In the most recent edition of our bi-weekly news roundup, Karin Fleming, with the help of Filip Ševčík, the Future Media Lab.’s new communications intern, share the news that caught their eye in the past week. 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 and Karin’s choices for this week:

1. After embedding a code in billions of digital ads, a recent report from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that about eleven per cent of display ads and about a quarter of video ads are being viewed by software, not people. Fake traffic is usually generated by malware programmes, commoditized and then sold by brokers – and it will cost advertisers roughly $6.3 billion this year. This is yet another challenge the digital environment poses for publishers, who are already trying to compete with digital rivals for advertising revenue. With eighty percent of publishers concerned about their ability to compete with Facebook and Google’s ad products, some – such as News Corp and Condé Nast – are embracing the people-based marketing strategies by utilizing the information they have on their subscribers.
2. Increasing ad revenues online is a big challenge for many media companies. The rise of ad-blockers indicates that consumers are increasingly technologically-savvy enough to avoid disruptive forms of advertisements and publishers are taking note. Vice Media, Buzz Feed and other new-media companies plan to start their own advertising platforms, partly because they blame automated advertising for littering the internet with too many ads and alienating consumers. Additionally, they believe that it’s possible to increase their ad revenues, because the current system is quite inefficient for publishers – up to 55% of programmatic ad spending ended up in the pocket of middlemen (US) in 2014.
3. Yesterday in New York City European Commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager defended her investigations into major US tech firms, specifically Google and Apple. This follows comments by US President Barack Obama back in February who said that the investigations were “commercially driven” and that European companies are not able to compete with American ones and therefore are “trying to set up roadblocks” to prevent American companies from being able to operate effectively. Commissioner Vestager’s comments also follow critical remarks on the dominant role of American tech players made by the EU’s digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger in April.
4. Millennials are often regarded as a uniform group when talking about their media consumption habits, a premise that a recent report from the Media Insight Project found to be inaccurate. Rather, the study found that millennials tend to be categorized into four distinct categories of media habits: 1) the unattached that go online mostly for entertainment; 2) the explorers that are interested in news; 3) the distracted, who do not actively seek out news; and 4) the activists, of which about half pay for news subscription.
5. Understanding the consumer habits of millennials – who have long been stereotyped as a generation resistant to news – has become a key part of many publishers’ strategies. Some newsrooms are trying out new messaging applications to source and broadcast stories, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, in order to target younger audiences. Additionally, the BBC and Bild also experimented with different apps in order to broadcast immediate, raw documentation of events, such as the refugee crisis in Europe. This content, which publishers are sharing on these platforms, is also complimented by news stories published by the platforms themselves. For instance, Snapchat introduced “Live Stories”, which uses content submitted by its users in order to publish behind-the-scenes accounts of news events.
6. Big Data is a term that is thrown around a lot these days: but what does it really mean? Often “big data” is used as a synonym for “a lot of data”, but this is highly inaccurate, according to Bernard Marr, a strategic performance consultant and big data guru. Rather, Marr says that the preferred term should be “smart data” – meaning that companies are not just working with large collections of data, but that they are working with it in an intelligent way. In order for data to be big, it has to be usable in a way that generates insights and analysis.

 

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