(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)Do you use adblockers? If so you might not be able to read your favourite news site or online magazine soon, if publishers choose to follow Axel Springer’s example and ban users who utilize ad-blockers (so far implemented on Europe’s best-selling tabloid, Bild online). This is done by installing a firewall that asks readers to either turn off their ad-block or pay €2.99 for ad-free browsing. Other strategies that are being used by publishers include placing anti-ad block messages on their websites. These messages, however, tend to have a negligible response on readers, with less than 1% unblocking ads or paying for an ad-free experience. Mitigating the effect of adblockers is quickly becoming a big challenge for publishers, but some strategies have proven successful. Ken Fisher, editor-in-chief of Ars Technica suggests educating readers in general about publisher’s dependability on advertising.

2) As was pointed out during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Barcelona and at the FIPP World Congress in Toronto this week, monetising mobile content is one of the most pressing challenges that publishers have to overcome. The top British and European publishers specifically highlighted several issues they are facing, while other speakers, such as Gerrit Klein of Ebner Media Group or Ken Suh from the start-up Unruly, proposed strategic decisions, such as “think mobile first” or “develop new era of ads” to increase revenues.

3) One of the big questions publishers have faced in recent years is whether or not to invest the time and resources into the development of apps. According to a study by Millward Brown Digital in the U.S., users “don’t have a strong preference between apps and browsers” when it comes to news and that while many people have 40-70 apps on their devices, 43% of consumers only use 4-6 apps daily. That’s a lot of competition on each device. Therefore, if you are deciding whether to improve your mobile website or spend money on the development of a native mobile app, Priya Ganapati says you should first consider what fits your business better. Ganapati’s insights are based off of her five-year tenure as a mobile product manager of the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones apps, with her #1 message “don’t have a news app”.

4) The last weeks were marked by a number of new launches, including Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Twitter’s Moments, both which could have an impact on publishers’ businesses. Whereas AMP is trying to stay open source and use technological innovation to speed up the load time of the mobile web, Moments will partially transforms Twitter into a media company that will perform an editorial function and curate content. AMP also appears to be a challenge to Facebook’s Instant Articles, while Moments looks like another trade-off between distributing content to wider audiences. However, both seem to have their downsides, with AMP necessitating publishers to alter they production processes and Moments weakening the publisher-reader relationship, since it will hide links to publishers’ tweets.

5) As data and IT professionals will be crucial for the future of media companies, the EU is organizing new initiatives such as “coding week” to raise awareness about the fact that there’s still around 40% of Europe’s population lacking sufficient digital skills. Will the member states react fast enough and update their education curricula, so Europe will have enough data analysts? Only time will tell.

6) After the European Court of Justice’s ruling on safe harbour last week, the national data protection authorities met on Thursday to discuss whether the common legal alternatives to safe harbour can be used by companies to transfer data across Atlantic and whether companies could have some grace period before a solution is found . However, an agreement wasn’t reached yet , resulting in legal uncertainty for more than 4000 companies.

 

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