One in three podcast listeners expect to increase their podcast consumption over the next six months, following a similar increase in their behavior in the past six months. The results were revealed as part of comScore’s first study dedicated to podcasting, commissioned by audio on-demand network Wondery.
Significantly, among all forms of advertising on mobile devices, podcasts create the highest improvement in perception. And among all forms of digital advertising, podcast ads are considered the least intrusive.
Key findings include:
Over two-thirds of online Americans aged 18-49 are aware of podcasting and nearly one in five listen to podcasts at least once a month.
Incidence of podcast listening is highest among males aged 18-34, at 30%, who spend an average of more than 11 hours per month listening.
About half of podcast consumption is done via mobile devices.
Podcast listeners like the educational and entertainment value of the experience, and report an increase in positive emotions after listening to an episode.
Two-thirds of podcast listeners say they have engaged in various research and/or purchase related behaviors as a result of advertising exposure from podcasts.
More than half of non-podcast listeners say they would be interested in listening if they knew where and how to find podcast episodes.
The study was commissioned between March and April of 2016 among over 2,000 respondents in the US aged 18-49. Full results are available upon request at wondery.com/contact-us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last week at the NewFronts, Time Inc. announced the upcoming launch of INSTANT, a mobile-first, all-video platform featuring content about the lives and projects of digital celebrities as well as content created by digital celebrities exclusively for INSTANT. The new brand will deliver news, features and exclusives about and by “the new famous,” the digital artists of YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, YouNow, Vine and other influential emerging platforms.
Significantly, the content will be mobile-centric, to reflect the dominance of mobile in the content consumption habits of INSTANT’s target audience. Content will be delivered as a fluid video stream that facilitates audience engagement. Slated for launch early this summer, INSTANT is being designed to offer a native app-like experience directly in the mobile browser.
We caught up with Kirstin Benson, INSTANT’s editorial director, to learn a bit more about the origins of the project and her plans for INSTANT.
Kirstin Benson, Editorial Director, INSTANT
Describe the origins of INSTANT: The seeds for INSTANT were planted long before I joined the company. Word on the street is that the concept was born last summer during a strategy meeting after an executive pointed out that there was no outlet covering digital artists the way People and EW cover traditional Hollywood stars and entertainment.
Was this launch motivated by the behavior of your digital audience? Advertiser driven? Recognition of larger industry trends? There were a number of factors that motivated us to launch INSTANT, including trends with users and advertisers. But, most importantly, we saw an opportunity to be the first media outlet dedicated to a group of people – digital artists – who play an increasingly important role in our audiences’ lives but are massively under-covered in the media. Until now, there has been a gap in the space.
Why do this as a multi-brand initiative rather than leverage one particular brand’s strength? There is no media company better positioned to launch a platform like INSTANT than Time Inc. From TIME came People, from People came InStyle and Entertainment Weekly…and now, People and Entertainment Weekly are joining forces to launch INSTANT. Just like People and Entertainment Weekly curate the best in entertainment, human interest, and pop culture, INSTANT will tell its audience who and what to care about in the vast and frenzied digital world. Thus, we wanted to leverage both of the brands for INSTANT’s launch.
Given that you’ve opted for a 100% native and branded ad offering, could you describe what will the advertising experience be like? All advertising on INSTANT will be presented through native and branded videos that play in-feed. In the absence of banner ads, pre-roll, and pop ups, the experience will seem fluid and seamless for our audience.
This native ad content will be created in house by the INSTANT team to ensure a consistent voice and aesthetic across content experiences, both branded and editorial so that it meets our audience’s expectation of great content experiences. All ad content on INSTANT will follow Time Inc.’s well defined guidelines for native and branded content and its labeling.
Why the focus on mobile and video for INSTANT? Our goal with INSTANT is to create content that our audience craves (read: video) and deliver it to them in their native environments – mobile web and social media. And the statistics support this logic: Video is taking over the web and will account for 80% of web traffic by 2019. Meanwhile, 78% of teens check their phones hourly and a third of them say they “feel addicted” to their devices. It was a no brainer to make INSTANT an all video, mobile-first platform.
Why have you opted to make INSTANT browser-based rather than develop an app? From an audience development and retention standpoint, it made more sense to make INSTANT browser-based rather than an app. We want INSTANT to be as accessible and as native to our audience as possible – and forcing them to download, register, and open an app does the exact opposite of that. That said, the INSTANT experience feels very app-like, despite being browser-based, so it delivers the best of both.
Thirty-one percent of registered voters said “reader interest” should determine what news stories show up on social media platforms, while 11% say editors should pick what’s visible to users. It is interesting to note that consumers have similar views when it comes to what they want from traditional media outlets according to a poll conducted by Morning Consult.
Only 15% think editors should pick what gets covered at traditional media outlets while 26% believe that reader interest should be the top driver of news at traditional media outlets.
However, the results differ when it comes to what respondents think goes on behind the scenes at both traditional media outlets and social media companies. More than a third of those polled think that traditional outlets primarily use editor judgment to determine coverage, while 23% think social media companies do the same. Only 13% think traditional outlets use reader interest dictate coverage and 20% believe that is the case at social media platforms.
Morning Consult also explored how people feel about social sites controlling what they see as well as their perception of the government’s role in monitoring social media as a distribution platform. The poll was conducted from May 13-15, 2016, among a national sample of 2000 registered voters.
The NewFronts started out as a sideshow (even a joke to some) compared to the TV Upfronts. But it’s no longer in the shadows, as everyone from the New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN and BuzzFeed stole the spotlight at this year’s NewFronts in New York. This series of events provides a forum for digital to court advertisers in an increasingly competitive market.
With two-thirds of U.S. agency and marketing professionals reporting increased investments toward desktop and mobile video, video — whether original series, virtual reality or live-streaming — naturally took center stage at this year’s event. Alongside new metrics for measuring advertising also came reflections about what exactly constitutes an advertisement now, as well as more of a natural acceptance, articulated some time ago, that the Internet indeed is becoming the new television.
Here’s a rundown of the most important trends from this year’s showcase, and some caveats:
1. Virtual Reality is Everywhere Following the 360-degree viewing capabilities the name implies, virtual reality is seemingly all around us now as more media outlets jump into the fray. As Adage reported, publishers “are bringing virtual reality to almost every pitch.” Some indicators: National Geographic, AOL and Refinery29 are all launching VR studios. Conde Nast too is producing a VR series. The Economist revealed plans for a second year producing virtual reality documentaries. Time Inc. also announced a virtual reality app will be included around its Life brand, which will encompass publications such as Time, People, EW and Sports Illustrated. In addition, Hulu and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, announced a partnership to curate virtual reality concert experiences to be available on Hulu’s VR app. The New York Times, meanwhile, announced its continued push toward VR on both the advertising and the editorial front.
Caveat: While virtual reality might be in the air, it might not have a big enough installed base or active user base yet.
2. Original Video Series Are Hot Alongside publishers bringing VR to almost every pitch was their announcements of original video series. Playboy, the New York Times, and The Economist announced new original video programming. Yahoo announced it was “doubling down” on its video focus and constraining it to four verticals — news, sports, finance and lifestyle. WebMD also announced it was bulking up on its lifestyle programming, and Vice unveiled plans to create up to 20 TV channels around the world. Furthermore, among other video-based initiatives, Vox revealed it’s creating a standalone studio to create content for Snapchat, as Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin reported.
Caveat: There are so many original video series that no one has time to watch them all.
3. Technology & Metrics Matter Major endeavors in the world of video also means that new metrics must emerge to keep up with industry demands. Mashable, for example, announced two additions to its Velocity technology suite. “Joining the Velocity Dashboard, which uses natural language processing to mine for topics about to go viral, is Velocity CMS, which is used to create competitive stories on those topics, and Velocity Kg, which will optimize content for multi-platform sharing,” as Troy Dreier of StreamingMedia wrote. Hulu is building interactive ads specifically for connected TVs, and is “working with Nielsen to enable the measurement of ads through over-the-top video delivery devices such as Roku, PlayStation, Xbox and Apple TV,” AdAge’s Jeanine Poggi’s reported. Yahoo also announced expanded video metrics through a partnership with the advertising analytics platform Moat to measure viewability and and metrics beyond viewability. YouTube, meanwhile, announced “Breakout Videos” through its Google Preferred product, to help find the next viral hit. It’ll allow brands to automatically buy ads on these soon-to-be trending videos.
Caveat: Technology is cool, but often it’s the tech companies who can build better technology than publishers.
4. Live-streaming Becoming Routine It goes without saying that live-streaming is becoming bigger than ever. Facebook, for example, revealed it will create a live-streamed morning show, and is partnering with Activision Blizzard, a videogame giant, to offer live e-Sports coverage on the platform. Among Time’s new video offerings is a streaming video network geared toward cord-cutters. YouTube and Hulu are also both launching live TV offerings.
Caveat: Same as VR: There might be more live-streaming show ideas than people who want to watch all those live streams.
5. Internet is the New TV We’ve been hearing this for some time, but it seems that the Internet is truly becoming modern-day television. National Geographic, long a fixture on TV, is now putting its efforts toward Instagram and other digital platforms. While Vox is backing a new television show, tellingly, more hype surrounds its pivot toward content creation on Snapchat Discover. Ellen DeGeneres has long been known for her television talk show, and now she’s starting her own digital network. Telenovelas are now coming to the digital world — specifically targeting Millennials — thanks to a joint effort by Telemundo and BuzzFeed. The digital news company Newsy is also trying to attract Millennial eyes with online programming and advertising meant for a generation not interested in broadcast.
Caveat: While Millennials make up a large segment of cord-cutters and “cord-nevers,” pay TV continues to rebound, and Comcast even added subscribers in the last quarter.
6. Dizzying Numbers None of the investment toward video and its related endeavors make sense unless companies have the data and metrics to back up their ambitions. BuzzFeed reported it now gets more than 7 billion content views a month (compared to 2.8 billion monthly views a year ago). And only a quarter of BuzzFeed content is consumed on its actual website, underscoring the importance of its social and other platform strategies. The entertainment and trend publisher PopSugar, meanwhile, reported that its video views on Facebook have jumped 452 percent since it first debuted its Facebook show, PopSugar Rush, a year ago. Hulu revealed that 70 percent of its viewing happens in a living room environment, reinforcing the trend of digital being the new TV. And Bloomberg Media also announced it has doubled its video streams since last year, as well as gained a 25 percent increase in mobile users. The company now attracts 20 million video views a month.
The Daily Mail, meanwhile, had its own impressive statistics: “The U.K.-based publisher is now posting 650 videos a day, which has resulted in a 516 percent jump in views in the past year. It’s getting 383 million monthly video views, 12 million video views per day, and claims an 80 percent completion and viewability rate,” Adweek’s Christopher Heine wrote.
Caveat: Some metrics are more valuable than others. Video views on Facebook have been maligned as too generous, counting after only 3 seconds. And huge numbers of eyeballs don’t always equate to huge income.
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.
/ An inside look at the business of digital content
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