Metrics shift to editorial analysis, business behind adblocks and collaboration among publishers

Friday, March 04, 2016      Future Media Lab.       0

 Continuing with our bi-weekly news roundup, Filip Ševčík shares the news that caught his eye 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 Filip’s choices for this week:

Business behind acceptable ads. Eyeo, founder of AdBlock Plus, revealed the monetization model of its acceptable ads programme. A blog post on company’s web explains that “only advertisers that stand to gain more than 10m incremental ad impressions per month because of whitelisting are asked to sponsor” and estimates that 90% of publishers won’t have to pay anything under these terms. But it’s not the only way to make a business of adblocking – some collect anonymized data and re-sell them to third companies, while other operate as freemium or one time purchases.

Trend: Turn-off adblock to view content or become a subscriber seems to continue. The viability of the strategy is further supported by a recent research of adblocking in the UK by IAB/YouGov, which claims that 54% of users would switch off their adblocks to access content. After successfully implementing such measures on smaller titles Geo.de (22% drop of adblocking users) or Essen&Trinken (35% drop), Gruner + Jahr plans to introduce it on a bigger, general news site Stern. Mark Thompson, CEO of New York Times expressed similar plans for the title in an interview and compared the aforementioned acceptable ads programme as extortion.

Native ad spend will overtake display ads by 2020. Yahoo and Enders presented a study that expects n ative ad spend to more than double (€13.2 billion) and overtake the majority of total display ad spend in Europe by 2020. To Joseph Evans, digital media analyst at Enders Analysis, it seems only logical, because it is a win-win for the industry.  Forbes, also bets high on native, as it quite successfully connects marketeers with influential experts and their own journalists to produce native ads, which already generate around 30% of company's total digital ad revenue.

Keep eye on the right metrics. Not sure what to track when transforming your media business? WAN-IFRA asked leading media analysts, such as Ken Doctor, NiemanLab correspondent, what to look at when evaluating sustainability of media businesses undergoing transformation. Among the recurring answers were reaching and growing millennial audiences or growth of mobile audience and revenues. The growing importance of metrics and insights is illustrated by a launch of a new website, MetricShift, which covers exclusively the latest trends in media measurement and analytics.

So what is editorial analytics? In short, it means aligning newsroom’s organization, culture and editorial priorities with bespoke tools to leverage the full potential of a long-term, data-informed decision making processes. It helps publishers better understand the environment they are operating in and especially – better understand their audiences. Unfortunately, only a handful of publishers adopted such methods until now and most still use generic analytics, according to the Reuters Institute report.

European publishers join Google’s AMP.  All major publishers from Italy, Spain, France and Germany are on board of Google’s AMP pages, as it has potential to increase their revenues from mobile. Tom Standage, The Economist’s deputy editor, considers the support of paywalls as one of the biggest advantages of AMP over Apple News or Instant Articles – publishers with hybrid business models can provide every article in AMP and don’t have to change their approach. But as Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news and social products, says, AMP is not just about news articles – it can be applied to improve the whole web experience.

Social referrals not as valuable as you might think. Social media platforms are often praised for the amount of new traffic they are driving to publishers. However, the average engagement of users referred by social media is 57 seconds, which is 8 seconds lower than engagement of users that found content via search engines and even 15 second lower than users with no referrer, according to data from Parse.ly.

Compete with content, not technology. Publishers start to recognize the need for collaboration, when trying to compete with tech companies entering the media value chain. They increasingly form traffic-sharing partnerships, programmatic alliances and innovation projects such as Coral or Burda’s CMS project Thunder, to pool resources and share innovation. Also, there’s AEMII, media innovation accelerator that enables Europe’s media sector to regain control of user engagement and content monetization. The next generation insights it provides are in particularly relevant for the industry, as getting reliable data analytics and insights from content distribution platforms is technically challenging, very costly, and typically requires tens of thousands U.S. dollars to adapt a common tracking service like ComScore or Quantcast to every single distribution platform.

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