Facebook tweaks its algorithms, combating ad-blockers by improving user experience and state of press freedom in EU

Friday, July 01, 2016      Future Media Lab.       0

 Continuing with our bi-weekly news roundup, Anna Capraro with Karin Fleming share the news that caught their eyes over the last two weeks. The news round-up is a way for the Future Media Lab. team and members of the Future Media Lab. network to share articles about innovations and developments in the media sector, including references to relevant media policy debates.

Here are Anna and Karin's choices for this week:

Facebook puts friends in front of publishers. In their most recent effort to address the lack of transparency of its news feed algorithms, Facebook has published its formal “News Feed Values” – a document that details how it decides what shows up in users’ news feeds. This comes alongside tweaks to the algorithm, which will result in posts from friends appearing higher up in news feed than posts for pages (such as publisher pages). For publishers who may have built an audience strategy around Facebook, this is potentially a big blow. Content shared by friends will now have priority, though it’s likely that Instant Articles, Facebook-native videos and other content will also be stacked against articles shared on publishers’ pages.

Culture is a biggest obstacle of change for media magazines. According to Chris Llewellyn, president and CEO of FIPP – the network for global media, culture is a big obstacle of change for magazine publishers. “Innovation starts with the leader,” said Llewellyn. “Without leaderships, training and rewards innovation will not happen.”

Combating ad-blockers needs to start with improved user experience. In an op-ed on Digiday, the chairman of GroupM Connect, North America, John Montgomery shares some insight he had after attending the recent ad blocking summit hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Essentially, he says that the best way to combat ad blockers is by improving the user experience. This can be done by setting standards on acceptable ads, he says, but in the meantime publishers, creative agencies and media agencies need to also modify their strategies to take into consideration the main complaints of consumers: that digital ads are invasive, negatively impact load time, or are irrelevant.

Is video the future of social? Today you are constantly hearing about the need to expand to video. Twitter has Periscope, Facebook has Facebook Live, and now Tumblr has the option of including live video. But while video – and live video in particular – is trendy, is it effective? While many of the social platforms are heavily promoting the use of video – in fact, a Facebook exec recently said that she expects the social platform to be “all video” in five years and it is paying outlets to produce it – it may not be the best answer for all publishers and is costly to produce. In fact, a recent report from the Reuters Institute shows that the push for more video is being driven largely by technology, platforms and publishers and NOT consumer demand.

Lack of standards in online engagement metrics means its tough to know where you stand. Publishers are increasingly using metrics to demonstrate the engagement of their audiences on Facebook. The problem is that analytics firms have different approaches that contrast and even contradict each other, while Facebook itself has more than 200 metrics that can be exported by publishers to determine an engagement score. This makes it difficult to really determine the value of engagement.

Publishers face new trouble with platforms. Many organizations increased their use of platforms especially for their ability into implementing of systems, however the news industries are declining their performance. Publishers started to use these new platforms, but they are losing control over how they distribute and present their content. This potentially could threaten journalistic ethics, particularly when it comes to interactive stories (articles that ask readers questions about themselves and use that data to personalise the resulting narrative), since hosting such stories on the platform enables the platform to have access to the reader’s answers, but not sharing the story could have implications on press freedom.

We’re in Wroclaw talking about press freedom today! The Future Media Lab. is one of the supporting organisations of a press freedom conference taking place today in Wroclaw. The conference, titled "(R)EVOLUTION OF EUROPE'S PRESS" bring together top press freedom advocates across Europe in order to discuss the political, economic and technological challenges that impact a free and independent press in Europe. The results of this highly interactive conference will be fed into a Future Media Lounge debate in the European Parliament in September 2016, as well as in a publication to stimulate this debate in a wider network across Europe.

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