, according to Advertiser Perceptions.

Snap’s stock price initially plunged more than 11% after hours then moderated to a smaller decline as investors digested positive user and revenue growth on Tuesday after the company reported its second-quarter earnings.

LinkedIn will lay off about 960 workers across the company’s global sales and talent acquisition organizations as it grapples with falling demand for recruitment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nielsen is changing its methodology for its digital measurement products — including Digital Content Ratings, Total Content Ratings, Digital in TV Ratings, Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings. In part, it’s due to growing privacy consumer issues and continued pull back of third-party cookies.

With the addition of these three Florida markets, Locast now delivers local TV channels via the internet into 21 U.S. TV markets containing more than 134 million viewers or 41% of the U.S. population. Locast has more than 1.4 million users.

On Sunday, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences unveiled the winners in the Digital Dramas category for the 47th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards via a virtual livestream ceremony hosted by Jai Rodriguez from the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. As the first virtual ceremony for the Daytime Emmys, Rodriguez hosted from a studio in Burbank adhering social distancing production protocols while the nominees waited to hear the winners virtually.

Leading executives in the spot TV advertising ecosystem will talk about ways to entice a larger number of marketers to invest in local TV during a TVNewsCheck webinar on Aug. 6. The event, which will focus on short- and long-term issues facing the industry, will feature (top, l-r): Frank Friedman, E.W. Scripps; Jane Meyerson, ICON International; Joe Cerone, Zenith; (bottom, l-r):  Rob Weisbord, Sinclair Broadcast Group; Mark Gorman, Matrix Solutions and Ted Kramer, ProvantageX.  Register here.

Walt Disney Co. has dramatically slashed its advertising spending on Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the situation, the latest setback for the tech giant as it faces a boycott from companies upset with its handling of hate speech and divisive content.

Here are some keys to creating meaningful engagement with your news audiences.

Ted Sarandos has been promoted at Netflix to Co-CEO, sharing the title with Reed Hastings, who also serves as co-founder. Sarandos joins the company’s board of directors as a result. “Ted has been my partner for decades. This change makes formal what was already informal — that Ted and I share the leadership of Netflix,” Hastings said.

The entertainment business is a big advertiser but has been noticeably silent as other industries protest the social network’s handling of hate speech.

The ruse discovered Wednesday included bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities were also hacked. Hackers used social engineering to target some of Twitter’s employees and then gained access to the high-profile accounts. The attackers sent out tweets from the accounts of the public figures, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

Hulu is making its advertising platform more accessible to businesses with smaller marketing budgets. The streamer, which is courting more advertisers as it’s further integrated into parent company Disney, is opening up a closed beta test of a self-service ad manager to small and medium-size businesses, it said today. It’s the first self-service tool from Hulu and will give marketers the ability to start campaigns on the streamer with a minimum spend of $500.

One of the country’s oldest and most established media companies is starting to look more like a Hollywood studio than a traditional newspaper. Driving the news: The New York Times has 10 scripted TV show projects in development, as well as three feature documentaries coming out this year and several other documentary projects in development and production, executives tell Axios.

Vox Media, the owner of media properties including New York Magazine, The Verge, SBNation and Eater, has informed its worker unions to prepare for company-wide layoffs, according to people familiar with the matter. Vox spoke with union leaders Monday to inform them of their plan to cut staff, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Vox furloughed about 100 employees in April, or 9% of its staff, until July 31 as Covid-19 affected advertising budgets.

Not everyone will see the 30 Rock reunion that will air Thursday on NBC. Multiple station groups are preempting the hour-long special, which will double as an advertisement for NBCUniversal’s 2020-21 programming and its new streaming service, Peacock. The stations that are choosing to preempt the special come from station groups Gray Television, Hearst, Nexstar, Tegna and Sinclair Broadcast Group, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap. While it’s not clear exactly how many of the stations are skipping the special, those collectively represent about half of NBC’s footprint.