Category results for "Industry-Research"

Industry Research

Seven steps you can take to manage the risk of ad blocking

June 1, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Publishers, platforms, and industry groups gathered together last month for the third time to discuss the continued threat of ad blocking. Attendees included ESPN, the Guardian and Google to name a few. The meeting was organized by Johnny Ryan, the head of ecosystem at PageFair, a company that builds technology to by-pass ad blocking, and Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, an industry trade association for quality digital content companies. Though the meeting was private, the participants agreed to share the seven takeaways to best deal with the risk of ad blocking

On the blocked web, the user must have immediate tools to reject and to complain about advertising. There needs to be a set of tools and choices for consumers to provide feedback to advertisers especially offering feedback in real-time to address a particular problem or concern with advertising.
Rather than restore all ads on the blocked web, only a limited number of premium advertising slots should be restored. This will make a better impact for brands, clean up the user experience, and incentivize better creative. Publishers need to offer few and better ads. In doing so they will provide the consumer with a better online experience.
The blocked web may provide the opportunity to establish a new form of above-the-line advertising. Advertising must be less intrusive and complement the consumer’s digital experience, not disrupt it.
Contextual targeting can be used on the blocked web to establish ad relevance if other forms of tracking are not practical or desirable.
On the blocked web, where third-party tracking is largely blocked, publishers can create new value by engaging with their users to elicit volunteered data. Publishers should find alternative methods to obtain consumer details such as offering a valued exchange for personal information such as customized content, newsletters and/or exclusive promotions.
Measuring advertising success on the blocked web with broader top-of-funnel metrics may incentivize buyers to focus on value rather than cheapness. Importantly, publishers must work with marketers to ensure they recognize the value of engaged consumers and trusted publishers. Introducing new measurements such as an attention metrics, will further advance digital media advertising effectiveness.
On the web as a whole, there should be a maximum page load time standard that publishers and advertisers both commit to. The digital media experience should be a positive consumer experience.

The seven recommendations identify the most effective ways to improve the consumer experience on publisher sites and thwart the adoption of ad blocking. Further, communicating to consumers on changes and new implementations will be key to rebuilding their trust for a restored and stronger relationship with publishers.

Industry-Research

People consume mobile news from more places than ever. So now what?

May 27, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

The advance of mobile and connected devices has caused a sea change in the way news is consumed and delivered. But knowing that people are spending a significant amount of time on mobile news sites and apps is not the input organizations need to architect an effective digital strategy. They also require more visibility into news consumption patterns across devices and demographic data that will help them to better understand and engage with an audience eager to access news and determined to explore new pathways.

This is where a new two-part series of insights based on custom research conducted with Nielsen and commissioned by Knight Foundation entitled Mobile-first news: How people use smartphones to access information sheds important light on how this audience of “news-seekers” is seeking, finding and interacting with news content across a variety of platforms and — more importantly — social media networks.

The good news is the audience of news-seekers across mobile sites and apps is “immense” and shows no signs of slowing. In fact, the research tells us that the vast majority (89%) of the U.S. mobile population (or 144 million users) now access news and information via their mobile devices. The not-so-good news is that the audience of news-seekers accessing and reading news on more traditional mobile sites and apps is decline compared with the numbers flocking to social networking platforms. (The Nielsen study reveals that the audience for news aggregator app Flipborad is the only one showing a steady increase — while audiences for all other top news apps are moving sideways.)

The social shift
The shift to social is seismic. Overall, 27% of mobile time (more than 12 hours per month) is spent on social networking sites. Facebook leads the pack with over 70% of its members using Facebook for their news fix every day. But it’s not the network for everyone. Consumption patterns differ depending on the social networking platform — with LinkedIn standing out as a favorite for news-seekers looking for tech and financial and business news and Instagram dominating as the destination for life-style news and trends.

However, news-seekers aren’t just spending time accessing content via social networks; they are also taking “offline actions related to the content.” Whether they simply “like” the content on Facebook or Twitter, or start a discussion in a forum or in the real-world, it’s clear that audience group wants to actively engage with content, not passively consume it.

The pathways to news content are also evolving. Facebook and social networks may be where much of the action (and activity) is, but search and email are also “launching pads for news-seeking activity in both apps and mobile sites.” The challenge for publishers, the research says, is “to be nimble in not just one channel but several.”

It’s also important to know which destinations are driving traffic and encouraging audiences to explore news content. The research places Wikipedia top of the list of websites visited by news-seekers prior to “exploring sites as varied as BuzzFeed, Daily MailOnline, nytimes.com, usatoday.com, washingtonpost.com and those of the Tribune newspapers.” Wikipedia has become a top reference site because current news and events are often embedded within Wikipedia entries, providing news-seekers the opportunity to learn more about a topic after reading a news article.

Demographic impact
But again, the top reference sites differ depending on demographics. News-seekers coming to news content from social sites and chat apps tend to be younger and more ethnically diverse, while referrals from mobile apps such as ESPN and Yahoo.com tend to bring in the 35+ crowd. Overall, news-seekers ages 18-24 are “3 and 4x more likely than typical online adults to go to news content from Instagram, Pinterst and Snapchat.”

Different ethnic groups also have different preferences. African-Americans are “2.5x more likely than typical online adults to go to news content from Twitter” while Hispanics lead mobile news-seeking in all categories and arrive at much of their news content through sources including BuzzFeed and Facebook.

Whether news-seekers come to the content they want via apps or aggregators, audiences share what the research calls a “a desire for news that is personalized to their interests.”

Read between the lines, and news consumption has grown rapidly — but so has the number of pathways to news content. While television remains the top source for all audiences, social media networks are also gaining traction as a trusted and even preferred source for news content and activity. Publishers are well advised to stop debating whether they should adopt a mobile or app strategy and focus on strategies that will allow them to distribute content in a way that reaches news-seekers on the devices they prefer and — more importantly — via the social networks they love.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Maybe the internet hasn’t killed our attention spans after all

May 26, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Remember that study from last year that claimed computers and the internet had transformed human attention span to roughly the equivalent of a goldfish — you’ll be forgiven if you’ve forgotten because after all the internet supposedly has turned your brain to mush. However, a new Pew study on long articles has found we might have longer attention spans than the goldfish study would indicate. (Though actually, studies have shown that the goldfish may have been getting the short end of the attention span myth as well.)

Dueling studies aside, the Pew research team took a long look at people’s smartphone reading habits. Conventional wisdom suggests that we want to just dip in and out on our phones: We might review headlines, but we won’t do much more.

In fact, the Pew study found the opposite is true. We spend almost twice the amount of time reading long articles — 123 seconds for long form versus 57 for short — and long and short articles get almost the same number of visitors. (For the purpose of the study Pew defined long form as over a 1000 words and short form as 101-999 words. And lest you question the methodology, Pew clearly put in the work.)

“All told, Center researchers spent months digging deeply into the details of 117 million anonymized, complete cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 news websites in the month of September 2015,” according to the research organization

My gut response to these findings would be, Duh! Of course people spend more time on longer articles than shorter ones — because they’re longer. But the fact we are reading these long articles on our smartphones at all is news in itself because it flies in the face of our preconceived notions of how we interact with content on our phones.

Julia Beizer, who is director of product at The Washington Post told Digital Content Next in a recent article, There ‘s more than one way to succeed at digital that research suggests our smartphone usage might vary more than we believe.

“One of the early misplaced assumptions around mobile was that mobile users are standing in line waiting for coffee. A lot of people are doing that, but a lot of people are on their couches at home too. Research shows upwards of 70 percent are at home,” she said.

We are also on long flights and commuter trains and other places where we are captive and have a lot of time to kill with our phones in our hands. It makes sense that we would be using our phones — which are getting bigger and higher resolution screens — to do more reading.

But a single study doesn’t necessarily prove anything, even one as comprehensive as this one appears to be. That said, there are plenty of long form content initiatives that seem to be capturing their share of attention.

Last year the Huffington Post without the benefit of this study took a leap of faith and launched Highline, a long-form article site designed to let writers and readers dig into a story instead of getting a short, high-level view. A year later, while the editors aren’t sharing their numbers, they’re still around and they claim it’s been a huge success and the articles on Highline are among the most read on the Huffington Post site. It suggests that when you produce quality work people will read the articles, no matter how long they might be or on what device they might be reading them.

What this all means is the attention studies could be wrong or at least misguided. Certainly, we lack patience. We won ‘t wait around if your content is taking too long to load, but it is important not to confuse that lack of patience (or the expectation of a good mobile experience) for short attention spans.

This is a big lesson for digital content creators, whether writing an article, creating content marketing pieces or writing website copy. If you write good stuff, you can keep people engaged regardless of the length. And given that time spent is increasingly being touted as the true measure of engagement, understanding the value of long form content is essential.

There ‘s tons of other data in the Pew study including the impact of social media to drive traffic, the topics people like most (crime is big), the days and times we are more likely to engage with content and so much more. It’s worth digging into, but if your only take-away is that we will read an article whatever the length if it’s good enough, that’s more than enough.

Industry-Research

Attention is a valuable audience attribute

May 25, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Since the beginning of broadcast television, exposure was the currency of audience measurement. Gradually audience metrics evolved from tuning behavior, to program selection, to page views, to viewable impressions. Interestingly, none of these measures capture the audience’s engagement with media or the advertising. Today’s media companies collect or count on third parties for an abundance of measurement data including page views, expressions of liking and sharing to quantify audience attributes of value to advertisers but again none quantify the audience’s attention.

Jacob L. Nelson and James G. Webster of the International Journal on Media Management at Northwestern University recognized the need to further evolve media measurement. They designed a research study to analyze the relationship between the amount of time visitors spend on sites, news sites in particular, and the number of unique visitors the sites receive.

They used comScore data to analyze 887 news websites in their study “Audience Currencies in the Age of Big Data.” Through then analysis of this data which measured an individual’s time spent on a news site and the average number of minutes spent on a specific page, Nelson and Webster found that these two variables most accurately represented an individual’s level of engagement. In further probing, they also found no significant correlation between the number users a site reaches and the amount of time visitors spend on that site. In other words, the number of visitors to a site does not necessarily correlate to the level of engagement. In fact, unique visitors and attention measures are very different measurements, one identifies the quantify of visitors and the other the quality of visits (engagement).

While publishers and advertisers have begun to adopt an attention based metric, there is still research to be conducted. Specifically, for advertisers, confirming the value and predictability of the halo effect of user engagement on ad recall and effectiveness. In programmatic buying, advertisers need further qualification of a time based audience especially since heavy users are often the easiest for advertisers to reach (and cheaper too). Further, time based metrics should not be a measure of consumption where gimmicks ensure long visits that stimulate engagement. Attention metrics must ensure creative methods to monitor user activity and interest to protect against gaming of this measurement. Being that attention is a core requisite for retention, both publishers and advertiser stand to benefit using it as a media based currency.

Industry-Research

Mobile is powerful platform for long-form content

May 18, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Consumers are willing to engage with longer content on their phones. A recent Pew Research study conducted in association with the James L. Knight Foundation and Parse.ly, a web analytics company, found that consumers spend almost twice as much time with long-form stories (i.e., news stories over 1,000 words) on mobile devices than short ones (123 seconds compared with 57). In fact, longer stories attract readers at about the same rate as shorter stories. While a 123 seconds or just over two minutes may not seem so long, it’s longer than most consumers spend with local television news stories. Importantly, the higher word count appears to directly correlate to increased consumer engagement.

However, consumption of content, short and/or long can vary based on how the reader came to the article, the time of day, and even by the topic covered.

Consumers spend the most time with content in the late night and morning. In late night, consumers spend on average 128 seconds on long-form content and 60 seconds or less on short-form. In the morning, consumers spent 126 seconds long-form and 59 seconds on short-form content.
Time spent with long-form content also varies based on how consumers access the content whether it be via a link from an external website, social media, search, etc. Time spent with long form articles based on entry points appear in ranked order: access via an internal link averaged 148 seconds, visit an article directly or follow an email link averaged 132 seconds, arrive from external website averaged 125 seconds, search averaged 110 seconds and social Media averaged 111 seconds (while lowest in time spent with long-form article, still accounted for greatest share of traffic).
Consumers accessing long-form via Twitter spend on average 133 seconds on content where as if they access via Facebook, they spend on average only 107 seconds. The same pattern follows with short-term content.
As one may expect news articles, both short and long, have a brief life span. Eight in 10 consumers interact with short form articles within the first two days of publication and 72% interact with long-form within the first two days of publication.
Important to note, visitors to long-form articles (28%) are somewhat more likely to view multiple articles on a site than visitors to short-form articles (22%). However, long-form reading does not necessarily develop site loyalty.
The research further identified the most popular long-form content on cellphones. Consumers read long stories on crime, foreign policy and government and entertainment and were also more engaged as the story lengthened.

Content on mobile does not need to limit itself to short-form. Mobile offers publishers a strong outlet for long-form content allowing for more sources, more points of view and additional context.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Americans say free, ad-supported online services worth $1,200 a year

May 13, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Americans assigned a value of nearly $1,200 per year to the array of free, ad-supported services and content currently available to them online, according to a survey conducted by Zogby Analytics. Unsurprisingly, the majority (more than 85%) prefer an ad-supported internet model instead of paying for online content, and three-quarters said they would reduce their online activities “a great deal” if they had to pay for those services and content. At the same time, almost as many say (72.8%) that free internet content such as news, weather, email and blogs is very important.

Commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), the Zogby Analytics poll of 1,004 adults sought to better understand the aggregate value that Americans perceive in the major types of services and content made available free to consumers because of advertising. Respondents were asked to estimate how much people would have to pay for 17 different types of online services and content, ranging from e-mail to video and weather, if they were offered only on a subscription basis rather than for free with ads.

Among the survey’s key findings:

Consumers assigned an aggregate value of $99.77 per month to a package of 17 major types of ad-supported services and content.
Eighty% of respondents said they had found ads useful in finding new products, researching a purchase, or assisting with the shopping process.
The types of advertising that consumers had found most useful were movies/TV shows (43%), technology/devices (37%), clothing (36%), local restaurants (34%), groceries (33%), phone/internet services (32%), and travel (30%).

Zogby Analytics was commissioned by Digital Advertising Alliance to conduct an online survey of 1004 adults in the US. The survey was conducted from April 19-20, 2016. Based on a confidence interval of 95%, the margin of error is +/- 3.2%age points.

Industry-Research

Native advertising and the news media

May 9, 2016 Research Team

An ever-growing number of publishers are offering native advertising as part of their digital advertising mix. By its nature, this sponsored content is designed to mimic the look and feel of the content around it. Michele McLellan undertook a study on native advertising for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. The Rise of Native Ads in Digital News Publications examines the native advertising offered by 14 U.S. news media organizations — ranging from prominent publishers such as Forbes and the The New York Times to community newspapers and digital news startups.

The study describes and evaluates the best practices that have emerged for producing native ads and attempts to measure the success (financial and otherwise) of native advertising programs. It also carefully examines how media organizations are dealing with concerns from government regulators that native ads sometimes deceive news audiences into thinking that the ads aren’t ads at all.

Among key findings of the study:

Creation and publication of native advertising has grown significantly in recent years as traditional display advertising comes under increasing pressure on a variety of fronts, including growing adoption of ad blockers.
While native revenue is expected to continue to grow, it accounts for a small fraction of revenue for many news publications. Most of the organizations in the study put it at 5 percent or less of total revenue. (Exceptions overall are young, born-on-the-web publications such as Buzzfeed and Quartz that have focused on native from the outset.)
News publishers in the study generally focus on creating sponsored stories rather than offering another native product – in-feed promotions that are more typically seen on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Sponsored content is designed to mimic or blend in with editorial content and it takes as many forms as editorial. Examples range from sophisticated story packages to sponsor-written posts. The publications use a variety of media, including text, interactives, videos and photos, and extend the reach of the content via social media and e-newsletter promotions.
Best practices for creating sponsored content include meeting craft standards that are consistent with editorial content and that is designed to be relevant, useful and/or entertaining to the publication’s readership, and avoiding an overly promotional pitch.
Clear labeling is also a best practice. However, a disconnect exists in labeling the content. While publishers have typically used labels such as “sponsored content” and “promoted post,” studies have found users do not always understand that this signifies paid content. The Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines in December that call for using the word “advertising” in the label.
Costs associated with creating and deploying content across digital and social platforms are higher than those for creating traditional advertising. Larger publications command rates in the five or six figures for sponsored campaigns while smaller organizations command much lower fees.

Industry-Research

Evaluating content distribution channels

May 4, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Publishers face unprecedented pressures in the mobile and social media dominated marketplace. In fact, according to eMarketer, mobile accounted for half of digital ad spending in the U.S. in 2015 and is suspected to reach 70% share of advertising by 2019, according to eMarketer. In response to publishers’ needs, the International News Media Association (INMA) released a report “Evaluating Distributed Content in the News Media Ecosystem” to help educate on the implementation strategies of distributed content.

As background, it’s important to note recent digital media announcements promoting content consumption on mobile and social media. Digital platforms are dominating users’ time and advertisers’ spending. Specific announcements include:

April 2016, Facebook opened Instant Articles to all publishers worldwide. IA is rich-media articles that open instantly within the Facebook mobile app instead of sending users away to a Web browser.
February 2016, Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open standard to speed up the mobile Web experience and Snapchat announced a new subscription option to publishers in its Discover section
Apple’s News app attracted 100-plus publishers.
October 2015, Twitter launched Moments, a magazine-like story format for curated streams of Tweets.

The INMA report identified different roles a publisher can choose to distribute their content on social platforms and classified them into three categories:

On-platform hosts: Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, Twitter Moments.
Off-platform open standard: Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Off-platform aggregators: Apple News, Axel Springer Upday.

Publishers first need identify which category can support their business strategy. Specifically, is the publisher looking to build an audience (growth), to develop an exclusive consumer relationship (content marketing) or are they interested in experimentation on multiple goals (laboratory).

Social media strategies are vital a publisher’s digital business. It allows one to distributes content beyond its property and to grow its audience base.

Industry-Research

Connected TVs outnumber set-top boxes

May 3, 2016 Research Team—DCN

Overall, there are more connected TV devices in US households than there are pay-TV set-top boxes according to new consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG). Across all households (including those that do not have any of these), the mean number of connected TV devices per household is 2.1, while the mean number of pay-TV settop boxes per household is 1.8.

LRG finds that 65% of US TV households have at least one television set connected to the Internet via a video game system, a smart TV set, a Blu-ray player, and/or a stand-alone device (such as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, or Amazon Fire TV) – up from 44% in 2013, and 24% in 2010. Among those with any connected TV devices, 74% have more than one device, with a mean of 3.3 per connected TV household.

Other findings include:

83% of households with any type of connected TV device get a pay-TV service
38% of adults with a pay-TV service watch video via a connected TV device at least weekly
79% of all TV sets in US households are HDTVs – an increase from 34% of all TV sets in 2010
33% of non-4K Ultra HDTV owners have seen one in use – up from 10% in 2014

These findings are based on a survey of 1,206 TV households throughout the US, and are part of a new LRG study, HD and Connected TVs XIII. This is LRG’s thirteenth annual study on TVs in the US.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Brand activation marketing offers unified approach to target audience

April 27, 2016 DCN

Over $595 billion dollars was spent on brand activation marketing in 2016. Brand activation refers to marketing that both builds a brand’s image and drives a specific consumer behavior or action.

PQ Media in partnership with the ANA conducted a comprehensive analysis of brand activation, an organized assessment of brand marketing, by platform, channel, and consumer segment. The research also projected that by 2020 activation spending will be over $740 billion outpacing advertising and trade promotion spending.

rand activation encompass focuses on six platforms that connect and interact with the consumer: promotion marketing, experiential marketing, retailer marketing, relationship marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing. Each platform includes 32 different channels.

Interestingly, 60% of all overall marketing spend is placed on integrated traditional and digital strategies with relationship marketing as the largest brand activation marketing platforms used in 2015. Relationship marketing channels includes direct mail, catalogs, list management, database marketing, marketing information and big data analysis, email and search lead generation marketing, loyalty programs, mobile marketing apps and proximity services.

The study identified that consumer brand activation accounted for 59% of all B-to-C spending ($332B) while B-to-B spending accounted for 41% or $229B. Automotive is the largest industry vertical to spend on brand activation. Importantly successful brands are using a combination of brand activation methods to effectively target audiences.

Industry-Research

Mobile ad inventory value rose substantially in Q1

April 25, 2016 Research Team—DCN

It’s been a very strong first quarter for the global mobile advertising space according to PubMatic’s Q1 2016 Quarterly Mobile Index (QMI), which found that ad inventory value on both mobile app and mobile web increased substantially, with CPMs (cost per thousand ad impressions) on mobile app up 67% and on mobile web up 57% year-over-year. For publishers and advertisers, this demonstrates increasing ad quality and value across both mobile platforms.

By analyzing the billions of daily impressions that flow through their platform, PubMatic observes real-time developments in the mobile space that allude to broader digital industry trends.

In its latest QMI report, PubMatic has updated and added several key benchmarks for mobile advertising performance around pricing, volume and growth. Note that each report provides a quarterly snapshot, and directional data might not be comparable with prior quarter reports.

Here are five key trends called out in the report:

Android app inventory value up nearly 150% YOY, as advertisers seek to target the majority of global mobile consumers
For premium publishers, mobile web represents the majority of mobile traffic and inventory, and a significant monetization opportunity
Average mobile CPMs in the Americas and the EMEA region grew 30% and 64%, respectively, demonstrating increasing quality of mobile inventory on a global level
Major sporting events attracted significant spending in mobile private marketplaces, driving PMP volume in the sports category over 1000% YOY
Programmatic is improving mobile CPMs, driving broader mobile advertising growth

Looking ahead, PubMatic suggests that premium publishers can continue to monetize on their mobile web inventory through two key strategies:

Add geolocation (i.e. latitude & longitude) or device ID to mobile web inventory to increase targeting capabilities. Better targetability can increase value of mobile web inventory significantly.
Bundle their mobile inventory into private marketplace (PMP) packages to make them cross-platform, which is more attractive to media buyers and typically attract higher prices than single-platform PMP packages.