Rise of platforms and adblockers, challenges of native advertising and media predictions for 2016

Friday, January 08, 2016      Future Media Lab.       0

(Left) Filip Ševčík, Communications Intern at EMMA/the Future Media Lab..

  In the first edition of 2016 of our bi-weekly news roundup, Filip Ševčík shares the news that caught his eye over the holidays. 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:

Platforms

 

1) Publishers continue to join initiatives launched by digital platforms to distribute their content. In mid‑December, The Sun joined Facebook's Instant Articles along with another 12 UK publishers. Chris Duncan, News UK’s Chief Marketing Officer, had doubts at first, but as the legal terms were adjusted to benefit publishers and the project became more transparent as a result of better tracking possibilities, he believes that platforms in general will constitute an important part of their content distribution strategy.

 

2) Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, expects this trend towards platforms to continue in 2016 and predicts that publishers will focus on content creation, distribute via APIs and leave the distribution to intermediaries or became platforms themselves in order to “turn their readers into users and audiences into communities”.

 

Business Models

 

3) Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, says, “the [ad-dependent] business model for news [based on getting pageviews and traffic] is broken”. Ernst-Jan Pfauth, Co-founder & Publisher of De Correspondent in the Netherlands, also thinks that subscription based model is the future of journalism, due to the volatility of advertising revenues and other factors that damage the publishers’ relation with audience – for example, closing off comments sections and low community building investments.

 

Adblocking

 

4) Adblocking is still expected to rise. Sourcepoint estimates that half of European internet users will have an ad-blocker installed by 2017. At the same time, IAB found that only 4% of consumers are willing to pay for an ad-free experience.

 

5) Forbes and Condé Nast GQ joined the ranks of magazine media that prevent adblock users from accessing their online content. Since 17 December 2015, 42.4% out of 2.1 million Forbes’ visitors decided to turn off their adblock software to access the content, served in an ad-light experience.

 

Advertising

 

6) Adyoulike, a leading European native advertising technology company increased its revenues in UK by more than 300% in 2015. However, ethical doubts associated with native advertising persist. According to a research done at Grady College in Georgia (US), only 17 out of 242 subjects were able to distinguish between native advertising and a real news story.

 

7) Schibsted’s study revealed that static, banner images are the most effective mobile advertising format, having the biggest influence on reader’s brand preference, while disruptive, rich media formats scored low. The results of this study might help the industry to move from obsolete click-through-rate measurements to new metrics of ad’s effectiveness.

 

8) ProPublica is the first major news site launched on the dark web, offering fully anonymous service, accessible through the Tor web browser. However, it is unlikely that secured media sites will become a common trend, as most publishers’ websites aren’t even using secured internet protocols, mainly because of potential loss of advertising revenues.

Media Freedom

 

9) The Overall Media freedom in Europe has worsened over 2015, according to Dunja Mijatovic, representative for media freedom at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. As a response to threats and terrorist attacks on media, regulatory interventions giving broader surveillance powers to national authorities were adopted in several EU member states. Also inPoland, the Treasury Minister recently got new powers to appoint and dismiss the management of public service broadcasters, which might violate the Rule of Law and is potentially harmful for freedom of expression.

 

Predictions for 2016

 

10) As every year, NiemanLab collected predictions for 2016 by experts from publishing, digital media and journalism. Few ideas are recurring, such as migration from homepages towards platforms and distributed content, re-inventing comments section to better engage community or rise of podcasts.

 

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