(Left) Filip Ševčík, Communications Intern at EMMA/the Future Media Lab..
In the most recent edition of our bi-weekly news roundup, Filip Ševčík shares the news that caught his eye in the past 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:
Digital platforms
1) In November we highlighted that Facebook appeared to send 32% less traffic to top Facebook publishers. The Wall Street Journal recently compared data from more online analytics companies and found that it isn’t entirely true – Chartbeat found that Facebook’s referral traffic to publisher’s sites remained relatively constant while Parsely registered even a slight increase of 1.2% over the period from January to October. Susan Bidel, Research Analyst for Forrester, attributes this discrepancy to differences in the methodologies and focus groups chosen by online measurement companies. Publishers therefore shouldn’t pay too much attention to these macro trends, and focus more on their own metrics.
2) For example, 3 major publishers experimenting with Facebook’s Instant articles experienced positive developments of their social referral traffic over the last months. However, due to the fact Facebook only provides article‑by‑article metrics, it’s impossible to distinguish between traffic driven by normal social referrals and instant article ones. Therefore, it’s still too early to draw any conclusions. That said, the trend towards instant articles is growing, as the Washington Post, Atlantic and Slate are some of the major publications that now publish most of their content directly on Facebook to deliver a better user experience. Additionally, they say the increased audience reach and monetization possibilities is an added bonus. Cory Haik, the Executive Director of Emerging News Products at the Washington Post, thinks there’s no risk in experimenting at scale, as it’s not a one-way door and publishers can always choose to step out of the initiative.
3) On the other hand, Vivian Schiller, former NBC News digital head and leader of Twitter’s news team, anticipates trouble for publishers lacking either scale or monetization both on and off digital platforms. But, David Weinberger, senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center, recommends publishers to collectively develop APIs to make stories part of the internet’s infrastructure to secure a better negotiating position in the future. However, Facebook does appear to be receptive to publishers’ complaints, as they recently announced they will be changing the advertising restrictions inside Instant Articles in order to enable publishers to generate more revenue.
4) What are the alternatives? Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open-source project from Google, offering up to 4 times faster loading times of mobile webpages, is launching in February next year.
Internet protocols
5) Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will launch in February next year, promising that its use of HTTP/2 protocol will improve load time for the web in general by speeding up the average page loading time by 3 seconds. So far, only 2.5% of websites use HTTP/2, so the impact this will have is hard to determine.
6) The secure internet communication protocol HTTPS is also under-used on publishers’ websites, despite significant number of security breaches and hacks. The HTTPS protocol makes it harder for attackers to filter, spy or redirect the flow of information, but publishers would probably lose out on some revenues if they upped their usage of it, since ads from certain sources are incompatible with it.
Copyright
7) The European Commission presented its plans to modernize EU copyright rules and projected 16 more initiatives to be introduced by the end of 2016. However, measuring the impact, will take extensive length of time because it effects a wide array of sectors, from publishers and content providers to online service providers and intermediaries. Something to keep an eye on!
Advertising – from display ads to mobile, video and VR
9) Out of 542 European agencies, advertisers and publishers surveyed by AppNexus, 80% use programmatic mobile and 56% programmatic video. As biggest challenges they’ve identified implementing programmatic across devices, slow page loading times of programmatic video and trust issues towards Agency Trading Desks and media agencies. One internet publishing source said that pre‑roll video ads will likely become the next focus of many publishers because of adblocking, while Ben Plomion, SVP Marketing at GumGum, believes the opposite, since this format of short videos playing before the content selected by users is disrupting their user experience.
10) Publishers could leverage their position between brands and consumers by producing native, virtual reality ads. But one problem might be maintaining the trust of audiences and clearly distinguishing between commercial and editorial content. Scaling is still problematic, because getting minimum viable audiences requires high time and resource investment. Furthermore, there’s a scarcity of VR experts available on the market, according to Ron Diorio, VP of Business Development and Innovation at The Economist. Since low-budget VR headsets from cardboard are affordable and the whole generation of millennials are heavy users of interactive media, the potential is promising.
Paywalls
11) More paywalls are being erected by European publishers. Der Spiegel, one of the biggest news magazines in Europe with a circulation of almost 900.000, recently announced that it will be putting some of its articles behind a paywall. Similarly, Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer is considering a paywall for its recent purchase, Business Insider, and smartphone app Upday.
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