Graymail issues, Facebook and Vice

Christmas is over and the New Year upon us… well at least in marketing terms. Both Facebook and YouTube have released their year-end films. We also look at ‘graymail’ and Disney’s new investment

The problem with ‘graymail’

Hubspot is in the habit of putting out the kind of ‘how-to’ articles this blog generally avoids. However, this one is worth flagging up. Essentially, it is about the company’s decision to cut 250,000 subscribers from its email.

The reason comes down to what it describes as ‘graymail’. This is the phenomenon whereby people subscribe but don’t actually read the email. This in turn can harm deliverability to others who do want to read it – in other words it gets filtered into the spam folder by the email client.

Despite the emergence of social media, email still has the best engagement rate.

But it’s easy to be swayed by subscriber numbers rather than click-through rates.

Disney doubles Vice Media stake

In an unlikely tie-up, Disney has doubled its stake in Vice to around $200 million, giving it around 5 per cent of the group. Vice continues to roll out new products across the globe and is to launch a cable TV network in the US next year.

YouTube and Facebook

YouTube and Facebook have released contrasting impressions of 2015. YouTube has taken an optimistic view of the past 12 months while Facebook has gone the opposite way.

2015 Year in Review from Facebook on Vimeo.Graymail issues, Facebook and Vice