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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

How far can the video push go?

Seems like everyone wants video these days. Facebook is paying publishers and celebrities to be part of Facebook Live, BuzzFeed is handing out two-year contracts to top video creators, and Twitter has had to pay its Vine creators to keep them happy. Not to mention Mashable recently laying off staff while pivoting more strongly into video.

But while the video gold rush continues, will there be enough gold to go around? Will all these bets pay off? While video advertising continues to grow—and pay more than ads around text—not all video content is created equally. And not all of it will pay the bills for quality video productions.

Live-streaming craze
Live-streaming video has gone through a number of boomlets, from the Ustream days to Periscope and on to the recent push for Facebook Live. The promise is that anyone can point and shoot live video from their bedroom, or out at a protest, or out in the field from a reporter. Following in the footsteps of Meerkat and Periscope, Facebooks Live is bringing live-streaming to its 1.2 billion users.

“Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page. “This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together.”

To give the service a boost, Facebook has been paying influential celebrities and media properties like the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Vox, and food and travel publisher Tastemade to use Facebook Live. BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reports the social media giant has offered publishers “around $250,000 for 20 posts per month over a three-month period” and “six-figure checks to celebrities who agree to use its live-streaming product.” Twitter also recently announced that it will spend millions to stream 10 NFL games during the 2016 season, and Snapchat has also scored a deal with NBC to showcase highlights from the 2016 Olympics on its platform. And AOL just announced that it will join the fray with live “TV-grade” video.

But all the talent going toward video also presents some of conundrums that publishers and platforms will have to sort through. The first has to do with content. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern put it, most of the mainstream media efforts seem to be as lo-fi as the do-it-yourself content, with poor production value. “Much of the content feels pointless,” she wrote. “BuzzFeed’s infamous watermelon-bursting video hit nearly a million live viewers. Fortune had reporters try protein bars made from dead insects.”

Beyond live-streaming
Live streaming isn’t the only kind of video filling up News Feeds. Mic’s daily video series “Mic Check” attracts the bulk of its mostly millennial audience through Facebook, where it has 1.7 million likes. And BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, based in Los Angeles, produces “videos that routinely rack up millions of views in the span of hours,” as Gawker’s Jordan Sargent wrote.

But some missteps have occurred along the way. BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, for example, released a video titled “27 Questions Black People Have For Black People,” that was widely criticized for perpetuating stereotypes, leading BuzzFeed to release an apology on Twitter. Not only that, but as more and more people start using video, the competition for what’s considered “good content” becomes much more fierce — which means that creating a sustainable financial operation becomes much more difficult.

BuzzFeed has been offering two-year contracts that “bind the creators to the company while also allowing their work to flow out and away from BuzzFeed,” Sargent wrote. Vine stars have also demanded they be paid for their work, according to BuzzFeed’s Kantrowitz. “Three and a half years is a long time to have us posting on your platform for free,” one Vine star said, while noting he could move elsewhere, such as Facebook or YouTube.

Whether these video endeavors are financially sustainable in the long run is still a question mark for digital-only outlets that have recently undergone corrections (although BuzzFeed certainly has assets behind it). But for now, the video push has scrambled the equation, with platforms paying publishers, publishers paying creators, and anyone with video skills sitting in the cat bird’s seat.

is industry cratering?
Perspectives

A correction for digital natives? Yes, and that’s fine

Days after nearly a million people watched a watermelon explode on Facebook Live, the Financial Times reported a gloomy outlook for the digital company behind the endeavor: BuzzFeed missed its 2015 revenue target by 32 percent and was cutting its revenue projections for 2016 in half.

Coupled with ongoing layoffs and reorganizations at top digital media companies, these shaky performances have left some people wondering whether these once-touted darlings — like the watermelon before it —are ready to burst.

BuzzFeed Falling Short?

BuzzFeed anticipated about $250 million in revenue for 2015 yet brought in less than $170 million, according to the FT’s Matthew Garrahan and Henry Mance, and slashed its 2016 revenue goals from $500 million to $250 million. BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer quickly dismissed the 2016 projections (though he wouldn’t discuss last year’s performace), and said the company was on track to exceed its revenue targets in Q2 and for the rest of the year.

“There’s nothing cratering in the industry. It’s better than ever,” he told Recode’s Peter Kafka. “It’s just different.

What may be different for BuzzFeed, according to Kafka, is the theory that BuzzFeed’s core ad product, native advertising written on behalf of marketers, might not scale as well as video advertising, which is generating big bucks. Another theory for the unexpected revenue shortage is that while BuzzFeed is a leader in distributing content directly onto social platforms — for example, video uploaded directly to Facebook — it hasn’t yet been able to earn money from that content because the platforms are still developing their ad strategies.

One advertising model that is certain, though, is video. “Video ad rates continue to hold up far better than for ads placed alongside all those tiresome words,” Ken Doctor wrote in Nieman Lab.

Video was also the secret word behind recent layoffs and restructuring at Mashable, which, along with Gawker, Al Jazeera America, Salon, International Business Times and Huffington Post, suffered from cutbacks in staffing. In an especially shocking blow, Mashable announced that Jim Roberts, who came to Mashable from Reuters, and before that, the New York Times, would be leaving. He is widely credited with helping Mashable grow up and hired editors to oversee political and world news alongside tech information and reporting. About 30 Mashable staff were laid off to refocus more on video and core Mashable content — namely, tech and entertainment — and away from news and politics.

Sky-High Valuations

The valuations that Mashable and other digital companies had, though, led to a lot more pressure to perform. Mashable’s announcement came not too long after it raised $15 million from Turner Broadcasting and others — a move some dubbed as “new media chasing old media” — bringing its total funding to $46 million. Comcast’s NBCUniversal, meanwhile, invested $200 million in BuzzFeed last summer at a $1.5 billion valuation, and invested $200 million in Vox Media. Adding to the repertoire of huge digital media investments is German media giant Axel Springer, which has invested  in 15 digital media companies (including Mic) in addition to buying Business Insider last year for about $450 million.

Do these investors have reason to worry about owning potential “unicorpses”? Probably not. But in any new field of media experimentation, there will be highs and lows. With the proliferation of so many native-digital players, it was predictable that there would be a correction, and eventually consolidation. For Mashable, BuzzFeed and the like, their content strategies are moving faster than the monetization strategies — which, while disappointing on the financial end, is certainly not a bad thing when building an engaged audience. While it doesn’t bode well for the value of text, it makes sense that these companies are turning to video if that’s where the money is. Other legacy media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post are doing the same.

If anything, these recent shake-ups in the digital media business serve as a reminder that anticipating the future of the business is no easy task. “If people expect these companies to have figured out how to replace the legacy news companies and navigate this new world, they’ve got to think again,” Doctor wrote. “There is no secret sauce in news publishing.”

Perspectives

Annotation platform Genius moves into ads, controversy

With venture capital behind it, the Brooklyn-based web annotation startup Genius recently hired its first chief revenue offer and announced plans to build an advertising business. Ronen Shapiro, a veteran of Vice Media, Complex and Pandora, will oversee sales through advertising, publishing deals and events.

But Genius, which was originally conceived as the crowdsourced lyrics annotation site Rap Genius, has also attracted controversy. Its ambitions to “annotate the Internet” have drawn scrutiny to the often blurry distinctions between free speech and online harassment, which may inhibit its potential for revenue.

Tricky ad prospects
Its Web Annotator tool, enabled by a browser plug-in or or by typing “genius.it” before a web address, offers an alternative to traditional online comments. It creates a mirror version of the website in which users can comment, a sort of “digital version of margin notes,” as Slate’s Chelsea Hassler put it. The annotations are publicly available, but only users with the proper plug-in or website code can actually see these comments.

How much Genius might earn from advertising is tricky. It says it plans to create custom content and data products — enabled by its technology — for marketers. “We’re looking at our assets of traffic, community, artist relationships, live experiences, and bringing brands into that,” Genius co-founder Ilan Zechory told the Wall Street Journal. Genius also announced a partnership with Spotify to bring lyric annotations directly onto the Spotify app, although the financial aspects of the deal weren’t disclosed.

But as Digiday’s Jordan Valinsky wrote, the visitors at lyrics websites have never been valued highly by advertisers, meaning they get rock bottom CPMs. That, coupled with brewing sensitivity of what annotating signifies in the modern Internet, means Genius will likely have to work much harder than other startups to grow its audience and community. The site says it attracts 40 million global visitors, but according to comScore, its U.S. audience, at least, is less than 12 million.

Silencing writers?
Critics of the Genius tool argue that it opens the potential for increased online harassment that effectively “silences writers.” Ella Dawson, who handles social media for the TED conference, for example, called out the annotations made on her personal blog, in which she detailed her struggles with a herpes infection. She pointed out that people aren’t notified that their work has been annotated, and they must log in with a Genius account if they want to engage with the annotations. “Annotations display more like passive-aggressive Post-It notes, but for someone who has been gaslit by partners, diminished by journalists, and harassed by mobs online, Genius annotations are an invasive violation,” she wrote.

Congresswoman Katherine M. Clark, a leader on the issue of online harassment, also wrote a letter to Genius Media Group CEO Tom Lehman which she shared on social media, calling out the likelihood of the tool’s misuse. Although Clark mischaracterized the technology at one point in her letter, others have pointed out that Genius “hews to a double standard because it will disable annotations on certain articles from publishers but not for individuals, according to Re/code’s Noah Kulwin. The annotator works differently on the New York Times website, for instance, which Zechory acknowledged was a deliberate choice.

“We’re talking about how we can work with them and so they’re a really big and important publisher to do cool stuff with,” he told Capital New York earlier this year.

In response, Genius has added a “report abuse” button and repeatedly said it’s not trying to become a platform for trolls. The backlash too has prompted its own backlash, with Gawker’s Sam Biddle, for one, arguing Genius does nothing different than most other pieces of online criticism. “How is criticism on Slate an act of legitimate commentary, while criticism on News Genius is inherently an act of abuse?” he wrote. “In fact, the ability to view public information and publicly respond to it is a basic underpinning of the internet and without this principle the internet would cease to function.”

Part of the problem with this “pseudo-controversy,” according to Biddle, is that Genius is positioning itself as a revolutionary technology company when its premise of annotating the Internet is actually very simple. It’s not like users can change what they are seeing. New York Magazine’s Brian Feldman also underscored that having to “opt out” of annotations doesn’t really matter when people must “opt-in” via the browser extension for the experience anyway.

After all the failed web annotation tools before it (ThirdVoice, Sidewiki, Fleck), Genius might just be a solution in search of a problem. Or a startup in search of a business model.

geniusannotation

Perspectives

Forget apps. This year, SXSW was all about experience.

Unlike past years in which an app dominated conversations at Austin’s annual South by Southwest Interactive festival, it’s safe to say that the talk of the town at this year’s South-By was the “experience.”

First, there’s the experience of virtual reality, which proved to be a buzz term in multiple realms: marketing, storytelling and more. Then, there’s the experience taking place as consumers transition more from the broadcast-like social media networks of Facebook and Twitter to more narrowcast-apps such as Line, WhatsApp and Kik — places where conversations, hyperlinks and other media disappear into “dark social” and are less traceable.

NYT, brands get into VR
Both of these experiences have huge implications for marketers and digital media makers, so it’s no surprise they attracted so much attention at SXSW. The festival even had an entire virtual reality track for the first time, with the New York Times being a huge player in it. Times president and CEO Mark Thompson and media columnist Jim Rutenberg spoke on a panel discussing the risks — and now, rewards — of plunging into VR journalism.

The Times also hosted a huge bash on Friday night that, as Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo put it, was “appropriately futuristic, with a gaggle of tipsy attendees checking out NYT VR on Google Cardboard viewers.” But the Times’ foray into VR isn’t just for fun; Pompeo figures its efforts creating VR experiences for brands has brought in $8 million.

Sam Dolnick, an associate digital editor and one of the journalists who helped launched the Times’ VR efforts, said that nearly every desk is pitching stories on VR. It’s forcing journalists like him to zero in on what kind of story works best on the platform, and why.

Beyond media orgs, brand marketers are also testing VR ventures. Brewing company Anheuser-Busch, for example, transformed a part of a garage into a “4-D Immersive Reality Budweiser Brewery Tour.” During it, participants with VR headsets were transported into the company’s headquarters in St. Louis, where they went on a journey sparking all of their senses so they could see, hear, smell and finally taste how Budweiser beer is made.

McDonalds also had a breakout VR experience created by VR company Groove Jones, in which attendees were transported inside a giant Happy Meal box and given two plastic tools to paint inside the box. “The experience was in 3D, so you could walk around your artwork and construct your dream image,” CNBC’s Michelle Castillo wrote. In the end, people were able to take home a GIF of their VR experience.

If it sounds like VR got to the point where it was overhyped, that’s true, as others have already cautioned. But the premise for brands to jump into this field is that they can bring audiences closer with immersive engagement. It can also offer them a way to market to consumers in a digital world where attention is at a premium, said Shiv Singh, SVP, global head of digital & marketing transformation at Visa, in a Q&A with the Holmes Report.

Visa, for example, had a “biometrics bar” where people could “pay” for drinks with retina scans or fingerprints, so they could understand how payments are evolving.

Analytics issue on mobile messaging
Yet if VR was the Cinderella of the conference, then mobile messaging was its ugly stepsister. “This trend stands to create a significant shift in how marketers talk to consumers and will make it even more difficult to collect user data,” Shae Carroll, social media director at Saatchi & Saatchi NY, told The Drum.

Marketers and publishers, then, are faced with the huge task of capturing the imagination of the younger populations on these platforms, and figuring out a way to measure it. The typical analytics provided by social media networks don’t work on messaging platforms. With some 40% of U.S. teens and young adults using a mobile messaging app like Kik, according to AdWeek — and more than half of all online sharing happening via “dark social,” according to a recent study by Radium One — marketing firms can’t ignore it.

The issue will always be that marketers very much want to play where people gravitate, even if those places like VR and messaging don’t deliver the data that’s needed today. The hope is they will tomorrow, when they also become mature enough to properly monetize.

Perspectives | Revenue

Finding solutions in the thorny, confusing world of ad-blocking

For publishers obsessing over ad-blocking (and few aren’t), the news lately has been mixed and confusing. A recent IAB/YouGov study in the U.K. finds that more people are using ad-blockers, but that more than half would disable their blockers in exchange for viewing content. And while Google has banned ad-blocking software in the Google Play store, they still allow ad-blocking browsers. And the IAB has set out guidelines for publishers to deal with ad-blocking visitors, but hasn’t addressed the root of the problem—the poor customer experience with ads.

For publishers treading the complex world of ad-blocking, these are strong indicators that they must figure out a healthy balance of insistence, tolerance and acceptance. Pure standardization on ad-blocking might not ever happen given current circumstances, and so publishers ought to take note and take the necessary action for their business and audience.

Popularity of ad-blockers
The IAB study found the number of people using ad blockers in the U.K. has increased to 22%, from 18% just a few months earlier. It also found that ad-blocking was most popular among 18- to 24-year-olds, with nearly half of respondents (47%) using them. And the number of people around the world who use ad-blocking software has doubled in the last two years to 200 million, according to estimates by Adobe and PageFair, an anti-blocking service. Apple’s decision last fall to allow ad blockers on its latest iOS update has no doubt propelled the propensity toward ad-blocking.

That Google, then, has taken a firmer stand against ad-blocking while still allowing for ad-blocking browsers in its app store shows how confusing this territory is. No publisher wants to lose out on the revenue that these ads generate (a report by Adobe and PageFair found that ad-blocking could cost publishers $41.4 billion globally this year, compared to $21.8 billion in 2015). But no one wants to be the bad guy to the consumer either, and the reasons people use ad-blocking software are clear: They are unhappy about behavior tracking and slow page-load times.

As Emily Bell recently put it, ad blockers are used by people who aren’t necessarily out to harm the industries behind the advertising, but who are looking out for their wallets. “Ad-blocking thrives because of a failure towards consumers,” she wrote in the Guardian. “Forcing people to consume advertising that strips their data and costs them money is hardly a vote-winning strategy.”

That’s likely why Google hasn’t completely jumped ship when it comes to ad-blocking, according to Android Police’s Ruddock. “Google knows that ad-blocking browsers are popular enough that not having them on Android could hurt the platform.”

Solutions for publishers?
So what is the best strategy to have? Guy Phillipson, chief executive of IAB UK, said transparency is key. “Part of the solution to tackle ad-blocking lies in making consumers more aware of the consequences, which seems like it’s starting to filter through,” he said. “If they realize it means they can’t access content or that to do so requires paying for it, then they might stop using ad blockers. It requires reinforcing this trade-off message—ads help to fund the content they enjoy for free.”

A few websites, including Forbes, Wired and the Washington Post, have already started doing this. When Forbes detected users with ad blockers visiting their sites, it asked them to turn the software off—and 42% of visitors obliged.

The IAB also released its guide for publishers on how to approach their consumers to turn off their ad blocking software by offering a “D.E.A.L.”, which stands for Detect, Explain, Ask and Lift restrictions or Limit access, based on the consumer’s choice. So chances are, more websites are going to start this negotiation process with users — asking them to either turn off the ad blocker or pay up.

The new IAB guidelines are not without their concerns, though, with the IAB acknowledging it’s a drastic measure that could alienate users. And as Ed Papazian of Media Dynamics Inc. questioned, “How is this going to work unless publishers with ‘good’ content, who get users to disable their ad blockers, also find ways to minimize the disruptive impact of too many ads per page and their helter-skelter intrusions on the user’s experience with the site?”

So while consumers will perhaps learn to accept the business models behind the content they want to access, the onus to make the ad experience better for users is still on the publisher. And having a better ad environment, in the end, is better for users, publishers and advertisers.

Advertising | Perspectives

Does Snapchat have what it takes to become an ad powerhouse?

Snapchat has gone from being a strange ephemeral video platform for teens to send sexy shots, to a walled garden of content where publishers and brands can reach millions with short-form content. With a user base of 100 million, and video views in the billions, it’s no wonder that Snapchat’s ad business is growing as fast as the company itself. But can Snapchat become a transformative platform for mobile advertising, as Facebook has, or is it just a flash in the pan?

For companies and brands looking to reach a young mobile audience, Snapchat offers a lot: The majority  of its users are under the age of 25, it’s slated to improve ad targeting, and it is rumored to be testing longer-form sponsored videos for media channels on its Discover platform. It’s also possibly building its own application programming interface (API) and has recently partnered with Viacom. But these speculations of advertising growth come after the company has long been criticized for unstable pricing on advertising, failing to provide data critical to targeting users, and no guarantee on the ad viewership.

Launching an API?
One major indicator that it might have staying power is that Snapchat is reportedly building its own API which would help automate the targeting and delivery of ads to specific users. Snapchat has yet to comment on these endeavors, but an API could also address key concerns among marketers, including ad targeting, tracking visitor browsing and searches outside of the app (which would help it collect data on its users). Better tracking could help publishers and brands figure out how many people are actually watching their ads.

In building its own API, Snapchat is following in the footsteps of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — companies that have matured as major ad players in the digital marketplace. An API would also allow for more kinds of ads on Snapchat, including those that include a “call to action” for consumers, such as downloading a new app. This is especially important given that Snapchat has previously been selling ads the so-called “old-fashioned way” — by working directly with brands and agencies. But an API, with its ability to execute effective campaigns and automate different orders, would help measure how successful these advertisements actually are.

The API would also help Snapchat grow out of a closed mindset. “The first thing an API does is allows them to create a partnered ecosystem that is technology driven,” Sean O’Neal, president of the online service platform Adaptly, told Digiday. “There’s only so much that a company is going to be able to develop themselves as it relates to their own native ad solutions.”

Viacom partnership
Not only that, but Snapchat and Viacom have also recently struck an advertising deal that allows Viacom to sell ads on Snapchat’s original content. With its mobile video capabilities, Snapchat, after all, is an ideal destination for television and entertainment companies, while Viacom has more experience with larger brands that might not know Snapchat well. The deal wouldn’t just help an aging company like Viacom reach the coveted millennial audience. “Snapchat executives have repeatedly talked up their desire to pull in TV ad dollars, seeing themselves as the video epicenter of smartphones,” the LA Times reports.

However, despite the hype surrounding the potential for advertising on Snapchat, publishers would be right to remain wary as the company sorts out its goals, philosophy and practices. Part of the reason why Snapchat didn’t emerge as a major advertising player to begin with is that its sales team was small, and by some accounts, too old to understand how its digitally native audience would respond to ads on the platform. The fact that it’s most popular among a younger demographic was also a concern for some brands, who feel their core older audiences are more concentrated on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter anyway. And those companies, unlike Snapchat, offer much more data on their users than Snapchat does, which would make it easier to guarantee a return on investment.

Part of the problem is that ad pricing has been erratic on Snapchat. When Snapchat first offered advertising in January 2015, it asked brands to pay at least $750,000 for a one-day ad, according to CNBC. Prices have now dropped far below that threshold, with some saying ads could be had for $50,000 and even others getting ads for free because Snapchat liked the idea. It’s hard for marketers to jump in, when they might figure prices might drop in the near future.

While some folks contend that Snapchat is having its “Facebook moment,” with popular Discover content and attention to ads, it would be wise to proceed with caution until a potential API and more mature ad pricing takes hold.

Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

A tale of two legacy brands: The New York Times & Yahoo

We all know the narrative that older media brands are struggling to reinvent themselves for the digital age, while upstarts have the advantage of being “digital natives” with no legacy burden. But what about the older “digital native” brands such as AOL and Yahoo? Looks like they might end up having an even more difficult road ahead.

Take the recent quarterly and year-end earnings reports from the New York Times and Yahoo. While the Times saw strength in digital subscriptions and native advertising, Yahoo struggled to deal with massive layoffs and “digital magazines” that weren’t gaining momentum. While both are considering streamlining their organizations, Yahoo has to take much more drastic measures.

Digital growth at the Times
At the Times, digital-only subscriptions grew 20% from the previous year profits were up nearly 50% from last year’s quarter. Print circulation, meanwhile, decreased by 6.9% for the daily and 4.4% for the Sunday edition, but circulation revenues were up 1.3% in the quarter due to an increase in delivery prices. When it comes to ad revenue, print decreased by 6.6% whereas digital increased by 10.6%. A growing strength, however, is mobile ads, which were up 74% in the quarter, making up 22% of all digital ad revenue (which itself is now 24% of all ad revenues).

CEO Mark Thompson said the Times’ T Brand Studio, which produces sponsored content, has become “a meaningful part of the business,” hinting at its importance in long-term strategic growth plans.

The results came the same day executive editor Dean Baquet sent an internal memo announcing an overhaul of the Times’ structure and strategy. “Does our system of powerful desks help us cover big stories that don’t easily have a home—like climate change and education—or does it sometimes get in the way? We deeply value the craft of editing, but in the digital era should we continue to edit every update of every story at the same level?”

The “desks” he’s referring to are the traditional Metro, National, International and other broadly named desks that help classify Times coverage—and thereby newsroom resources. Baquet revealed in the memo that he had asked David Leaonhardt, a recently named columnist and one of the founding editors of The Upshot, to help him examine the current newsroom structure and any necessary changes.

Yahoo’s retrenchment
Meanwhile, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is feeling an even bigger burden of change, especially in the face of dwindling prospects nearly four years into the job. Yahoo’s loss in the quarter was $4.4 billion because of a write-down from investments that didn’t pay off. Without that charge, the company actually earned 13 cents a share. Compared to Google’s 31.9% profit margin in the fourth quarter, Yahoo’s profit margin was an embarrassing 2%. It’s now planning to close down five offices, and its board announced it was looking at “strategic alternatives” (in other words, a potential sale).

It doesn’t help that one way of streamlining costs—laying off 15% of Yahoo’s workforce—adds to a brain drain already taking place at the company. The New York Times reported in January that more than a third of the workforce has left in the last year, prompting Mayer to approve “hefty retention packages” to prevent people from taking job offers elsewhere. Yet most recently, entrepreneur Arjun Sethi, who helped Yahoo compete in the field of mobile chat apps, announced he was leaving.

Much of the criticism toward Yahoo is that its vision was poor from the start. “It’s very, ‘We’ll try this, we’ll try that, we’ll throw a bunch of money at that thing without a clear, coherent strategy around it,’” Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, told the Los Angles Times.

The problem with Yahoo is that its expectations are higher in the digital-native space, having to compete with the likes of Facebook, Google on the platform side and BuzzFeed and Vox on the content side. The New York Times has figured out that an older brand can succeed online with the right revenue mix: mobile ads, native ads, subscriptions and memberships. It’s not going to be easy, but they have certainly built up trust and credibility over the years.

While the ceiling is so much higher for ambitious digital natives, the bottom is so much lower when things go sour.

Innovation | Perspectives

Can smart TVs get smarter?

The promise of the “smart TV” is that it will do much more than just provide a guide for channels—that it can personalize our experience, serve up the channels we want, connect us to the Internet, add in streaming options and more. And the more connected it becomes, the more chance for advertisers and publishers to target users with messages and content.

While the smart TV hype has outshined reality so far, the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas brought some potential good news for smarter TVs.

The Korean electronics giant LG, for example, is adding more than 50 streaming channels to its latest generation of smart TVs. Switching from cable networks to streaming content from publishers such as BuzzFeed, Wired and the Wall Street Journal is now as easy as the click of a button. LG partnered with the startup Xumo to fuse Internet content into television’s traditional environment, and partnered with Watchmi, a German Internet video startup, to give 300 more international streaming channels to its new TVs.

Samsung also announced new features at CES, positioning its products at the center of the Internet of Things ecosystem. The ability for its smart TVs to recognize add-on boxes such as an Xbox is one such boon. It makes the life of a consumer a lot less complicated because it eliminates the need for any extra remote controls, as the main remote control can commandeer these other devices.

Streaming updates
Sling TV, the live streaming service introduced at last year’s CES, announced this year that it’s planning to overhaul its app entirely. Its new app will allow consumers to easily identify their “must-see TV.” Viewers will also have the option to store their shows for up to three days in the cloud, and navigate recommendations provided by Sling on what to view next. And let’s not forget that streaming behemoth Netflix activated its service in more than 130 countries during a CES keynote address.

But beyond the hype at CES and the positive attributes of smart TV are some of its pitfalls. One big one is that for all the bells and whistles these TVs offer, few people take advantage of them. The market research company NPD estimated in an August report that “roughly a third of smart TVs in the U.S. weren’t actually connected to the Internet.” In comparison, the number of Americans using streaming devices such as Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV is climbing even faster than the number using smart TVs (and their functions), according to researchers at the Parks Associates.

And that’s because these different devices are solid competition for smart TVs. “If you’re a streaming media box (maker), you’ve got much more ability to push new features out into the market at an affordable price,” Barbara Kraus, Parks Associates’ director of research, told the Associated Press.

Overcoming ambivalence
The influx of more apps on these devices could put a strain on the popularity of smart TVs if they don’t institute them as well. Ali Kani, general manager for Nvidia’s Shield Android TV device, said that while smart TVs satisfy the need to watch video, the future living room will be “revolutionized by apps.”

Underscoring this and the general ambivalence about smart TVs is the simple fact that new technology gets old pretty quickly as even newer technology emerges. If companies such as Samsung put new features only in its latest generation of products and don’t state whether older smart TVs will ever get this new technology, it leaves consumers hanging, and not in a good way.

This applies to the  “so-called ultra high-definition 4K television” as well, according to the New York Times’ personal tech columnist Brian X. Chen. He argues that given its expense and the underwhelming digital enhancements meant to come with this kind of high-definition television, it’s not in the consumer’s best interest to buy. Topping that off is the dearth of quality programming average viewers would want to see, including arguably America’s most popular show, “Game of Thrones.”

“My advice: Wait at least another year or two before buying it,” Chen wrote.

Perhaps that’s a good piece of wisdom all prospective smart TV owners ought to take. Not to mention any publishers hoping to make a splash in the added streaming channels on smart TVs.

Perspectives | Revenue

What’s next for publishers after FTC’s native ad guidelines?

Native advertising has always had the advantage over banner ads because it mimics the look and tone of editorial content. And because publishers may have confused readers with native ads that look too much like editorial, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced guidelines late last month in an effort to keep readers from being misled. It also announced an 11-page guidebook for businesses on how they can comply with the FTC’s new policy.

The overarching theme behind the FTC’s new guidelines is that advertising must be absolutely clear to consumers, and the language used to describe it must be explicit. Plus, disclosure should be in proximity to the headline and should be disclosed before people click on the story – much stronger rules than is now common practice.

Impacting Innovation
So will these new regulations stymie native advertising’s potential? The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), while welcoming the guidelines, took some issue with them, saying the emphasis on the clarity of meaning was “overly prescriptive, especially absent any compelling evidence to justify some term over others.”

”While guidance serves great benefit to industry, it must also be technically feasible, creatively relevant, and not stifle innovation,” Brad Weltman, IAB’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement.

However, DCN CEO Jason Kint had a more nuanced take on the rules: “Ultimately the impact of these guidelines will very much depend on what cases the FTC brings,” Kint told me via email. “We hope the FTC will use their enforcement authority to stop egregious acts of deception and not punish publishers and advertisers trying to do the right thing.”

An Ongoing Problem
According to the FTC, terms such as “Promoted” or “Promoted Stories” — which are commonly employed to label native advertising — are “at best ambiguous and potentially could mislead consumers that advertising content is endorsed by a publisher site.” Words such as “Ad” and “Sponsored Advertising Content,” according to the FTC, are much more direct and clearly understood as advertising by consumers, and should be used instead.

The FTC’s conern is meritted. A study conducted by Contently last year found that most consumers can’t distinguish native advertising from regular content on a website. “Our findings show that no matter what steps publishers have taken, there is still significant confusion on the part of readers as to what constitutes an article and what constitutes an ad,” Contently said in its report on the study. The company suggested the “devil may be in the details,” and that perhaps readers also aren’t choosing to take the time to recognize the difference between an article and an advertisement.

Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, meanwhile, likened native advertising to “product placement on digital steroids. There’s no way that saying, ‘This is an ad,’ means anything,” he told the New York Times.

Ensuring Clarity
Perhaps these reactions indicate that publishers and advertisers just haven’t yet found the right way to ensure clarity — which only substantiates the FTC’s argument that obvious and well-placed statements are necessary to describe native advertising. Indeed, digital publishers such as Mashable and the Huffington Post were relatively calm about the new policy, with the Huffington Post saying it’s the result of inconsistency in the market.

But the bigger issue for publishers, according to the IAB, is that more enforcement on native advertising is bound to come. While the FTC’s regulations are not quite the law of the land, most publishers and advertisers are going to want to comply to avoid financial sanctions or risk being held out as bad actors.

And that brings publishers and advertisers back to a predicament that once seemed far away from this new, innovative kind of advertising. So publishers will have to weigh their desire to push the envelope with innovative ad forms and being crystal clear to users about ads. The winners will be the ones who can do both, without sacrificing quality or trust.

Perspectives

Facebook plays nice with updates to Instant Articles

Publishers complained, and Facebook listened. While the launch of Facebook’s Instant Articles brought some fear and loathing that the social media giant would grab control of content distribution, the reality is that participating publishers have been pretty happy with early results, though they have asked for more control.

Publishers wanted to be able to serve more ads into Instant Articles. Facebook raised the limit from one ad per 500 words in a story to one ad per 350 words. Publishers wanted to serve ads specifically for Instant Articles, and Facebook now allows that. Publishers wanted to include links back to their sites or sponsored content, and Facebook accepted that.

Could this be the start of a beautiful relationship? Time will tell.

Instant Articles growing
Instant Articles emerged earlier this year to allow a select group publishers, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Bustle, to publish directly onto Facebook rather than posting links that would redirect audiences back to their websites. By cutting the load time for users by 10 times, Instant Articles ultimately offers users a better experience. And as Washington Post CRO Jed Hartman told the Wall Street Journal, better user experience should ultimately benefit publishers.

However launch publishers soon found the restrictions placed by the social network made Instant Articles less of a boon than expected, in large part because they were better able to monetize pageviews on their site than content views on Facebook. In an effort to remedy this issue, Facebook has announced a new tool that automatically pushes an ad out for every 350 words. However, there are still restrictions on the type of ads, with rich media ads still forbidden. That would increase, running counter to against the idea of ”instant.”

“If Facebook allows publishers to just add all of the same kinds of things that made their own sites less appealing in the first place, then Instant Articles will quickly become useless,” wrote Fortune’s Mathew Ingram.

Facebook, for one, never doubted the potential of Instant Articles, despite criticism. It’s since released Instant Articles across Asia, including Facebook’s second biggest market, India, and Latin America. Now, there are 100 publishers using Instant Articles, with 300 enrolled to start eventually, according to WSJ’s Marshall.

Facebook’s power in mobile
The Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos reportedly wanted to participate in Instant Articles as soon as he heard about it, with the sheer scale of Facebook being an enticement of its own. However the influence of Facebook in this mobile sphere is a significant factor for early movers, who jumped on board with Instant Articles even before much time had passed to offer a fair assessment on its efficacy.

“We’re trying to do two things,” Cory Haik, the Post’s executive director of emerging news products (who recently took at job at Mic), told Nieman Lab. “Grow our digital subscriptions — and those are highly engaged users that come back directly to us, create that daily habit that’s important — and the other piece of it is growing new audiences in these really dramatic ways, which is mostly on mobile. And when I say that, there’s a direct correlation to social and these emerging platforms.”

It may seem that Facebook is helping to accommodate the demands of publishers, but don’t forget it’s also benefiting from loosening restrictions. More ads means more revenue across the board (Facebook takes a 30 percent cut from the publishers it sells ads for). And given that not all publishers sell ads, there’s a definite upside for some. For larger publishers, it is a positive sign that Facebook has been quick to address some issues. However to keep this content relationship strong for the long term, Facebook will need to continue to listen and respond to what publishers are saying.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

The rise of VR for immersive storytelling and advertising

Bearing witness has been one of the essential boons for journalists when it comes to delivering stories few have access to: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it,” is one such adage that comes to mind.

But with the rise of cameras that can record a scene in 360-degrees, stereoscopic video (which creates depth) and a new generation of headsets accessible to consumers, the ascent of VR as a new storytelling staple is clear. Coupled with collaborative partnerships across the technological and media landscape, the chance for VR to enable the “presence” of a user — in other words, to make her feel as if she is actually reacting to the environment she is immersed in — is now unprecedented. With this, “bearing witness” is taking on a different meaning.

The bottom line? The chance for VR to encourage empathy can potentially transform journalism and viewers’ understanding of the world. Plus, it might also create the type of immersive advertising and sponsored content that no ad-blocker could deny.

New York Times as Pioneer
The world took notice when the New York Times recently gave away 1.31 million Google Cardboard headsets to its print subscribers, solely to bring them into the VR experience. The simplicity and crudeness of the cardboard is its genius, Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen argued. “It’s cheap enough to be handed out for free; we smartphone users supply the only part that’s expensive,” Wohlsen wrote.

This sort of accessibility is key to the potential for VR to actually reach mass audiences instead of a tiny subset of early adopters. Producing VR work is already an expensive endeavor. While outfits like the New York Times Magazine, Frontline and Vice News — with their stories on the refugee crisis, the Ebola outbreak and last year’s Millions March against police brutality, respectively — have made major dives into VR storytelling, they are part of “the 1 percent” of news organizations that can afford to do so. Headsets like the one from Oculus Rift and other apparatuses for viewing VR are expected to become cheaper and therefore more mainstream, but it’s a far cry from the ubiquity of simply the smartphone. (Although YouTube, for one, has said it wants to bring VR to anyone with a smartphone.)

That’s why the Times’ home delivery of Cardboard units to use with a smartphone was a win in more ways than one. First of all, it delivered the headsets with its newspaper, acknowledging that traditional distribution system — and subscription — as a precursor for this modern news consumption. The Times is also planning to extend its virtual reality endeavors into sponsored content, as Sebastian Tomich, the Times’ senior vice president of advertising and innovation, told Contently. “Any format the newsroom is pursuing, you can assume that we’ll pursue it on the brand side as well,” he said.

Enticing for Brands
It’s not a surprise, then, that other brands and publishers are considering VR’s potential. Writing for TheMediaBriefing, Chris Sutcliffe notes that a VR environment can be enticing to brands and other publishers, as brands are already relying more on “experiential events” to help communicate their brand messages. The “rawness” that VR environments offer and the audiences they attract could potentially provide a new revenue stream, he writes. Designer Rebecca Minkoff, for example, is selling her own cardboard VR viewer for $30 for viewers to see how she filmed her runway show.

All this is not to say VR doesn’t have its hurdles. The recent Tow Center report on virtual reality acknowledged producing such work involves a series of trade-offs, especially around production time, quality and the capacity to reach wide audiences. Tom Kent, the standards editor at the Associated Press (which is also stepping into VR) also wrote a strong statement on Medium of some of the ethical questions that could impact VR journalism in the future, which New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan also discussed.

The Times’ release of its VR documentary “The Displaced” coincided with a range of critiques, from the difficulty of using the Cardboard unit to questions of the authenticity of the story. Michael Oreskes, NPR’s news chief and a former Times editor, cautioned, “Our stories can’t be virtually true. They must be fully real.”

As we ponder how VR fact-checkers would operate, we can also consider the vast potential of what immersive journalism—and advertising—could do to create a whole new dimension in audience engagement.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

Will streaming help interactive tv ads stick?

TV ads have always been decried as a format of the past, rarely targeted or personalized. But interactive TV ads offer the potential for demonstrable viewer engagement and feedback. And that’s the promise of Hulu’s new deal with TrueX, a unit of 21st Century Fox. Using technology from TrueX, Hulu will give viewers of Fox shows the option of watching a 30-second “engagement” advertisement instead of the approximately two and a half minutes worth of ads that are sprinkled within an episode.

It’s the most high-profile instance yet of interactive ads within streaming TV. The question now is whether the circumstances surrounding the Hulu-TrueX deal will get other networks and brands to jump on board—and make this kind of engaged advertising more the norm.

Breaking Through on Streaming
Interactive TV has been one of those Holy Grail quests that’s been tried and failed for years. The problem, however, is that marketers have been looking at the wrong screen when it came time to developing interactive ads. It was understood that some people were cutting the cord and streaming online content onto a “proper” television screen through an Xbox or Roku. But taking advantage of the use of laptops, mobile and tablet devices was not a key strategy. That’s why some of the earliest attempts at interactive ads bombed.

The point now, however, is to utilize the benefits of digital video, as Joe Marchese, president of advanced advertising products at Fox Networks Group and founder of TrueX, told the L.A. Times. “Digital video is an on-demand, non-linear medium, and having an ad format that fits this experience is a win for advertisers, publishers and viewers alike,” he said.

TrueX had already tested interactive ads on streaming sites before Hulu. This past May at the upfronts, TrueX reported on one such trial with the TV show, ”The Mindy Project.” They found that the typical viewer clicked 4 times in the ads, spending 52 seconds in the unit, with a 2.9% clickthrough rate. Plus the ads had a 96% completion rate.

Another example of interactive ads fitting well was during the Game Awards — an online-only awards show for videogames. During the show last year, which attracted about 2 million online viewers, users were able to click on ads during the show to download the different games that were nominated. For one of the games advertised during the show, sales “increased by 15 times during the weekend the awards show aired, producing seven figures in revenue for the game over that period,” the New York Times’ Nick Wingfield reported.

In-Stream Purchase Unit
In the same vein, Hulu announced last year moves beyond traditional video ads with an “in-stream purchase unit” with Pizza Hut. Consumers can place an order within the ad itself before returning to whatever content they were viewing. There’s also a “360” video ad that will let users pan around through a 360-degree viewpoint within the ad. And the point of these advertisements was to get the tactile response of consumers watching on different mobile devices.

While Fox is the only media company allowing these new ads on Hulu right now, TrueX is also open to servicing the entire industry with these ads, opening the door for ABC, CBS, Viacom and other organizations to perhaps learn from Fox’s example.

“This type of attention transfer lifts all boats,” Jamie Auslander, TrueX’s VP of research, told AdWeek in May. “It’s as impactful as six video ads.”

Other media outlets will likely take a cue from Fox only after learning how these 30-second advertisements play out among viewers. But if TrueX has its way — and if its previous studies on this kind of advertising hold true — the ads will be a hit.

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