(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) Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the world’s biggest marketing services company, advocates for the use of paywalls, saying that readers will always pay for content that is valuable to them and digital advertising is less and less profitable, especially with the rise of adblocking. If this is true, the question becomes which paywall to adopt: metered, hard or freemium? The Times had success with a hard paywall, which moved from loss to profit, while The Economist’s Robin Raven considers hard paywalls as insane and advocates the freemium strategy, which lets audiences sample selected content. This model has seen a lot of success for some companies, such as Bild, for example, which needed only two years to reach more than 290,000 paying digital subscribers with its freemium model. The General Manager of Bild, Tobias Henning, favours the freemium model because it fit better into the character of the title and provided publishers with the choice of which articles should be free and which paid for – unlike the metered paywall model. In the end, a brand’s decision about which paywall – if any – is appropriate to them will largely come from their knowledge of their audiences. But since the future of digital ad businesses is uncertain, we can expect many media brands, particularly digital-only ones like Vice, Vox Media, Buzzfeed will begin testing reader revenues in 2016.

2) Platform ambassadors are the newest positions at publishing companies and their task is to establish and manage relations with online content distribution platforms. It’s only logical since distributed content became mainstream and landscape of digital platforms is complex. Scott Stein, VP of product at Gannett is very positive about the collaboration with platforms as long as everybody is getting value. This new role might certainly help with transforming publishers’ needs into reality, as for example Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations and media partnerships is trying to ensure.

3) German publisher Axel Springer continues their battle against adblocking, as it served Adblock Plus with a court order to remove forum post on how to circumvent Bild’s “adblock wall”. However, let’s not forget that the core of the problem goes back to fatigued consumers.

4) The new James Bond film, Spectre, is one of the first brands to get its own Discover channel on Snapchat. The success of the promo shows us that well-designed and engaging ads can be shared and appreciated by users. In-app native ads and branded content is an increasingly good strategy for some brands, be it via Snapchat Discovery or Twitter moments.

5) Short attention spans aren’t necessarily as widespread as people assume. Vice media, on the other hand, known for its long-form documentaries plans expansion and start 12 TV channels in Europe, while The Economist introduces its Global Compass series of 15minute-ish long, ad-free videos featuring views on global policies like legalization of drugs or euthanasia.

6) Despite the calls for the amendment of EU net neutrality law and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, the European Parliament decided to adopt the law unchanged. Based on this decision, ISPs have permission to manage traffic at certain occasions and offer specialized or zero-rated services. Commissioner Günther Oettinger agrees with the Parliament’s ruling, saying that overregulation would only limit investment and innovation in the fast-moving digital sector.

7) In spite of the fact October was declared “European cybersecurity month” there was yet another hacker attack – this time on British telecom and broadband provider TalkTalk. This was the second attack on this company since it was hacked in February, which apparently didn’t lead to many internal changes since supposedly passwords and personal details were still not encrypted and stored as plain text. A global study from Newscycle Solutions found that 52% of surveyed newspaper and online news publishing companies were hacked or suffered data breach since the beginning of 2014. With such an increase in attacks, cybersecurity is increasingly important for publishers. The big question, however, is how to achieve the right legislative framework in order to balance the protection of privacy on the one hand and the ability for businesses to collect audience data on the other.

8) If you were wondering what time of the day is best for reading news, experience of Marc Weisblott, editor of Twelve Thirty Six only tells us that there’s no clear answer – After he delayed his regular newsletter by 3 hours, the readership declined by mere 5%.

9) Google launched a fund for online journalism experiments, presumably to appease European publishers, while the EU plans to review Alphabet’s Android, e-commerce and advertising practices. Google will offer funding for both start-ups and bigger scale projects.

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