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Articles by: "Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift"

Mark Glaser is the founder and publisher of MediaShift. He is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review, and was an executive editor at PBS IdeaLab. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.
Perspectives | Revenue | Video

Who’s winning (and losing) the online video boom?

As the NewFronts wrapped up, there was a growing feeling that online video wasn’t just a precursor to the Upfronts and broadcast that were coming next. The NewNew Fronts are becoming the main event.

Traditional TV networks are losing their audiences as competition from non-linear, streaming programming is rising — everything from Netflix and Hulu to Facebook and Snapchat. Digital ad spending overtook TV ad spending for the first time last year ($71.6 billion versus $71.2 billion, respectively), according to eMarketer. A new report commissioned by the IAB found that spending on ads around original digital video programming has doubled in the past two years.

These inescapable trends are creating a new frontier for publishers trying to reap the benefits of the video ad boom. Broadcasters and newspapers are trying to figure out how to allocate more resources for video, while digital-native publishers try to keep up with demand.

With that in mind, here’s a rundown of some of the winners and losers in the online video explosion.

Winners

Comcast

NBCUniversal, the digital offshoot of the traditional broadcast network, earns major points for having invested $500 million in Snap (think long-term, not just the first earnings report!), $400 million in BuzzFeed and $200 million in Vox, thereby creating partnerships that benefit both traditional and new media players. When Conde Nast joined the NBCUniversal and Vox Media advertising network, the digital conglomerate announced it’ll reach 200 million consumers online, including 99% of all millennials in the U.S. And these three entities are together developing two new ad products around mobile video and branded content.

Facebook

If there is a behemoth winner in the house, it’s surely Facebook. The world’s largest social network has pushed its news feed to prioritize video, and publishers have to post videos there if they want to reach Facebook’s nearly 1.3 billion daily users. Recode’s Kurt Wagner reported last month that Facebook is planning to pay publishers to create more produced video on the platform, to help push its new mid-roll ad products (the new deal will replace the one Facebook struck with publishers last year to use Facebook Live).

Facebook will offset the cost of paying publishers by earning the money back from the mid-roll ads, and then splitting whatever revenue remains with the publishers. While some publishers are hesitant to embark on such a deal with unproven benefits — no one knows how the ads will fare yet, and earning returns on Facebook video has long been a frustration for publishers — many others will give it a shot.

YouTube

Like Facebook, Google’s YouTube is riding the benefits of the online video boom. YouTube may have stumbled earlier this year when advertisers found their content showing on extremist videos, but it’s still the world’s most popular video destination. And now the world’s most popular video website is planning to produce six different ad-supported original series and develop more than 40 original shows and films over the next year. It’s also investing more resources into its ad-free subscription service YouTube Red (and the YouTube TV skinny bundle), pushing YouTube into a tier of competition that includes Hulu, Amazon Video and Netflix.

Google earned more than $24 billion in advertising sales in the first quarter — more than that of the entire TV industry – even in the face of boycotts over brand safety. The tech giant is betting on high-profile YouTube stars and celebrities to bring viewers to these advertisers, and has made changes to improve controls for advertisers. If it continues to cultivate a wide audience around its original programming, it can certainly demand higher rates from advertisers even in the face of setbacks.

New York Times

The Gray Lady may have been a late bloomer to the digital boom, but its adaptation strategies are certainly catching up. Its subscriber growth is the highest its been in its history, thanks in large part to the post-election bump — as well as wise investments on digital offerings. If you haven’t noticed, many articles online now feature video content alongside it. In February, the Times announced it’ll feature fresh daily content on Snapchat Discover. Alongside pushing VR video as an editorial decision, it’s also been publishing VR branded content.

And at this year’s NewFronts, the Times announced “Times Story[X],” which will launch this summer and serve as a powerhouse for creating strong visual, technologically forward narrative journalism that both the newsroom and its marketing unit T Brand Studios can use.

Losers

Traditional TV networks

The four major broadcast networks lost 8% of their audiences this TV season, adding to a four-year trend of declining TV ratings. TV networks have also increased their ad prices in these last four years in an effort to offset declining viewership — which doesn’t necessarily bode well for marketers. The ad-buying agency Magna has announced it’s shifting $250 million of its budget originally allocated for TV toward YouTube.

The Walt Disney Company, which owns the ESPN cable network, missed its revenue target this past quarter and announced in April it’s laying off 100 people to cut costs and better adapt itself for digital distribution. Time Warner and Viacom have also reported that second-quarter advertising revenues are likely to decrease. It’s no wonder: Viacom’s MTV, once the go-to network for younger audiences looking for information and entertainment catered to especially for them, is losing its viewers to Snapchat and YouTube.

Advertisers sticking to TV (and not diversifying)

Advertisers know that they can guarantee audience reach with the time they have with television advertising. Traditional TV has also benefited from the brand safety issues marketers have faced when their content has inadvertently popped up against extremist propaganda on YouTube. Networks touted their reach and reliability for serving up mass audiences, in a New York Times story, but they also face tough competition from targeted ads on social platforms and the explosion of choices on streaming services. But it’s still a question of when, not if, those ad dollars will move to digital video.

In the end, the winners of the video boom will be those publishers, platforms and brands who embrace the power of video, but make sure it fits with their mission – and serves their intended audience. Native video publishers like NowThis and Hulu might have an advantage, but legacy publishers and broadcasters still have a chance to shine if they can evolve quickly.

Advertising | Perspectives

Are the NewFronts still worth it? That depends

When Digitas started the NewFronts in 2008, it convinced the world that digital upstarts needed their own version of television’s glitzy Upfronts was a necessity. The agenda was also fairly straightforward: “Build a marketplace for showcasing high-quality creators and distributors of video at scale,” as co-creator John McCarus said in a recent interview with Tubefilter’s Sam Gutelle.

Five years after the IAB took over its stewardship, though, many are questioning the worth of the two week dog-and-pony show taking place these first two weeks of May. But if the evolution of the advertising industry — and the individual circumstances of different publishers — suggest anything, it’s that there really isn’t a blanket consensus on the NewFronts, except that it makes the most sense for those who need a boost or have the money to mount something eye-catching.

In and Out, and Changing Tactics

The dropouts and withdrawals at this year’s NewFronts ignited chatter that the NewFronts were losing relevance. Among those dropouts: BuzzFeed, Yahoo, Stylehaul, Studio71, National Geographic and Machinima (now owned by Warner Bros.).

Some, though, aren’t leaving the buyer presentation completely. However, they are changing their tactics and opting for lower-key events. The web video firm Fullscreen, for example, will host a series of small presentations with agencies instead of a large panel, as will Yahoo (which is currently being acquired by Verizon) and new corporate sibling AOL, which was once a headliner. BuzzFeed too, will host its own event for advertisers, and Studio71 backed out of its New York live event and is now going to stream a 15-minute presentation (and will donate money saved to a charity).

Still, NewFront newcomers like Twitter, BBC.com, Group Nine Media and Uproxx, a digital media company focused on millennial males, are jumping into the fray. And IAB senior vice president Anna Baker insists this year will attract record attendance, topping last year’s 16,000 attendees.

Goal Reached?

One way to view this opt-in, opt-out trend is from the perspective of worth. The NewFronts have become enormously expensive and cluttered. So it makes sense why some companies might prefer to do something smaller, where they can insist on undivided — rather than distracted — attention. Another viewpoint is that the demand to educate about the urgency of digital is, well, just not that urgent anymore. With eMarketer’s forecast that advertisers will spend $11.7 billion on online video this year, it’s obvious that marketers know where they should focus interest. The competition and conglomeration of YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat on online video advertising is also routinely drawing attention to this goal.

Indeed, another way to view the more personalized approach of some companies is that it’s a reflection of the maturation of the industry. This is particularly true as digital video becomes more fragmented and thus necessitates more one-on-one attention. With programmatic buying becoming more common, it also means that this big annual event is not as important because so much buying happens on a regular basis throughout the year.

The Brand Perspective

Obviously, different publishers have different levels of urgency in appealing to marketers. But much of the decision around this boils down to brand, and which one — and what aspect of their identity — stands to benefit from being featured at the NewFronts.

Take Twitter. The company has had a roller-coaster of a time growing its user base and showcasing its utility as an actual ad-supported business. But it also recently announced a partnership with Bloomberg to stream its own 24/7 news service — and a major push into streaming video since its NFL streaming deal last year ended. Needless to say, Twitter has a lot at stake going into this year’s NewFronts as it pivots more heavily into streaming video.

Yet as NewFronts co-founder John McCarus acknowledged in his TubeFilter interview, the focus on the show around interruptive video advertising misses the massive growth of an important upstart in video: branded content. That could be a big reason why both Fullscreen and BuzzFeed have lowered their commitment, for example. Their general manager and senior vice president of marketing, respectively, both essentially stated their companies had outgrown the current format of the NewFronts.

So What’s the Value?

Still, for all the debate on the NewFronts’ value, there’s still a very important overarching goal for publishers – especially given the 2016 U.S. election and scrutiny on fake news and objectionable content – and that’s to tout their brand safety. The New York Times, for instance, will take advantage of the thousands in attendance to host a live podcast and basically, promote Times’ quality and not edgy technology.

For some publishers, at least, the evolving advertising marketplace requires not just thinking about digital video, but the revolution taking place at multiple places in the industry. Let’s think of the NewFronts as less of a who’s who in popularity or recognition, and more as a “graduate school” for those looking to step in and reinforce their education in the business. No one in any industry would say that’s a bad thing.

Innovation | Perspectives

Less chat, more info: Facebook tries to revive messenger bots

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference last year, executives touted the rise of chatbots. These automated personalities within the Messenger app promised to answer your queries as seamlessly as a human — or so was the expectation. But in fact, mismatched expectations regarding the purpose of the service, the lack of strong AI to back it up, and lack of awareness by the public left many industry analysts doubtful of chatbots’ ability to fulfill the hype.

With this year’s F8 conference upon us,Facebook is trying to shift the gears on this with the announcement of “group bots” within Messenger, a new Discovery tab for bots and more commands related to bots in Facebook’s virtual assistant M. But it looks like the social giant must also do some inward scrutiny — and involve marketers — to get users on board in much bigger numbers.

The Promise of M

When Facebook released M to a select group of some 10,000 California power users in late 2015, the promise of the virtual assistant was usurped by insight into how it could maintain such intelligent operations. “M is so smart because it cheats,” as MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite put it succinctly. Unlike other virtual assistants, which admit defeat when a question stumps them, a human being “invisibly” stepped into the role of the bot to cure the disease of not knowing — without ever letting the user know otherwise.

Of course, this is an expensive design to scale for Messenger’s 1.2 billion users. But M — along with competition from Siri and Amazon’s Alexa — inevitably laid a foundation for misrepresenting how users might realistically benefit from such a chatbot.

Siri and Alexa are trained to be generalists. However, Facebook has largely pushed developers to create more specialist bots. Of the more than 30,000 bots on Messenger, most of them serve a single purpose. That, in itself, makes creating a habit of use difficult. After all, unless you truly have an affinity for pizza, how many times will you use Domino’s Messenger bot in a single week? But Facebook also let the promise of chatbots spiral downward by not doing enough to inform and educate users on how to best use them.

Discoverability and Bugginess

That brings us to the twin disorders plaguing chatbots: discoverability and bugginess.

There was no native way on Messenger to find a chatbot, so unless a user already knew the name of a bot to type into Messenger’s search box, there was no way to actually use one. While third-party bot browsing options like Botlist exist, they are little-known and thus, little-used.

In part, that’s what Facebook hoped to address when it announced a new class of group bots to work inside Messenger at this year’s F8 conference. Once one person introduces the bot into a group conversation, everyone will know about its existence (although how to get that first user to know of the bot remains a looming question). And whereas users might have previously been misguided into thinking chatbots could be true, humanlike discussion partners, these group bots are meant to be more “information bots” (think scores and or stock prices) rather than “chat bots.” Feeding chatbots enough data to maintain conversation flow, and ensuring the AI was up to task, were hopeless hurdles that have made “bugginess” a default bot personality type.

That people have spoken little about chatbots since their initial hype may actually work in Facebook’s favor if it wants to reset people’s expectations. With little regard and much ignorance about the service (in fact, a November 2016 online survey by Publicis Groupe’s Digitas LBi found 78% of U.S. adults hadn’t even heard of chatbots), Facebook could help bring the popularity of chatbots outside the music fandom crowd into the mainstream population.

Can Payments, Marketing Pave the Way?

Kik CEO Ted Livingston, for one, argues the real benefits of chatbots come from their enabling the offline world around us, rather than functioning solely as app replacements. Paying for items is one way to do that And, if U.S. chatbots can make that territory theirs, they’d follow in the footsteps of China, where it’s common for QR codes to trigger interactions, and where more than 600 million WeChat users use its peer-to-peer payment service. While Kik is in talks with its Chinese counterparts to introduce payments, Facebook has already launched this option. Still, addressing Facebook’s buggy bot issues is necessary for users to trust making financial transactions.

Yet aside from all the hype and wonder, there is huge potential for publishers and marketers to seize control of the potential for bots — if they can seize control of the AI and have a common goal for users. Just like voice assistants, bots can get smarter over time with the right technology enabled. Another issue is that a simple question to a bot can yield multiple responses. However, if the aim is to get the user to do something specific — whether it is go to a website, make a purchase, or look up a news item — the answers need to actually be both human and robotic enough to do just that.

It’s not only Facebook that has to do some inward reflection on bots — marketers and publishers must too. They must also demand that Messenger (or any other messaging platform) be the right kind of environment for their goals to thrive. This involves much more nuanced AI programming to make brand interaction a clear-cut goal. It also requires much more education by both Facebook and marketers to let their audiences know bots exist, without setting them up for disappointment.

Advertising | Perspectives

Will humans make a comeback in the wake of the YouTube boycott?

Programmatic advertising, with its cheap and easy targeting of individuals based on their online browsing habits, has appealed to brands since its onset. Yet the risks, while always known, have never really come to the fore, until now. Advertisers have been up in arms over the realization that their ads were showing up alongside racist and extremist videos on YouTube and other sites, and essentially underwriting hate.

While automation has its upsides, this is a time for human intervention. That means brands making more efforts to find safe spaces curated by humans, and YouTube using more human engineering to help match brands to better content. Not to mention users making judgments on what it means when big brands support objectionable content (even if they don’t realize it).

An Unfolding Disaster

A ticktock of events, including a damning Times of London investigation and decisions by the Guardian, AT&T and Verizon to pull their advertising from YouTube’s “hate” videos, shows just how big this problem has become for Google and the industry. The advertiser boycotts have continued with Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, McDonalds and even Havas Media Group following suit.

Adweek commissioned the market research company Survata to survey daily YouTube video viewers in a weekend online poll about whether they deemed ads as endorsements of the content; the results were both worrisome and relieving, depending on how you viewed them. Thirty-six percent of the 502 respondents said yes, they do interpret ads as endorsements. But about half of respondents also said that this didn’t make them change their opinions about these brands.

Regardless of what audiences may actually think, investment firm Nomura Instinet estimated the advertiser boycott could have damaging effects on parent company Google, and cost the search giant as much as $750 million in revenue. Google and other firms, meanwhile, have countered back. Google is tip-toeing around whether the problem is as big as everyone says and feels, and RBC Capital Markets said in a research update that the part of Google’s business affected by the YouTube fiasco is technically only about 10 percent of the company’s revenues. And the $750 million is also less than one percent of Google’s projected sales for this year, which means Google might not take a huge hit if it reacts fast enough.

Meanwhile, Google has altered its rules for what videos can carry advertising, and invested research efforts into improved AI to better understand the context and sentiment of YouTube videos. Increased scrutiny on its public performance likely means it’ll invest in this even more.

The JPMorgan Chase Experiment

With Google being one of the world’s biggest platforms, it’s difficult for most brands to simply opt out and boycott completely. But larger firms are experimenting with ways to bypass total automation and use human judgment to find the coveted safe brand spaces.

Take JPMorgan Chase. The company told the New York Times that it has started whitelisting websites that run its ads via Google. Prompted by the realization that an ad for Chase’s private client services had appeared on a site called “Hillary 4 Prison,” it ran a 30-day test period in which an intern manually clicked through 12,000 websites where JPMorgan ads were appearing, to see whether they were being featured alongside objectionable content. The intern flagged about 7,000 ads that were appearing where the company would prefer them not to be.

Now, JPMorgan has arranged a “human-checked” list of 1,000 YouTube channels it has deemed safe for its ads to appear. And it has dropped the number of websites showing its ads from 400,000 to 5,000. So what did it learn from the test? Performance appeared to the be same, even though the ads were displayed on far fewer sites. Chase’s CMO Kristin Lemkau told the Times that whitelisting was becoming de rigeur now at the bank, and that “at some point, a human is going to take a look.”

New Skepticism About Automation

JPMorgan’s move into whitelisting, the YouTube controversy and advertiser boycotts are stirring larger conversations on the necessary evolution of the digital advertising industry. It’s not just that the technology is failing or not yet up to the standard of human editors, but that relying on programmatic advertising allows networks to “grade their own homework.” And this kind of blind advertising is bad for business.

Outsourcing monitoring to third-party auditors and in-house ad networks, which I previously wrote about, is a potential solution. But the issue is that programmatic has become a growing default that’s hard to slow down. Forrester Research said in a report that only 29 percent of marketers in 2016 took steps to whitelist websites for their ads. And some smaller brands simply can’t manage the resources to do that.

Hany Farid, a professor at Dartmouth and senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, has also said that Google, Facebook and other major companies ought to deploy more human editors to filter content — because the hype around AI is just that: hype.

But the bottom line is that human intervention is costly, and would be a paradigm shift for the way the advertising industry has evolved in recent years. It may be the way to go, but it’ll take some time for it to become just as automatic as programmatic.

Advertising | Perspectives

Media alliances take on the Google-Facebook duopoly

The Google-Facebook digital advertising duopoly seems like a fait accompli at this point. So too is less-than-favorable revenue that publishers get from them, as a leaked DCN report earlier this year indicated. So it’s not surprising that publishers keep trying to team up to take on the online tech giants. The question is whether these efforts will amount to much more than throwing rocks at a Google bus.

Before we get into the latest efforts, let’s look at the numbers: eMarketer’s latest forecast finds that Google and Facebook continue to dominate in 2017. Online advertising in the U.S. is expected to grow 16% this year to reach $83 billion, and the two companies stand to earn the most from this growth. Google will account for 40.7% of U.S. digital ad revenues in 2017—more than double Facebook’s share. And Google will outperform on search and grow this year to seize 78% of all U.S. search ad revenues. Facebook, which rules U.S. online display ads, will grow to control 39.1% of the U.S. display market.

New Alliances

Condé Nast recently teamed up with Vox and NBCUniversal to join their year-old effort, Concert. The premium advertising marketplace was meant to help advertisers get better combined audience. It promises to reach over 200 million online consumers — including 99% of all millennials, according to the comScore data that the companies cite. As part of their new team effort with Condé Nast on board, Concert will develop new ad products catered around mobile video and branded content. Vox and NBCUniversal also now benefit from the addition of Condé Nast’s behavioral data-tracking platform Spire — evidence that these companies are thinking about a win-win situation for everyone, not just themselves.

Meanwhile, just as YouTube and Facebook have made moves into video and TV — or what some people are suggesting is “the new TV” — Fox Network Group, Turner and Viacom have created a new consortium called OpenAP. The grouping is meant to align offerings but also help navigate the tricky territory of audience measurement. The group says that a neutral third-party auditor will run OpenAP and attacks what it calls “proprietary walled garden, self-governed reporting” — a likely nudge at Facebook and its measurement flubs.

The team effort is also necessary for the TV industry to maintain a semblance of control in an environment where digital is taking hold. As OpenAP’s letter states:

“OpenAP will be a single platform that agencies and advertisers can integrate with their own planning systems to activate advanced audience targeting and independent measurement within premium content. That premium content reaches 93% of all television audiences today, and we hope it will expand if additional publishers join OpenAP in the future. This consortium is a necessity to move our industry forward.”

And there have also been newspaper alliances. The holding companies of The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Mirror, The Sun, Express, Metro and The Daily Star in the U.K. are involved in a collaborative effort called “Project Juno” to take on the tech behemoths. Meanwhile, another U.K. body representing national and local publishers, the News Media Association (NMA), has called for an investigation into Google and Facebook’s online dominance because of their roles in helping to distribute fake news. This serves as a reminder of the perils of a news supply chain running on just a couple of distributors.

Coopetition Revisited

This isn’t the first effort at alliances to take on Facebook and Google. As I noted in a 2015 DCN column, coopetition — when companies put competition aside and cooperate for the greater good — has long been known in Silicon Valley. But for all the attention it attracted then, the Pangaea programmatic alliance of different newspaper publishers — including The Guardian, Financial Times, CNN International, Reuters and The Economist — has been fairly silent.

So too has the Truffle Pig advertising model that Snapchat, The Daily Mail and WPP became involved with in 2015. Like the real-life truffle hog it was named for, that advertising agency was meant to use its heightened sense of smell to sniff out and market content in a way only it could. As Digiday’s Jessica Davies pointed out last summer, “Such alliances have historically run into problems around infighting, lethargy and incompatible data and systems.”

And while some publishers are teaming up against Facebook and Google, others are imagining a different kind of coopetition altogether: working with them instead of against them. Some may refer to this as a “frog in boiling water” mentality (in which the publisher eventually dies). However former editor-in-chief of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, is among those to suggest otherwise. His take is that it’s obvious the two companies will maintain an authority no matter how hard publishers resist. “I can’t think of an editor that can afford to not be on Facebook; that would be suicidal because a third to half of your audience is there,” Rusbridger has said. And some local news partnership groups are following suit.

In the end, the alliances are good for publishers who can share knowledge and audiences and get more attention from marketers. But the idea that they will somehow supplant or topple tech dominance is wrong-headed. In the end, it will take cooperation between publishers, as well as between publishers and tech companies, to succeed in a disruptive era.

Perspectives | Revenue

Why publishers and advertisers need to get native advertising right

Native advertising has come a long way from its debut in the digital marketing environment, when the lines between advertising and editorial were blurry at best. But a new study from the cloud-based intelligence platform MediaRadar, “Leaders and Lessons in Native Advertising,” found that 37% of publishers still aren’t complying with the Federal Trade Commission’s rules on disclosure for native advertising.

In late 2015, he FTC clamped down with more guidelines and an 11-page guidebook for businesses to promote more transparency within native advertising and ensure clarity for audiences, as I wrote at the time. Of course, 37% is a huge improvement from 61%, which was the figure cited in last year’s study on non-compliance. But the bottom line is that honesty about native ads has yet to become the status quo. In a world where fake news and ad fraud have troubled audiences and skewed our instincts for what’s valid, it’s to the benefit of publishers and advertisers to work harder.

The Evolution of the ‘Explicit Native’

Attracting the attention of users quick to download an ad-blocker or scroll past promoted posts on social media poses a significant challenge for marketers and publishers. Enter native advertising, thought to be the panacea for balancing editorial interest with advertising dollars. The FTC guidelines emphasized explicit disclosure of native ads in proximity to the headline (which, let’s face it, is the only thing many readers will allow their eyes to glaze through).

While the IAB deemed the terms “overly prescriptive,” DCN’s own Jason Kint said the impact of the guidelines would largely depend on what cases the FTC brought to the fold. There’s a difference between publishers and advertisers “trying to do the right thing” versus those engaging in “egregious acts of deception,” to use Kint’s words.

Native Exposed

And we saw the first case the FTC brought up, in March 2016, when it charged retailer Lord & Taylor for allowing 50 Instagram stars to wear the exact same dress — with none of those influencers noting in their posts that wearing the dress was a coordinated campaign. Nylon magazine also ran an article and an Instagram post featuring the dress. It was almost as if Lord & Taylor had decided to blatantly disregard the FTC’s disclosure rules.

The FTC saw it as such and brought charges against the retailer, eventually reaching a settlement. The company, for its part, announced that it “never sought to deceive” its customers. But it was a clear warning that the FTC was serious in doubling down on enforcement, and that actions speak louder than words when it comes to trusting marketers. No matter that the FTC’s makeup under President Donald Trump is still a mystery (there are only two current members of the Commission) — the stage has already been set for advertisers to work harder to ensure compliance and not outsource this work to other parties.

And if the evolution of labeling content as native indicates anything, most digital publishers are trying harder. There’s been a 119% year-over-year growth in doing so. So how about the 37% of publishers choosing not to comply? They’re risking their reputation and revenue.

The Benefits of Going All In

With native set to continue to grow again this year, it seems only logical to go all-in on following the rules while delivering good advertising, and not circumventing the rules for the same goal. Yet some challenges going forward are that most native advertising campaigns only last a couple of months, and native renewal rates are fairly small at 33% across all media sites.

How should we address this? Well, MediaRadar’s study indicates that publishers who have robust native advertising operations and have invested in the necessary tech — including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Quartz — have a stronger renewal rate at 49%. Top publishers who sell and measure the impact of native successfully can expect renewal rates of 60 to 80%, according to MediaRadar’s forecast.

Tips for Success

That being said, here’s some advice for publishers going forward:

  1. Invest more in native advertising for more profit. It’s not going away, so seizing the right packages and running campaigns long enough to actually benefit is key. That also means considering the use of in-house native advertising teams, or freelancers devoted solely to creating native advertising.
  2. Communicate the results. This helps prove the efficacy of the advertising. And, granted the results are positive, this helps increase renewals.
  3. Consider newer ad categories that have yet to jump on the native bandwagon. Media and entertainment, professional services, finance and real estate, tech and retail were the top five categories in native advertising last year, so look beyond those to expand.
  4. Invest in the right technology. It will help sustain your business in the long run.
  5. Don’t break the rules. Unless you’re OK with potentially risking some revenue (a fine of $16,000 for every native ad violation) and your reputation among users.
  6. Try harder. The big issue for publishers who don’t follow the FTC’s guidelines, it seems, is that they want to game the system to make bad native ads work. But sacrificing quality or trust isn’t the way to go. The answer: Better advertising.
Advertising | Perspectives

We need to solve digital advertising’s quality control problem now

An explosive investigation in The Times of London found advertising from reputable brands like Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar and the NGO Marie Curie running on YouTube videos promoting extremism and pornographic content. So, by extension, those companies were helping to fund pro-Nazi, ISIS and other terrorist propaganda.

Despite YouTube’s investment in software to weed out such content, its continued existence — coupled with the advertising that appears on it — shines a harsh light on advertising’s poor quality control. And News Corp.’s CEO Robert Thomson released an incisive statement in reaction, saying that the industry’s actions are undermining its stated priorities, and vouching to bring its advertising under its own authority.

It’s clear that attaining actual solutions to this problem requires much more soul-searching within the entire industry, and a change in current operations.

A Looming Problem

In many ways, the recent report in The Times is not that surprising. Publishers and advertisers have found themselves in unwanted territory on the internet before, as we previously wrote in DCN. The attention fake news garnered at the end of last year was a game-changer in that regard, as it spotlighted the money to be made from hyper-partisan sites with misinformation. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft’s pledge last December to share information, to better eliminate extremist content, was therefore a lauded effort.

But even though Google says it has a “zero tolerance policy for content that incites violence or hatred,” blacklisting is apparently not enough. And ad quality has long been an issue before “fake news” became the term du jour in media and marketing circles. The pervasiveness of fraud and viewability issues has demanded better standards for metrics, and better advertising so that consumers don’t just reach for the ad blocker. Google doubled-down by removing 1.7 billion ads last year that defied its policies — which was more than twice the number of ads it took down in 2015.

But with Facebook and Google together controlling well over half of the digital ad market, that leaves smaller players in a desperate scramble for the scraps, undermining concerns about integrity.

Who’s to Blame?

Which brings us to the question: Is programmatic advertising to blame, or is it a scapegoat for other problems the industry can’t yet address? Marie Curie, for instance, claims it was absolutely unaware its ads were appearing alongside the content of a pro-Nazi group. Sandals Resorts, which had its advertising appear next to an Al-Shabaab video, meanwhile, blamed Google’s mishandling, stating the video hadn’t been categorized as “sensitive.”

The advertisers were quick to express their deep concern and withdraw their advertisements, but the “hands off, we didn’t realize it” response is not the kind of reaction that engenders trust. And that is the bigger concern here. News Corp’s Chief Executive Robert Thomson called this out in a statement. Some of his choice lines deserve highlighting:

“We are in an era in which integrity is priceless, yet digital distributors have long been a platform for the fake, the faux and the fallacious, highlighting an issue which we have long stressed – that they have eroded the integrity of content by undermining its provenance.”

“Ad agencies and their programmatic networks are also at fault because they have sometimes artificially aggregated audiences, and these are then plied with content of dubious provenance – the agencies win, the fabricators of the fake win, and advertisers and society both lose. Affinity and integrity are core elements of a sustainable relationship between advertiser and consumer, and yet affinity and integrity are far too often missing in the modern marketplace.”

If the demand for money and efficiency is eroding the integrity of content — not to mention that of brands and platforms — everyone involved must collaborate to gain that trust back. And that means investing the time, energy and resources in some not so quick-and-easy moves.

Identifying Solutions

One potential solution that puts the advertising industry back into the hands of advertisers is to rely less on programmatic and more on in-house ad networks. News Corp, for instance, is testing its own digital ad network to ensure a “high quality audience for advertisers.” The Scandinavian publisher Schibsted also has its own in-house ad network, and focusing on that has helped decrease ad-page load times while doubling viewability from 40 to 80 percent. Vox too has its own in-house ad platform. And alongside BuzzFeed, Mic and other publishers, it’s expressed an aversion to programmatic. Digital Content Next recently announced the formation of TrustX, a cooperative digital advertising marketplace made up of many DCN member companies, including NewsCorp and Vox.

The reality is that individual ad networks are not yet mainstream by any means. Most advertisers are not big enough or rich enough to opt out of automated advertising, and smaller publishers don’t have the size to build their own network.

What is possible, though, is a more consistent, industry-wide approach to addressing these issues and testing solutions. That means worrying less about the bottom line — at least for now — and taking collective responsibility for this problem. And more human oversight over the entire industry — even over programmatic advertising — is the first big step. Just as Facebook has acknowledged it can’t just rely on an algorithm to stamp out fake news on its platform, marketers know that it can’t rely on automation alone. Doing so only stands to create more problems for an industry already on the edges of consumer trust.

Perspectives

Speculation over Spectacles: Snap’s IPO and its mixed value for publishers

Snap Inc., the parent company of the millennial-loved Snapchat app and makers of camera-equipped sunglasses, Spectacles, recently filed paperwork for an initial public offering, targeting a valuation between $20 billion and $25 billion. With a coveted core base — the app claims to reach 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. on a given day — and a business model matching the advertising industry’s ongoing shift to mobile, the five-year-old company remains a media darling in an environment dearth of other significant offerings.

Snap wants to raise at least $3 billion, but it has yet to turn the kind of profit that justifies such an expensive offering. Closer inspection on the company’s revenue sources, losses, competition and stagnating growth rates shows that despite the attention, the company might present challenges to investors — and publishers who are investing time and money in the platform. The company lost $514.6 million in 2016 and has warned prospective shareholders that it “may never achieve or maintain profitability.”

The Pluses for Snap — and Publishers
But Snapchat has certainly made hay with its walled garden, Discover, showcasing content from premium publishers eager to get daily content in front of that juicy core audience. And the New York Times recently signed on to deliver its Morning Brief for Discover, citing Snapchat as the “ideal place” to deliver “smart, visual digital journalism” to younger audiences. According to new research from eMarketer, nearly half of Snapchat’s revenues last year — 43%, to be precise — came from ads on Discover.

Unlike the 30-second standard ads for television commercials, or even YouTube’s 15- or 30-second pre-roll ads, the quick and easy 10-second spots on Discover are just right for an audience used to on-demand television. And advertisers must tailor their creative to the audience, in order to drive swipes and attention. Plus, eMarketer projects that Snapchat’s total revenues will more than double in 2017, from $348 million to $804 million, while the company says it is aiming for $1 billion in revenues this year.

The Downfalls for Publishers
That’s great for Snap but not so hot for most publishers, who have received little more than tepid gains from their work on Snapchat, according to research from Digital Content Next. DCN found that their members surveyed reaped the least revenues from Snapchat in the first half of 2016 — $192,819 per publisher, compared to $773,567 earned on YouTube, $560,144 from Facebook and $482,788 on Twitter. DCN publishers also cited Snapchat as the most difficult company to work with.

While Snapchat has alluded to future offerings of better metrics for advertisers, and announced a pay-up-front licensing model that may help publishers monetize on Discover more effectively — a model akin to what TV networks use when purchasing programming — that’s not exactly a foolproof profit plan, at least not yet. While Snapchat has managed to avoid the onslaught of fake news that’s polluted other platforms, publishers would be right to continue to be wary of giving complete control to the platform — even a hot one like Snapchat with a lock (for now) on millennials.

The Stresses of Being a Hot Commodity
Of course, Snapchat’s biggest rival, Facebook, isn’t standing still. Like Snapchat, Facebook also wants to be the next TV, and a much more visual network. From Instagram Stories to tests of disappearing messages on Messenger, Facebook hasn’t been discreet about cloning Snapchat, and this intense competition may prove difficult for the upstart in the long run. (Note that Snap rejected a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook previously.)

In its prospectus, Snapchat cited “increased competition” as one of the key reasons user growth slowed considerably at the end of last year, a trend that prompted comparisons to Twitter — another company with a hot IPO that’s failed to attract new users and growth. And unlike Facebook — which has grown to be the most powerful network in countries like India, where mobile connectivity is the de-facto way users access the Internet — Snapchat’s reliance on strong mobile infrastructure and cheap bandwidth costs means that its international growth is limited. It also faces competition from regional apps like Asia’s Snow.

Then there’s the concern that Snapchat will fail to reach users over the age of 30, whereas Facebook has proved to be friendly for multiple generations. Better ad targeting and deeper engagement, therefore, is crucial for Snapchat. But it’s running neck-and-neck with Instagram when it comes to being an important network for teens, according to a fall 2016 survey by Piper Jaffray, with 80% of teens using Snapchat to 79% opting for Instagram. Not only that, but one in three users on both Instagram and Snapchat said they hardly noticed the ads on their platform of choice, according to eMarketer.

Snap certainly has some tall orders to fill if it wants to match its valuation hype, as the buzz builds around its IPO. Publishers, especially magazine and digital native outlets, will continue to shower attention on Snapchat and get a payoff, but for the platform to really reach beyond its core millennials, that will take more time and investment.

Perspectives | Video

Facebook shifts focus from live-streaming video to long-form

Although Facebook paid millions to the likes of the New York Times and BuzzFeed to live stream a certain number of videos — a $50 million investment altogether — publishers now say Facebook is talking to them less about live video and more about premium quality content, according to Recode’s Kurt Wagner.

“Our goal is to kick-start an ecosystem of partner content for the tab, so we’re exploring funding some seed video content, including original and licensed scripted, unscripted and sports content, that takes advantage of mobile and the social interaction unique to Facebook,” Facebook’s Ricky Van Veen said recently in a statement regarding original content.

While the one-year contracts haven’t yet ended, and there’s no official word from Facebook about them, it appears that they may have been a short term strategy for the platform. It also turns out many publishers aren’t interested in renewing these one-year Facebook Live contracts either. Some told Recode that Facebook’s compensation wasn’t enough to justify the time and resources needed to produce the live streams. So what’s the future of live-streaming on Facebook, and how can publishers get on board the new push for long-form video?

Live-Streaming Is Here to Stay
While some may interpret the news as Facebook admitting that live-streaming was never a profitable prospect, all arrows point to live-streaming’s staying power. Live viewership among Internet users decreased slightly in the second half of 2016. YouTube and Snapchat experienced small declines in market share of live-streaming, but Facebook’s market share actually rose from 14% to 17% between June and November of last year, according to eMarketer, suggesting that Facebook is emerging as a leader in a market that’s still in its infancy.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced a slew of new tools and features for Live: a video tab on the Facebook app that makes spotting live videos easier (which helps fight against the algorithms that might keep viewership at bay); the ability to broadcast onto Facebook straight from a web browser (which is sure to keep Facebook competitive against the video bloggers doing this on YouTube); a “Live Contributor” role Page admins can assign people to broadcast live from the page; and enhanced live video metrics for people with at least 5,000 followers. Facebook is also planning to introduce mid-roll advertising, which will finally offer some payoffs for publishers who haven’t yet profited from these video streams.

Mediocre Content from Publishers Can’t Match Viral Hits
So it’s not necessarily that Facebook doesn’t believe publishers will now stay clear from Live altogether. In a breaking news moment, Live is the best way to reach as many as 1.7 billion viewers at once. Think of last year’s coup attempt in Turkey, or when House Democrats staged a sit-in to push for gun control.

Let’s also not overlookthe shooting of Philando Castile by police, and his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live stream in the immediate aftermath. Or even Chewbacca Mom, laughing in the glory of her own happiness, and the subsequent viral sensation she became.

When publishers slog through Facebook Live like it’s a chore, it shows. Hosts wear their ambivalence on their faces, and the quality is mediocre at best. With the abundance of competing content, users have no incentive to watch a live-stream. When individuals take to Facebook Live, however, it’s different. There’s no ambivalence. There’s the necessity that comes from immediacy. And the result is connection.

Brands Are Already Succeeding with Long-Form Video
Connection is the reason why some brands would prefer long-form video anyway. It often seems like Facebook is calling the shots these days when it comes to influencing media. But on-demand video services and live streaming are already pushing marketers to think beyond short 30-second ads, and toward advertising that is, essentially, stand-alone entertainment that connects with the viewer.

Case in point: Luxury brands like Burberry and BMW. Short commercials, which helps boost brand recognition, aren’t as important to them as it is to lesser known companies. They have loyal customers who are more concerned with the identity of the product — and identity comes from the perspectives, narratives and dramas you can present in what are basically short films. It’s a shift within marketing — “being” becomes more important than “having.”

Meanwhile, remember that ad blockers are some of the most popular mobile app and web extensions, with one out of every five smartphone users blocking advertising on web browsers, according to PageFair. Again, it goes back to the cable industry analogy. Just as viewers make time for premium long-form programming, getting them to turn off ad blockers requires making quality advertising! Because web advertising has become so targeted, there’s also more potential to experiment with advertising lengths.

So even though live-streaming on Facebook has been hit-and-miss so far, these could just be growing pains: Publishers will likely continue efforts with live-streaming and creating their own long-form video for editorial—and let’s not forget their focus on monetizing, regardless of format or platform.

 

Perspectives

4 Signs of life for Twitter

Many people consider Twitter to be on death’s door, almost flatlining and barely breathing. But, in the words of one Monty Python character: “I’m not dead!” Well, at least not yet.

Twitter had its shares of missteps in 2016, including an exodus of executives, including its CTO and COO, and a failure to sell itself in a highly-publicized bake sale. One of the reasons that sale fell through was the problem Twitter has with trolls and abuse, which has driven off many high-profile users. And its CEO Jack Dorsey is only part-time on the job, as he’s also CEO of Square.

So why am I confident that 2017 will breathe some new life into Twitter, besides our new Troll-in-Chief taking office soon? Let me count the ways…

1. Jack Dorsey’s Listening Tour

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey certainly showed his interest in taking public commentary seriously when he issued a public call for feedback at the cusp of 2017, asking what the microblogging service ought to be doing better. His request drew hundreds of responses circulating around four themes: curbing online abuse; allowing an edit function; providing users better management of topics and interests; and offering easier ways to track conversations.

His tweets on the four requests — brief, of course, given he was limited to 140 characters — show where Twitter may put more emphasis this year. He said that following topics was the strongest request and that being more topic- and interest-focused “opens up a lot.” He also noted that conversations, while a huge part of what makes Twitter magical, are simply very difficult to follow, and promised to make that easier. So it looks like we can bank on anticipating more ease in those departments.

The others are a bit thornier. It’s one thing to offer a quick fix to edit errors, for instance. But if the President of the United States uses Twitter in such a way that his account becomes the most powerful publication in the world  — and it’s a guarantee that his tweets will be included in news stories — Twitter is no doubt part of the public record. It’ll have to do more development to ensure accountability if it chooses to steer toward an edit function.

2. Fighting Abuse

When it comes to abuse, meanwhile, Dorsey acknowledged that a ton of work is necessary ahead and that the “biggest ask” was for greater transparency around its actions. And then, as if on cue, Twitter swiftly shut down the account of pharmaceutical executive and Trump supporter Martin Shkreli after he targeted freelance reporter Lauren Duca — who penned “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America” on Teen Vogue. You could see that Twitter was at least trying, even though it missed the opportunity to showcase full transparency by only giving a one-sentence response to justify shutting down Shkreli’s account.

That aside, the fact that this occurred on Twitter — followed by chatter around it on Twitter — only to be followed by news about it generated again, on Twitter — shows the company excels at a certain kind of rabid engagement among its regular users.

3. Brands Experiment with Twitter Moments

In fact, it could have been a Twitter Moment, something that marketers and publishers are also experimenting with on the platform. Moments, with its curated tweets, are an ideal product for casual users who don’t want to be on the platform all day but want to know the Twitter gossip around a particular event or story.

From a brand or company perspective, they’re also inexpensive to produce and take advantage of the real-time marketing that Twitter also offers — hence why clients as diverse as Lime-A-Rita, YouTube and Newsweek are all jumping into the fray. It would come as no surprise if more news clients and marketers followed suit in 2017, or if Twitter did more to enhance the feature — after all, Moments is already a solution to help people follow a topic or interest.

4. Twitter Remains an Important Source of News

Indeed, while Twitter may never be able to scale the way Facebook has, it has been leaps and bounds ahead of its rival when it comes to hiring editors, working with news publishers and generally positing itself as a media company. Unlike Facebook, whose recent hire of Campbell Brown to lead news partnerships seems more like a hire of a marketing rep rather than a public editor or editor in chief, Twitter is looking to hire editors and an associate producer.

And let’s face it: News breaks all the time on Twitter, whether by eyewitnesses at the scene, or journalists giving inside dirt, or celebs and sports stars posting what they shouldn’t. Twitter has also been testing breaking news push notifications along the lines of the Associated Press and New York Times, and has moved from the “social networking” to the “news” category on Apple’s App Store. Not only that, but Twitter’s push into live video, including its deal to air NFL games live on the platform, is a much more elegant maneuver than Facebook’s own insistence on Facebook Live (which, with its conspicuous sponsored posts on Facebook and enormous banners on buildings, seems much more desperate).

Twitter may have trouble growing its user numbers and stock price, but its relevance keeps rising. Let’s see what 2017 brings. And remember, when you hit rock bottom, there’s only one way to go: up!

Perspectives | Video

Top 6 trends for publishers in 2017

It’s been a topsy-turvy year for publishers in 2016, with big pushes into video, native advertising and even VR. But the end of the year saw the rise of Donald Trump, and questions about the power of social media and filter bubbles, along with the upside of a “Trump bump” in paid subscriptions and donations at the New York Times, ProPublica and other places.

With 2016 soon coming to a close, let’s look ahead to how the biggest trends of the past year will influence the digital media business in the year ahead.

1. Addressing fake news and the filter bubble
Fake news and the filter bubble, particularly after BuzzFeed’s explosive story on Macedonian teens reaping profits from pro-Trump news sites, have emerged as the topics du jour for media and technology companies following the 2016 election. With users now increasingly aware that red feeds and blue feeds exist as competing truths on their favorite platforms, all parties involved – from technology behemoths like Facebook, Google and Twitter, to media executives and publishers, to individuals themselves – must bear the burden of addressing this issue as 2017 unfolds.

Facebook and Twitter have both announced measures to help stop the spread of fake news, particularly by limiting advertising from fake news websites on its platforms. Facebook has reportedly filed a patent for a technology that would help users spot and report “objectionable content,” and is working with top news publishers to curate content directly into news feeds, both of which would presumably help curb an infestation of bogus content. And news consumers themselves will need to brush up on digital news literacy if they want to understand where content comes from and who’s behind it.

2. Love/hate relationship with platforms continues
Speaking of ups and downs, publishers have had a tough time coping with the growing power of social platforms, especially Facebook, as they command attention but don’t always play fair. Facebook continues to err in disclosing accurate ad and video measurements, while Twitter confuses analysts and consumers alike by banning, and then reinstating, the account of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. Their standards will have a wider influence on the industry – particularly when it comes to free speech, hate speech, and the limits and freedoms of platforms to censor content.

What publishers can do in working with these platforms is multifold. First, they must consider whether they want to continue to trust and sustain social media ecosystems (that were built in large part on the appeal of their content), while competing with them for advertising and distribution. And if it is the case that Facebook is not investing in publishers the way they should and Twitter is declining in importance, then perhaps publishers need to invest more in other platforms like Snapchat and Google AMP rather than Facebook’s Instant Articles.

More likely, publishers will need to work together to push platforms like Facebook to work more closely on initiatives that are a win-win for both sides. Making sure analytics are right, ferreting out fake news and developing long-term revenues for Facebook Live would go a long way toward collaborative goals.

3. Premium content demands premium subscriptions and donations
Despite Donald Trump’s war with mainstream media, his election has helped the bottom line for news publishers and media outlets. From ProPublica to the New York Times, The Atlantic to Columbia Journalism Review and the Los Angeles Times – all have reported increased readership and interest from audiences, whether in the form of web traffic, donations or direct subscriptions.

Will this paid content boom last? The Financial Times had a similar “Brexit bump” and has largely kept most of its uptick in paid subscribers, so we will see. But it’s interesting that there’s less emphasis on eyeballs-for-eyeballs’-sake and more interest in paid premium content. Two new digital startups, The Outline (from Joshua Topolsky) and Axios (from Politico founder Jim VandeHei), have pushed quality over quantity, with manifestos against the chase for clicks. VandeHei, in particular, is pushing $10,000 subscriptions at Axios. We’ll see if people continue paying up.

4. Too much video, too many native ads
This year saw so many publishers push harder into video, and push harder toward native ads and branded content. On the video side, publishers like Mashable and BuzzFeed went all-in on video, while startups like NowThis and OZY are basically built for video. And traditional publishers like the New York Times, Time Inc. and the Wall Street Journal have invested deeply in their in-house studios to deliver branded content. Vice Media and BuzzFeed have also said that branded and sponsored content offered a substantial chunk of their 2016 revenues.

And that parallels the push by Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to make big bets on video, including live-streaming, where Facebook paid publishers to produce content. But how much is enough, and when do you get to overkill? We know that advertisers love branded content and video ads, and publishers know that their video is eminently sharable on social media, but is this what consumers really want? When you have a glut, only the best quality can survive. People will gravitate toward quality content, toward timely content, toward content with a personality. That means data and surveys will play an outsize role in which types of branded content or video – or heck, branded video – will make it in the long run.

5. Beyond the cutting edge: Bots, VR and edge tech needs to add to bottom line
Virtual reality was a media darling in 2016, but it’s still a far way off from mass consumption. More than anything, it’s going to take actual demand from the consumer, and widespread adoption, for it to become truly profitable. 2017 may not be the year we’ll see that, but the VR and AR markets are expected to grow in the long run as the hardware and techniques for investing in the tech become cheaper.

Bots, meanwhile, will become a hotter topic in the coming year, especially given Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure cloud service that will help developers build bots more easily. Yet again, consumer attention remains an important consideration. While bots may seem like a convenience, and have caught on in Asian countries, developers are going to have to work hard to convince people of their necessity in order for the tech to truly take off and become profitable.

6. The regulatory climate under Trump for M&A and privacy
An incoming Trump administration has Net neutrality advocates worried that a reversal of federal policy is likely despite Trump’s silence on the issue. His main public comment on Net neutrality, from 2014, is a tweet asserting the FCC’s move to reclassify the internet as a utility was “another top down power grab of the Obama administration.” His appointees to the FCC transition team have all been critical of current Net neutrality rules, so this could lead to yet another battle over the rules.

Although Trump promised that he would fight against the $85.4 billion AT&T/Time Warner deal, which he lambasted as “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” it seems he may be tiptoeing back on that line. AT&T executives, at least, seem confident the merger will pass regulatory scrutiny after meeting with Trump’s transition team. Whether this suggests more mega-mergers in media and tech likely depends on just how fickle Trump proves to be.

And when it comes to privacy, all indicators suggest 2017 and the following three years will be turbulent times. With more reports of hacking and press freedom under threat, the Signal app – which security researchers say offers the most privacy protection out of all messaging apps – has experienced a 400 percent jump in daily downloads since November 8.

Perspectives

Stamping out fake news will take collaboration by platforms and publishers

Since Donald J. Trump became president-elect of the United States, attention on “fake news,” its role during the U.S. election, its contribution to social media echo chambers (and subsequently, our understanding of reality) has taken America by storm. By one professor’s estimate, at least 120 fake news sites exist. Apparently, fake news entrepreneurs can earn anywhere from $10,000 a month, to $3,000 a day—even as much as $10,000 a day from Google AdSense.

Facebook’s role as the garden where these fake news “insects” roam wild is under even more scrutiny, as is the payment mechanisms from Google. Just what these companies ought to do, though, and how publishers can assist with their efforts, has been a trial-and-error process that leaves few, if any, industry analysts satisfied in the current hyper-partisan, “post-truth” world. But some common themes have emerged in the search for solutions.

First, Admit There’s a Problem
One is that the leaders of these tech companies must acknowledge with resolute conviction that they do contribute to the spread of misinformation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg immediately denied the claim that Facebook played a major role in the elections and declared that “more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic.” Six days later, after more intense coverage on the issue—including word that a renegade group of workers within Facebook had formed a task force to deal with the problem—Zuckerberg wrote a more thoughtful post on Facebook, outlining some of the projects in motion to mete out fake news.

“We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties,” he wrote before specifying efforts like third party verification from fact-checkers and improvements on the quality of “related articles.” “Disrupting fake news economics” is also a goal, and Facebook updated its Audience Network policy as well to align with that. Now, it states “it will not display ads in websites or mobile apps that hold fake news,” as Adweek’s Marty Swant and Christopher Heine reported.

Google too revealed it was working on policy changes to keep fake news sites from using its AdSense advertising network. The new mandate pressures publishers to prove their legitimacy. “Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” Google said.

Second, Take Concrete, Transparent Steps
The moves are not quite enough, though, according to DCN CEO Jason Kint. In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Kint argues that the two companies owe both users and democracy far more, especially with their resources. “Wouldn’t it make sense for you to pursue cleaning up the garbage littering the digital media ecosystem with the same excitement, investment and vigilance with which you pursue these huge, visionary projects?” Klint wrote. “We don’t see that in your public statements or actions.”

He also underscored the necessity of transparency. Zuckerberg’s post, for example, had left some industry analysts wondering—who are the independent fact-checkers Facebook will be working with? When news broke that the company was secretly developing censorship tools to enter China, many in the tech industry bristled at why it couldn’t devote that kind of stewardship to curbing fake news.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, stressed that Facebook needs to open up its walled garden of data on fake news and its influence. “Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers,” she wrote in an Op-Ed for the New York Times. “It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.”

Roles for Publishers, Ad Tech
If Facebook is akin to a tobacco company, that means that publishers and news outlets must work harder to depend less on Facebook and more on alternative means of distribution, to reduce the monopoly it has over publishers. Publishers also need to look internally at themselves. Fraudulent ads have been known to appear on the New York Times, for example, because human oversight of programmatic advertising is often lacking. Even if the Times has one of the “cleanest ad experiences in the publishing business,” as public editor Liz Spayd wrote, the Times should do more to ensure this stepsister of fake news doesn’t appear.

Ad tech firms, who tend to take a “who am I to decide?” approach to fake news, as Digiday’s Lucia Moses wrote, might also want to focus less on the dollars earned and have an empathy check. Perhaps they could take a tip from AppNexus Inc., which operates one of the biggest digital advertising services. The company did a “human audit” of the so-called alt-right website Breitbart News, found it violated hate speech rules, and so barred Breitbart from using its ad tech service. Even if AppNexus wasn’t looking at fake news, per se, its hard scrutiny shows how firms can be serious about the range of issues it has presented.

The publishing and platform businesses ultimately serve their users. For publishers to truly emphasize facts in the click-bait, competitive nature of the web, they need to prime their audiences with less of an emotional reaction toward consuming information, and write headlines and news alerts appropriately instead of amplifying false claims. That also requires much-needed media literacy for all of us, especially in light of news that students cannot identify fake news.

Indeed, no one technology company or publisher can save us now. This is a group effort.

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