Cakes, taxes, and ear-worms - all in the latest Glide newsletter
ZEROES AND HEROES Cakes, papers, editions, and tax
When is a website a newspaper? When the VAT man gets involved.
With echoes of the famous 1990s Jaffa Cake trial, the PPA's campaign to remove VAT from digital publications got a boost after News UK won a tax tribunal appeal to treat digital editions as zero-rated.
The tribunal focused on the 20% VAT levied upon digital editions, which 'Axe the Reading Tax' campaigners argue differ from rolling websites and should for VAT purposes be zero-rated as if a newspaper.
The tribunal saw legal types pore over the wording of 1972 laws defining newspapers and news services, and on their current legal or conceptual relevance to today's digital publishing landscape.
As dusty as a tax tribunal might sound, it saw Times editor John Witherow, MD Chris Duncan, and Digital supremo Alan Hunter all give fascinating real-world insight into the production of periodic editions, digital replicas, rolling news sites, newspapers production, and distribution channels.
For students of modern journalism and news production, the case to gave lesson on how today's publishers get where their readers expect them to be. The News UK team helped describe many of the challenges and mechanics of modern subscriber news products - be they online or in hand.
Of course this was of very real interest to us. Firstly, we're all for anything that's good for content teams and publishers. Secondly, Glide continues to find wider use among clients to do the exact things described in the case, so it's doubly relevant.
For News UK the estimated VAT overpayment has been in the tens of millions of pounds - so in the short term many publishers will be delving into their tax archives to see how this squares with their product lineup, and what they have been obliged to charge subscribers.
In the longer term, it can aid making digital editions significantly better value to subscribers and publishers alike, which seems like a win for all. We may have an orange-flavoured chocolate-coated non-biscuit to celebrate.
If you want to read the arguments and decision, you can see the full decision here as a PDF.
GLIDE UPDATES In with the new
We teased the next Glide drop at the end of last year (how long ago that feels already!), and it's now rolling out.
In the Publisher UI there's updates in Previews, Content Panels, widget labelling, custom article data and more, and across other services there's updates in Dispatch, Media, Connect, Composer and Users, all targeted at improving performance or usability.
As always if you want to know more of any part speak to your usual Glide contacts, or head over to the customer portal. We'll keep you posted on v1.5 news.
A.I.S.E.O IS THE NEW TUNE
BERT and learning
Out in the world of SEO - aka Googleland – January saw Mountain View roll out its latest core search algorithm update, flagging it on Twitter and elsewhere to give a cursory heads-up to webmasters and publishers: you don’t need a long memory to recall unheralded Google algorithm updates sending site numbers reeling unexpectedly.
Of note in this update was analyst talk around ‘BERT NLP’, and its growing importance for Google after initial implementation in late 2019. NLP is Natural Language Processing, with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) being the specific technology Google are developing.
What does that mean? 'Bidirectional' refers to scanning both left and right of words, using deep learning to better understand context and assess relevance and information quality. We can’t help but think this is a good thing: the sensible advice of 'create good stuff' is truer by the day, and sites which produce quality content with good writing should benefit. Here's to that.
SEO big brains RankRanger did some excellent analysis on the update here, and along with others surmise much the same: quality matters.
If all these initials and acronyms are doing you no good, you can liven them up with a catchy ear-worm here. "A.I.S.E.O.!"
CUSTOMER MAGIC Gliding into your DMs
One thing which caught our eye recently was the really clever way one Glide customer has been using Glide and Slack in tandem, to create and publish newsletters to its CRM platform - entirely sidestepping the need to use their CRM as an authoring tool and eliminating the repetition of content creation.
Slack has become so widely-used, and an always-on app on so many devices, that one of our recent R&D tracks was around the concept of a publication created for and publishing only to Slack, and how Glide can make that simple.
So it was with much joy we saw a use case which beautifully took this idea of connecting platforms into the real world by using Slack like a DJ's mixing deck to select Glide content to be distributed by the CRM.
Problems, solved.
Stay content, and see you all in a month (with another catchy tune)!