Volume 3 of our What We’re Reading blog series coming at you hot🔥 To refresh your memory, this series highlights our favorite news, posts, and reports relevant to digital publishing to help our publishers, readers, and blog subscribers stay up to date with the latest info. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Volume 1 and Volume 2 for additional reads. And, as always, we love hearing your thoughts, so don’t hesitate to share your opinions about these articles and any others you’ve found of value. Now... let’s dive in!

In an ever-changing digital environment, publishers regularly face variability and uncertainty when it comes to distributing content, driving traffic, and building audiences. Avenues that were once successful are no longer producing the same results. Particularly challenging for many publishers this year has been the loss of traffic associated with Facebook’s News Feed changes. Prior to the changes, Facebook was responsible for over 40% of all external referral traffic, and many publishers relied on them to stay afloat. Now, however, across the board there's around ½ as much referral traffic coming from Facebook. Some publishers are experiencing even greater cuts; LittleThings, for example, lost 75% of influencer and organic traffic after the algorithm changes, causing the site to shut down😨.

At the beginning of the week, we asked readers to share their predictions for the 2018 World Cup. Since then, 16 teams have been knocked out, and 16 are moving onto the next round. If you thought the group phase was intense (and shocking… cough cough, Germany), prepare yourself for the next set of games; with the sudden death stage of the tournament upon us, competition will certainly be heating up🔥. 

Every four years, the FIFA World Cup captivates the globe (in 2014, there were 3.2 billion viewers😱) in a tournament so exciting and spirited that people can’t help but drop what they’re doing to watch. This year’s World Cup is no exception, as football enthusiasts everywhere are pulling out all the stops to watch their favorite teams battle through the opening group phase. Loyal fans are getting up early, staying awake late, live-streaming games to their phones (which may not seem like dedication, until you think about the ensuing data bill), and even playing hooky from work. With only ten matches left in this round, the next three days are guaranteed to be action-packed as each team fights to be one of the sixteen moving forward.

It’s summer and you know what that means: evening barbecues, weekends at the beach, and most importantly, summer interns! This summer, Disqus welcomes four awesome interns (myself being one of them) for a ten week program full of learning, innovation, hard work, and fun.