(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:

1) Axel Springer’s decision to ban adblock users from the newspaper Bild’s website proved to be more effective than expected, as the number of readers accessing the site with adblock dropped from 23% to single digits after visitors using adblocking software were asked to choose between subscribing or turning off their adblock. According to Mathias Döpfner, more than two-thirds chose the latter option. In Britain, the situation is similar - IAB UK reported a rise of British adults using adblock – from 15% to 18% since June – but at the same time adds that 61% of British adults online would prefer to see ads and free content before paying for adfree content.

2) In case you want to serve readers video ads while circumventing adblockers, there’s a new server-side ad insertion that lets you “stitch” video and ad content together within your content management system (CMS). The adblock then only has the options to show consumers either both videos both or nothing, since the video and ads are combined into a single stream.

3) Native advertising is seen as another way to deal with adblocking and is expected to grow. Forbes, one of the first publishers to adopt native ads is bringing Brandvoice, its native advertising platform, to Europe. According to Ann Marinovich, VP of Advertising, Product and Strategy at Forbes, “readers care about quality information, no matter where it is from, as long as it is bringing value”. Method, UK’s content studio that collaborates with The Sun and The Times even says that readers spend over 9 minutes on its branded articles.

4) On the consumer side, there’s a new opportunity to avoid spammy ads, this time by replacing them with curated content from other news sites. Ad Replacer is positioning itself as competition to other content aggregators, though it has yet to be seen whether the idea will take flight or not.

5) After a push from marketers for more accountability regarding ad sales, many publishers now offer viewability-based trading. The Economist, however, has gone beyond this and started offering attention-based selling, which is similar to the strategy of the Financial Times. Ashwin Sridhar, Global Head of Digital Products Revenue at The Economist, explains that high viewability doesn’t necessarily result in higher user attention and that their solution offers marketers the option of buying reader’s in-app and online attention on a cost-per-hour basis. Nick Hewat, Commercial Director of The Guardian, points out that “time based trading is just one step to where publishers have to go.

6) Dominik Grau, Chief Innovation Officer at the German B2C and B2B publishing house Ebner Media Group is rather positive about the future of media, and sums up the most important lessons learned at Content Marketing World in Cleveland and FIPP World Magazine Conference in 5 points. His main takeaway is that content is the new gold for publishers and essential to build their audiences. However, the big question is how this content will look.

7) As audiences increasingly discover and consume content via online platforms, content is being broken down into smaller pieces of information and distributed across platforms. Over the past few months, digital platforms launched numerous, brand new initiatives for publishers. Andreas Pfeiffer, founder of Pfeiffer Consulting, wrote for WAN-IFRA an in-depth analysis of the distributed content landscape and clarifies common misconceptions about content distribution platforms, news consumption and publishers. To highlight a few: “only 4 percent of respondents said “Facebook is the most important way I get news”; “on average only 10 percent of users say that social media is their preferred way of getting news”. We consider it especially relevant after SimpleReach reported that referral traffic to the top Facebook publishers dropped by 32% from January to October. Facebook denied sending less traffic to publishers overall.

8) When it comes to the length and quality of content, the demise of popular sports and culture site Grantland let us make few predictions. Firstly, publishers can no longer limit themselves to monetizing only text – constraints valid for the physical world no longer apply for digital content composed of 1’s and 0’s. Secondly, a general-interest medium can’t survive solely from longform content, because of scaling: producing longform takes time and readers also need time to read through it, which might be a challenge when average consumer’s attention span is 8 seconds.

9) Publishers are finding new ways to get users’ attention and keep it. To help readers get through longer stories, New Yorker magazine recently launched a small, pop-up notification tool. The tool measures the point where users stop reading the article and offers to send them an email reminder so they can continue reading where they left off. The New York Times Research & Development Lab is also experimenting with permeable publishing, which lets users ask specific, pre-selected questions of the author. Such articles would function as a two-way communication channel that lets users incorporate feedback and context directly into stories and might be a viable alternative to social media when it comes to creating an engaged community.

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