Each year, analyst Mary Meeker — a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — releases her massive Internet Trends report, with businesses scurrying to take advantage of her insights into what’s hot and what’s not. This year, Meeker released the report while at the Code Conference, for maximum high-level impact. There’s a lot to chew on, but here are the most important trends for content creators and online publishers.
Google, Facebook Dominate; Mobile Undersold While U.S. Internet advertising is growing, Google and Facebook remain the dominant platforms for selling advertising on the Internet. The two platforms collectively control a 76% share of the growth in U.S. online advertising, Meeker noted, using numbers from last year’s IAB/PwC Advertising Report. All others besides Google and Facebook saw growth of 13% in online ads in 2015.
On another front, advertising growth has yet to actually reach its full potential because marketers aren’t spending enough on mobile. As Wired’s Davey Alba wrote, “They’re still committing too many of their dollars to so-called legacy media.” As such, the $22 billion that is spent on mobile advertising in the U.S. is a tiny amount of what it should be, according to Meeker’s report. Indeed, only 12% of all advertising right now is mobile. While this presents a boon for content created or optimized for mobile, it’s also a huge risk and concern for traditional media players, as Larry Downes wrote in the Washington Post.
One big hurdle for mobile is the rise of ad-blocking. Four hundred and twenty million people around the world are now using some form of ad blocking software on their mobile phones, according to PageFair. When looking at the reasoning behind the rise of ad blocking, including privacy concerns, the onus is on publishers and marketers. They must not only appeal to consumer behaviors, but also to their aesthetics and feelings of what good advertising should be. Advertising on Snapchat, for example, is in part successful because it’s short, sweet and integrated into the platform seamlessly so that it’s part of the user’s natural experience. (And it’s outside the realm of ad-blocking.)
Messaging and Visual Communication Rising Among Millennials and Generation Z, visual communication is king. As Recode’s Noah Kulwin pointed out, “People worldwide shared almost twice as many photos in 2015 as they did in 2014, and almost half of that happened on a service owned by Facebook.”
And whether it’s a photo, video or live-stream — such as Candace Payne’s viral Facebook Live video trying on a Chewbacca mask — advertisers can very much take advantage of the sharability of visual communications. Take the Candance Payne example, as Larry Downes wrote in the Washington Post: She mentioned Kohl’s department store twice in her video — and that video was viewed more than 150 million times in one day. In turn, the company’s app leaped to the top of the charts in the iOS App Store. If user-generated video can redefine advertising in such a way, expect more videos with branded content.
And when it comes to messaging apps, that means commerce communication is officially entering the fold. “Messaging apps are continuously becoming the second home screen,” Meeker said during her presentation. If the best way to connect with Millennials — now representing 27% of the population, with a spending power that’s going to rise — is on messenging apps, then that’s the natural destination for advertisers. The rise of voice-recognition software on these apps also means that the commercial applications can’t be ignored. Perhaps dictating the purchase of a product via speech on a messaging app may not be far off.
Global Internet Growth is Slowing — Except for India Global Internet growth is slowing, except for India, where user growth is actually accelerating at 40%. India has now surpassed the U.S. to become the second most connected population after China. With more Indians purchasing mobile phones — which will be the entry point for the majority of Indians accessing the Internet — the potential for publishers and advertisers in this space is huge.
India then serves as an interesting case study through which marketers can better understand how to target new Internet users. As Meeker discussed during her presentation, new Internet users are becoming increasingly harder to find because they come from poorer, developing countries, where the cost of a smartphone is a significant portion of a person’s income. The cost of a smartphone in India is relatively low compared to other countries, however, so it would behoove advertisers to capitalize on this market potential.
New York Times President and CEO, Mark Thompson addressed the IAB Ad Blocking Summit, held June 6, 2016 in New York City. In his talk, An Update from The New York Times on Its Approach to Ad Blocking, Thompson took a hard look at the factors contributing to the rise of ad blocking and urged the entire industry to take responsibility for fostering a climate in which digital advertising degrades the user experience and fuels the adoption of ad blockers. Through the lens of The New York Times experience, Thompson provided insights into productive and proactive steps that digital content companies – and the entire industry – can take to address ad blocking.
Below is the full text of the talk he delivered:
Mark Thompson, President & Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company
Thanks Randall [Randall Rothenberg. President and CEO of the IAB].
I want to make five points this morning. The first is that we have to clean up our own act as an industry.
To a significant extent, the root cause of digital ad-blocking is digital ads and the way many websites deploy them on their sites.
Too many ads. Intrusive and distracting ads. Ads which slow page-load to a crawl, or are slow to load in and of themselves. Boring and uncreative ads, which no user can possibly enjoy viewing. ‘Relevance’ –if it means endlessly retargeting users with ads for something they searched for and bought or lost interest in weeks ago. The pervasive and indiscriminate tracking and sharing of user data.
We’re not all equally guilty. At The New York Times, we’ve kept the number of display ads on the page low. We’ve worked hard with our advertising partners to develop campaigns that are creative and compelling. We’ve developed new units and ideas – like Flex Frames which we launched last year as Mobile Moments on smartphone and which we’ll extend to all platforms this September.
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. If a user installs an ad-blocker because of unacceptable ad experiences somewhere else then, guilty or not, we still face the challenge of persuading them to uninstall it or, more plausibly, to whitelist us so that their ad blocker allows our ads to load. Our first task as an industry is get rid of the bad experiences which make that whole tricky process necessary.
And our second is to develop and promote digital advertising whose originality and quality engages and delights users and, because of that, also delivers real results for advertisers.
In a world of phones and feeds, marketers need to think like programmers rather than as traditional advertisers, not trying to steal attention which is directed at something else, but offering consumers content which actually has value to them, in the right context and user-experience.
Our branded content business at The Times is all about that – creating and distributing high quality programming for marketers. It didn’t exist in 2013. It delivered more than $13m of revenue in 2014, and $34 million in 2015. We expect it to grow very substantially again in 2016.
For us, branded content does not mean fake journalism trying to pass itself off as genuine newsroom output. It’s work like the animated virtual reality film we made for GE for the launch of our VR app and the distribution of a million Google cardboards. High quality content well worth consuming in its own right.
And it’s not just about branded content; we’re also focusing quite a bit of energy on making display advertising better. Fewer, faster ads, delivered at the pace of mobile and more compelling at the point of discovery, where the user first sees the ad. Clearly labeled but an integral part of the main news feed, on both the phone and the desktop. Bigger, punchier units that provide a better canvas for creativity.
Third, we must do a much better job of explaining our business model – and the connection between advertising revenue and high quality content – to our users.
Let me talk about The New York Times first, then turn to digital publishing as a whole.
At The Times we have two big revenue streams in both print and digital: subscription and advertising. In print, where we make around $1 billion of revenue a year, the proportion is currently about 60/40, with $600 million coming from home delivery subscription and newsstand sales, and $400 million from print advertising. In digital, at present it’s more or less 50/50.
Our digital news subscription business is the largest and most successful in the world and it’s still growing rapidly. In the first quarter of 2016, we added 67,000 net new subscriptions – that’s more than we did in any of the three previous years. Our model is accelerating, in other words.
But delivering national and international journalism to the quality to which The Times aspires and our users expect means massive investment. We believe we can grow our digital subscription business until we have many times the current number of subscription relationships, which across print, digital, news and crosswords stands at around two and a half million. We do not believe that we will ever be able to sustain Times journalism or The New York Times as a flourishing business without an advertising business of real scale.
We need to spell this out clearly to our users. The journalism they enjoy costs real money and needs to be paid for. Advertising is a vital part of the revenue mix.
Everyone knows and accepts that physical newspapers cost money to produce and that someone who steals a copy of a newspaper from a newsstand is a thief. That’s not a word I’d use of those who install ad blockers – the Internet has left many people with the erroneous impression that digital high quality content doesn’t cost anything to produce – but there are some awkward facts to be faced.
If you consume great journalism without making any contribution towards paying for the journalists and the editors and photographers and videographers and graphics artists and engineers, and if enough people follow your example, that journalism will either be diluted or restricted to the relatively small number of people who have the willingness and ability to buy a subscription. And not just you but everyone will be impoverished as a result.
We want our journalism to be widely available and for non-subscribers as well as subscribers to be able to sample large amounts of it. Of the around 110 million people who come to us each month, more than 107 million are not subscribers. If ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, that kind of free reach will no longer make economic sense.
We believe in the civic value of our journalism and we want it to be widely read across America and the world, but not if that undermines our ability to continue to produce it.
No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it. We are not there yet but, if we judge that it will strengthen the long-term prospects of that journalism to prevent non-subscribers who employ ad blockers and refuse to whitelist us from reading it, we’ll do it.
But if this is a real issue for us, consider those publishers who do not have a digital subscription model and who are entirely reliant on digital advertising, to replace falling print revenues in the case of legacy companies, and for the whole of their revenue in the case of digital ones.
I don’t need to tell anyone here that digital advertising is going through a wider disruption with the astonishingly rapid switch of consumption to smartphone, the decline of standard web rotational display, the power of the major social and search platforms and so on. My friend Shane Smith talked recently about a likely bloodbath among advertising-dependent publishers this year. I’m British and I find the word ‘bloodbath’ a shade melodramatic – especially from a Canadian – but I agree with Shane’s analysis.
This is why proportionate but meaningful industry-wide action on ad blocking is so important.
So put my first three points together and think of them as a potential new agreement between publishers and users. We have a responsibility to work with advertisers to deliver rich, enjoyable, valuable ad experiences, and to use and pass on data about their visits to our sites fairly and transparently. They have a responsibility to contribute to the economic sustainability of quality content creation.
In the end, free riding will not just damage us and the wider public realm. It will damage them.
Let’s now turn to my fourth point, which is a practical one. There is early but encouraging evidence that a significant proportion of users will respond to clear messaging about ad blocking and the threat it poses to quality content.
And that point is grounded in a basic idea that has become a requirement of digital business: when you empower your customers by providing them with choice, good things can happen.
Over the past few months, as part of a wider program of experiments and surveys, we’ve tested both dismissible and undismissible messages about ad blocking. Both sets of messages sought to explain to users who had installed an ad blocker the connection between advertising revenue and the journalism they wanted to consume.
With the dismissible messages, the user could click and close the message and go on to read the story they had come to The Times for in the first place. undismissible messages prevented users who got them from reading the journalism at all, unless they agreed to whitelist us in their ad blocker.
We tested both dismissible and undismissible messages with non-subscribers. You won’t be surprised to hear that, at least in these limited tests, undismissible messages were much more effective than dismissible ones. Indeed, more than 40% of those who encountered the undismissible message agreed to whitelist The Times.
Times subscribers are already making a significant contribution to the funding of our journalism, so we think of them very differently. We did not put undismissible messages in front of these valued paying customers. But we did try dismissible messages – and no fewer than 30% of the ad blocker-using subscribers we tested agreed to whitelist The New York Times.
We’re still testing and analyzing, but even at this early stage we have confidence that – if we decide to move in this direction – we will be able to convince many of those who use ad blockers to whitelist us so that ads still load on The New York Times site. It may be that, in both cases, the percentages of those agreeing to whitelist would grow over time – though we also recognize that some ad blocking non-subscribers, who are repeatedly confronted with such messages but who are unwilling to whitelist, might give up using our site altogether.
That would be a pity, but neither they nor we can have it both ways. It’s not fair to continue to consume something you’re not prepared to support in any way. As for us, in principle we don’t want to stop anyone from sampling Times journalism, but we also have to accept that someone who won’t subscribe or look at ads doesn’t help us succeed in any way at all.
But we do want to offer all of our users as much choice as we can, and we recognize that there are some users – both subscribers and current non-subscribers – who would prefer to have an ad-free experience.
So we are also exploring the possibility of offering a higher tier digital subscription offer which would allow users to enjoy Times journalism without seeing advertisements, while still making a fair contribution towards its creation.
My fifth and final point is that – although we recognize some of the frustrations that have led users to adopt ad blockers – there are technologies and practices associating with ad blocking which are unfair and deceptive. We intend to push back against them and we want to encourage the rest of the industry to do the same.
We are particularly troubled by the business model of some of the largest ad blockers who whitelist advertising in return for payment, thus effectively requiring digital publishers to pay in order to receive advertisements to their own users – including advertisements which are, by anyone’s definition, non-invasive.
The largest entity engaged in this practice is the private limited company Eyeo, which owns both the leading desktop ad blocker, Adblock Plus, and the so-called Acceptable Ads whitelist, which seeks a 30% of revenue from any firm that generates more than 10 million unblocked ad impressions a month as a result of appearing on its whitelist.
This is a manifestly unsavory business practice. Ad blockers often portray themselves as an answer to unsatisfactory digital advertising experiences. But Eyeo wasn’t founded by concerned citizens. It was founded by a digital ad veteran and represents the most cynical, most money-grasping end of the old unreformed digital ad business. We need to expose Eyeo, Adblock Plus and the Acceptable Ads whitelist, so that the public can see them for what they are.
Unlike most of the other ad blockers in the marketplace, Eyeo is not attempting to limit tagging to protect privacy – they permit trackers to pay to be included in their Acceptable Ads programs.
Eyeo’s secondary line of business has been to license the “Acceptable Ads” whitelist to other ad blockers, including some smaller mobile ad blockers. The second largest ad blocker, Ad Block, which was sold in October to and unknown buyer, also uses Eyeo’s Acceptable Ads list.
We want to encourage other publishers and counterparts throughout the industry, and the organizations which represent us, to be trenchant in publicly confronting ad blockers who engage in these coercive and misleading business practices. Recently, we have joined with other publishers in the NAA in filing a complaint with the FTC to investigate certain deceptive practices of ad blockers.
It is not just publishers who are vulnerable to these trade practices, and we encourage our partners across the industry to seek out opportunities to oppose them.
Five points then:
We have to clean up our own act as an industry.
We must develop digital advertising which is valuable and a pleasure to consume.
We must make sure our users understand the link between ad revenue and high quality content.
There is evidence that many users will respond to the right messages about ad blocking.
We must fight the unacceptable and deceptive business practices associated with some ad blockers.
Ad blocking is undeniably a challenge – I wouldn’t have said what I have this morning if it wasn’t – but let me finish by putting it into perspective.
We’re still certain that digital advertising will play a critical and positive role in our future success. As you’ve heard, we’re pivoting our ad business towards less intrusive, leaner, inline display; branded content; bold new smartphone executions, video, virtual reality and other kinds of visual storytelling. We believe that right now we’re offering our users the best digital advertising experiences in the history of digital publishing.
We’re already seeing tangible results – revenue from smartphone advertising, for instance, grew 149% year over year in the first quarter of the year – but the best is still to come.
So let’s take firm action on ad blocking. But let’s also unlock the full creative and economic potential of our ability to bring great content, great users and great creative advertisers together. Thank you.
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. (ForthepurposeofthestudyPewdefined long form as over a 1000 words and short form as 101-999 words. And lest you question the methodology, Pewclearlyputinthework.)
“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‘smorethanonewaytosucceedatdigital 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 tookaleapoffaith 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. Ayearlater, 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. Wewon‘twaitaround 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‘stonsofotherdata 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.
According a recent report in the New York Times, the majority of new online advertising revenue—85%—will go to two companies: Google and Facebook. While these companies have consumer-facing services, the reason they dominate the digital advertising ecosystem is because of the technology and algorithms they employ as third parties. Third parties collect data about consumers yet have no direct relationship with them. In addition, those people usually have no idea that their data is being collected.
When you consider that direct response ads represent nearly two thirds of digital advertising and these companies only get paid when consumers click on ads it’s no wonder we see the digital experience dominated by annoying, intrusive, and crappy ads.
And how are consumers reacting to this situation? As TRUSTe has noted, clearing cookies is still the primary method employed by consumers to protect their privacy. However, clearing cookies has detrimental effects to the user experience such as requiring consumers to log in every time they revisit a site which then makes the stalking, creepy ads come back even more. Yet they still clear cookies because it’s one of the main tools they know about to prevent being tracked. In this dysfunctional dynamic, big data is being used to drive down costs of serving targeted ads rather than drive up relevance to the consumer.
A few years ago, consumers started activating their Do Not Track (DNT) signals in an effort to express a choice, even though there was no industry standard yet. As Doc Searls plotted out, the number of DNT signals declined at the same time that the number of consumers with ad blockers started climbing. It’s not a coincidence – consumers have been looking for easy ways to express choice. If this continues, publishers won’t be able to fund quality content like this piece about the early season slide of the Yankees.
It’s interesting that our members are having some success asking consumers to turn off their ad blockers in order to access the content they love. The conversation goes something like this:
Website owner: Hi loyal reader, would you pretty please turn off your ad blocker or whitelist this site? We need advertising revenue to pay for quality journalism.
About 40% of consumers: Sure! I love you guys.
The remaining 60% of consumers: Meh. I’m gonna go look elsewhere for that story about Trump. I really, really hate those annoying ads on those other crappy sites I visit.
My take on this is that consumers understand premium experiences and are willing to view advertising in exchange. But, the value proposition gets out of whack when there’s no transparency for the consumer and the experience is poor.
Meanwhile, advertisers aren’t happy either. As the ANA pointed out, $7.2 billion was lost to fraud last year. They’ve been paying for ads that aren’t even viewable. There are also huge concerns about the inability to fully document where all of their digital advertising dollars are going. In short, there’s a lack of transparency and trust for advertisers. Sound familiar?
So, how does our industry find its footing again? We’ve got to be more clear with consumers about the value proposition and provide them with easy ways to express choice over ubiquitous data collection. By putting consumers first, we also force the issue on ad fraud, viewability and accountability. Every company involved in the digital advertising supply chain would have to justify how it’s adding to the overall value proposition. They would need to “put in more value” than they “take out” – the best way to build trust.
The FCC recently proposed privacy rules for broadband providers that aim to give consumers more control. The problem is that this only applies to ISPs – not all of the other entities that relentlessly track consumers around the web. And, government regulation often becomes outdated very quickly – market solutions or real industry self-regulation are far more able to adapt to new business models and practices. Maybe the FCC proceeding will lead to a new conversation within industry.
With the growing market of Internet of Things, immersive experiences and connected world we live in, the strains on trust between advertisers, consumers and publishers are only going to get worse. We need to find the right balance of providing consumers with transparency and real choices. Consumers are looking for a better experience. Advertisers are demanding fairness. And, I would like to live in a world where I can read all about how badly the Yankees are playing.
According to our latest research, engagement with known brands is boosted when consumers encounter them on favored social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. At DCN’s most recent member’s-only event, Content Everywhere held May 10th in New York, Andrew Hare, Senior Director, Research and Strategy at Magid (which partnered with DCN on the study) previewed the 2016 DCN Content Distribution Impact Research report. The good news is that, thus far, social is additive, not cannibalistic of consumers’ content consumption on brand sites and aps. While Hare alluded to an eventual tipping point—in which consumer attention reaches maximum overload—he said that today, distributing content via social channels builds traffic through brand discovery.
However, as DCN CEO Jason Kint pointed out in his opening remarks “attention is the scarce resource that matters long term.”. So media brands must approach social wisely in order to receive fair value for their content in social contexts. And, with both the promise and challenges in mind, a wide range of speakers from DCN member companies, as well as invited industry guests, discussed topics ranging from staffing and resource allocation for social media, to deep dives into strategies for specific platforms, and measuring the impact of social distribution.
Here are 3 key takeaways from this closed-door event:
1. Social is everybody’s job: Not surprisingly, a recurring theme throughout the day was the vast audience that media brands can reach via social platforms. Even those with misgivings about brand-recognition within social settings recognize that social distribution must be part of the mix. Several speakers noted that it is ideal for all staff members to be active on social and understand how to communicate with audiences, Tom Fishman, SVP of Audience Growth & Engagement at MTV cautioned that “hiring a social team can be easier than training an existing team on social. “
And looking for the applicants with the highest follower counts is not the way to go about hiring, according toVox Director of Programming Allison Rockey who noted these individuals are terrific at building their personal brand, but may not be the best at building yours. In fact, Rockey suggests starting with a 140-character cover letter and finding people who genuinely love your brand.
That said, Rockey (and others) pointed out that there are platforms such as Snapchat that require specific skill-sets. This was reinforced by Amy Lawless, the VP Digital Strategy & Planning at Scripps Networks, which boasts a 10 person Snapchat team that produces 14 pieces of content for the platform daily. While the New York Times has tested platform-specific staffers, they’ve found that having photo editors and headline writers who are adept at social is more effective, according to Jason Sylva, Executive Director of Digital Media. The Times and others like to see staffers with social media expertise working with writers and editors to help them hone their skills so that a broader cross-section of staff become adept at creating content for different platforms.
2. Engage (and re-engage): Because there’s currently no easy way to get a clear view of measurement across the many social platforms publishers must carefully consider metrics when it comes to social content distribution.Keith Hernandez, President at Slate, says it is essential to analyze the performance of specific content in order to optimize for specific platforms and continue to look at how people interact with the content over time so that you can deliver sequential experiences that deepen engagement. With branded content specifically, Hernandez says that Slate has been able to build “audience pools” in social which are much more likely to be interested in specific types of information.
Targeting has also been a particular strength of social for Atlas Obscura, according to CEO David Plotz. In their case, using the brand’s highly-visual content to entice geo-targeted individuals to attend live events has been “a powerful indicator and driver of brand-affinity.”
Roker Media has focused its efforts on live streaming, which CEO Ron Pruett describes as “the missing link between social and television.” Given his background in commerce, Pruett says he also evaluates content based on actions and with live “you get instantaneous feedback.”
3. Build audience affinity: While reaching massive audiences is the primary driver of media brands’ social content distribution efforts, click-throughs and page-views do not tell the whole story. Though Plotz believes that social played a large part in growing his audience sevenfold in the past year, the company’s ability to drive audiences to its live events provides a context in which Atlas Obscura becomes indelibly branded.
Lawless says that Snapchat has provided Scripps Networks with an opportunity “to develop a relationship and brand affinity with younger viewers so that as they age up, they have affinity with us.” Jonathan Meyers, Senior Vice President, Strategy & Operations at CNBC Digital says that social has offered a context in which his brand can connect with younger audiences as well. “Millennials are something like three times as likely to start a business” so he focuses evening content for social on entrepreneurship.
At Harvard Business Review, they are always thinking about the customer journey, according to Katherine Bell, Editor of HBR.org. “Use social to build the habits and trust. Then, at that moment when they are in real trouble at work, they’ll think of you… and you can save the day and earn their loyalty forever.”
Universally, the speakers and the attendees from DCN member companies that participated in the Content Everywhere member day are all embracing social platforms with a careful eye towards maintaining brand value and strategic resource allocation. As new platforms emerge, publishers are focusing on lessons learned from ongoing experimentation to make social work for audience building, brand affinity and—of course—revenue.
Artificial intelligence can help journalists automatically adapt stories to the
personalities, moods and locations of their readers.
The news and information ecosystem is in the midst of change — again.
Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world.
Smart devices will require “smart content”. It’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future.
A change in how we interact with news Today, most people find information via search or social. And while these two channels are radically different in functionality, they have one thing in common — any given article surfaced through these platforms is exactly the same for everyone in the world.
Content today is one size fits all. And why wouldn’t it be? A journalist writes a story hoping to reach as many people as possible.
Search and social help tailor information choices to individuals to a degree, but Google, Facebook and Twitter know that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the equation. That’s why, since 2013, these companies have been investing substantial resources into the space and acquiring startups.
In Facebook Messenger, for example, several news organization such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already using bots and some level of automation to deliver news through the platform.
Beyond automation: What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence understands the environment it operates in and performs certain actions as a result of it. AI seeks to learn what its users want and how they want it.
In the specific case of news media, articles can be processed through algorithms that analyze readers’ locations, social media posts and other publicly available data. They can then be served content tailored to their personality, mood and social economic status, among other things.
AI allows journalists and media companies to create infinite versions of an article, resulting in increasingly relevant information that speaks directly to individuals — ultimately forming a more engaged audience.
Examples of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation in content creation Crystal is a program that adapts emails you write to the personality of recipients. For example, if you’re sending a note to a more laid-back person, the software suggests a change in tone from a formal introduction such as “Dear John” to a more colloquial “Hi” or “Hey.”
Crystal uses previous emails to that recipient as well as their social media posts to recommend certain language, tone and sentiment. It’s easy to see how this approach can be adapted for a newsroom –in fact, it can build off of pioneering efforts already underway such as automated earnings reports by The Associated Press.
Artificial intelligence can even localize stories. If you live in California, you might not read a story entitled “Texas residents poisoned by toxic waste plant for years.” But if the story included an automated note highlighting a similar past incident in your city, you would probably be more inclined to look at it.
The future of journalism powered by artificial intelligence
Beyond tailoring content to users, AI can help journalists do more investigative work by analyzing massive sets of data and pointing to relationships not easily visible to even the most experienced reporter.
While this technology can improve efficiencies in newsrooms, though, it should work in tandem with journalists, not replace them. Going forward, the challenge will be to make sure we continue to adhere to our standards and ethics.
What will the future of news will look like when it becomes powered by AI? We will soon find out.
I’m the Strategy Manager for The Associated Press and fellow at Columbia Journalism School. I write about media, storytelling and innovation. Let’s connect. (@fpmarconi)
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.
While U.S. Internet advertising is growing, Google and Facebook remain the dominant platforms for selling advertising on the Internet. The two platforms collectively control a 76% share of the growth in U.S. online advertising, Meeker noted, using numbers from last year’s IAB/PwC Advertising Report. All others besides Google and Facebook saw growth of 13% in online ads in 2015.
