Tag: new media

Television’s argument for relevance

The TV industry warns the fight for advertisers’ dollars is far from over

One of the notable things about the media’s collapsing business model is how television has suffered nowhere near the same downturn in advertising revenues as the other channels.

This has been baffling for many of us pundits so a series of interviews I’m doing with media executives on digital disruption was a good opportunity to discuss why television is holding the line where print has dismally failed.

While the executive has to remain anonymous at the moment, the series is for a private client, their view on why television has so far avoided the advertising abyss is simple – accountability.

We have something, as do my friends at other media companies, that YouTube and Facebook don’t have which is we create quality content. What will differentiate us is we have premium, locally produced content that is one hundred percent brand safe and one hundred percent viewable and, most importantly, is independently measured by third parties.

My view is that advertisers in that environment is a much more powerful experience than advertising in Facebook or YouTube

While many of us may laugh at Australian commercial TV being described as ‘quality’, it does appeal to audiences far bigger than the typical YouTube channel or Facebook Live stream.

The advertising industry’s established systems also, unsurprisingly, work for the television industry in giving the sector accountability that the online services lack in a world where ‘click fraud’ – software tricks to report false web impressions – is rampant.

Even more importantly for the new media giants is the ‘brand safe’ message being pushed by the incumbents. The advertising crisis for Google is real and the established players intend to exploit it.

While the TV executive is pushing their own product, it’s clear the fight for advertising and marketing dollars is far from over.

When the Facebook tiger bites

Facebook’s changes to the newsfeed illustrate the dangers for businesses in depending upon the internet giants.

Two years ago Buzzfeed’s head of global operations visited Sydney and laid out the company’s vision of being the New York Times.

As Scott Lamb explained, an important part of the Buzzfeed model was generating traffic through social media shares — at that time a tactic which Iwas working well.

Since then the gloss has gone off Buzzfeed as the company misses financial targets and traffic plateaus.

Now Facebook has announced further changes to its newsfeed which sees more emphasis on users’ family and friends’ posts than news and brands.

Sites like Buzzfeed are left in a bind as one of their key sources for traffic dries up and, once again, Facebook’s cahnges show how risky it is for publishers and marketers to rely on individual online platforms.

In truth all of the major online services are predators with Facebook, along with Google and Amazon, being at the top of the food chain, just like tigers.

For those riding the internet tigers, the risk of being mauled is real. As Buzzfeed and others are finding.

How the old advertising models fail on new media

Online display advertising is broken. Which should surprise no-one.

Understanding how a new technology will change industries is a challenge that has faced every generation in modern times.

Two of the industries most challenged by the rise of the internet have been the publishing and advertising sectors which have seen their established and wildly profitable ways of doing business demolished.

One of the mistakes almost every industry and business facing technological disruption makes is trying to apply their old models to the new methods which almost always produces poor results, the transition from live theatre to movies and then to television through is a good example of this.

So it’s not surprising that the advertising industry is now admitting that display ads on web pages have never worked and from that follows the maxim that print dollars equate to digital dimes.

For the online publishing industry, we’re still waiting for our modern day David Sarnoff to figure out how to make money online.

Programming the Internet’s advertising

Appnexus CEO Michael Rubenstein tells us how the advertising industry is evolving with the internet

Michael Rubenstein, President of AppNexus is the first interview for a while on the Decoding the New Economy channel.

Rubenstein joined AppNexus as employee number 18 in 2009 and has been part of the company’s growth from a small startup to a global technology company with a workforce of 1,000 professionals.

AppNexus is one of the new wave of companies managing and programming online advertising, helping advertisers and publishers target their products better while giving ad tech companies deeper insights and data.

In this interview, Rubenstein discusses some of the forces changing global advertising along with the challenges of dealing with a high growth business.

Apologies for the bad hair on my part.

User generated content starts getting expensive

As YouTube faces competition we may be past the glory days of free user generated content

Ten years after being founded YouTube is facing competition as new sites are being setup or existing video services start aggressively courting creators reports Variety magazine.

YouTube is the poster child of the user generated content movement where it’s largely unpaid contributors who generate the material that people  watch on the service.

This model works fine as long as it’s amateur cat videos people are watching but when as it becomes a big business the justification for not paying content creators becomes flimsy.

Google’s management recognised this some time back and started rolling out its own partnerships with creators to add more income than the often tiny advertising revenues most earn.

Now it turns out those popular video bloggers are being tempted over to other sites and for YouTube the cost of premium content is about to get expensive.

For the Silicon Valley businesses is requires a change of culture as they simply don’t like paying creators; in the tech startup view of the world it’s only coders, founders and few lucky support staff who get the rewards while the bulk of people who add value to the product are treated as commodity ingredients.

For a period it was difficult for media startups to get funding unless they had a free source of user generated content, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti revealed in 2012.

Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

The movie studios and record companies on the other hand have a culture of paying their artists and production staff, despite their reputation of exploitation and stinginess.

It may well be that we’re past the golden era of user generated content and the free lunch for the sites that depend upon free materials.

If it is, then standards on sites like YouTube can only improve even at the costs of Google’s profit.

What happens when others control your traffic?

Are the online gatekeepers becoming too aggressive?

Quartz magazine is held up as one of the most innovative news websites and one of the models for the future of online publishing however its president Jay Lauf suggested at the Digital Media Strategies conference in London yesterday that web users are increasingly shifting towards social sites to find their content.

This isn’t new, most sites have been dependent upon referrals from the popular social media services and companies like Buzzfeed have built their entire strategies upon traffic from Facebook.

Lauf suggests that sites like Quartz and Buzzfeed are increasingly losing control of their own audiences which raises risks for publishers and readers as they become dependent upon the social media gatekeepers.

Quartz’s traffic from LinkedIn is a good example of how a gatekeeper can control traffic with referrals falling away as the social site pivots into a publishing platform of its own.

It could turn out that control of traffic backfires however as people find those services deliver less value or relevant information.

Ultimately it may be the gatekeepers who suffer from restricting traffic as readers decide they aren’t getting the news they want.

The tension between creative and business

One of the ongoing tensions in the new media landscape is that between the demands of advertisers and content creators.

This isn’t a new thing as a 1959 interview between Mike Wallace and TV pioneer Rod Stering shows.

Sterling describes how pressures from networks and advertisers created often weird compromises along with a fair degree of self censorship among TV writers and producers.

Little that Sterling describes would surprise today’s online journalists, bloggers and social media influencers who find themselves subject to identical pressures today.

Navigating a world of silos

Blogger Robert Scoble sees social media silos as the cost of distribution in the new media world

Having seen Robert Scoble interview dozens of startups and founders, it was fascinating to get him on the other side of the camera for a Decoding the New Economy interview.

One of areas I was keen to explore with Scoble was his experience of moving from his blogging platform to Facebook and particularly the risk of being locked in a silo, something previously discussed with Doc Searls.

“I’d rather all my content wasn’t in Facebook,” Scoble observes, “but those days are over.”

Unlike Searls, Scoble sees the social media networks — particularly Facebook — as being a useful distribution tool while accepting their limitations; “I find I get a lot more engagement and distribution on Facebook.”

“Unlike a lot of other journalists I don’t have to make my money out of advertising so I don’t care about taking my eyeballs off the blog and onto Facebook.”

“It does limit my storytelling ability because you can only use one video and I can’t do a lot of typographic stuff,” says Scoble, “people are seeing these on mobile phones anyway so they don’t want to see all of this stuff anyway.”

The mobile aspect is key to the business world going forward, we stopped midway through the interview to buy an iPhone 6 which went on pre-order right in the middle of the discussion.

For the mobile world Scoble sees the rise of various ecosystems like Google’s and Apple’s forcing people to make choices about which camp they are going to join.

Like many in the tech industry, Scoble is very cautious about looking too far ahead; “none of the people, even the investors, are looking more than five years ahead.”

The key though is miniaturization as devices get smaller and more portable, the potential for technology becomes greater.

Whether that potential is limited by the desire of vendors to lock users into silos remains to be seen.

 

Reinventing online publishing

Has the Daily Mail cracked the business model for online publishers?

Is the Daily Mail the future of online publishing? In USA Today Michael Wolff posits that the British media outfit might be the first newspaper company to navigate the transition from print to digital.

Certainly the 180 million unique visitors a month make it the English language’s most popular news site which, despite the unease and criticisms about its brand of journalism, shows the model might be working.

Wolff puts the success down to the digital arm being autonomous to the print operations, making the point its hard to simultaneously defend the old, but still profitable, print mastheads while growing the digital platforms.

It would be sad if it were a crusty incumbent that becomes the David Sarnoff of the digital era rather than some smart and hungry kids from a barrio or ghetto,  but there’s no reason why one of the established newspaper groups couldn’t be the people who reinvent the media for modern times.

There’s plenty of competition though from groups like Vice, Buzzfeed and dozen of others. Despite the Daily Mail’s successes, there’s still no shortage of opportunity

Social media’s dark side

Propaganda has become part of social media. How much can we trust online?

I was asked by ABC Radio Newcastle today to talk about the dark uses of social media – spreading propaganda.

This is an topic that’s come to the fore with the troubles in the Gaza Strip and the downing of MH17; all sides are using traditional propaganda techniques with a thick overlay of new media.

A key part of the social media aspects of the modern propaganda methods is those who want to spread their message only need to confirm the prejudices of their loyal followers.

In turn the loyal foot soldiers will then spread the word through their Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds; a modern Goebbels doesn’t have to control the media, they just need enough useful idiots.

It’s also worth noting the new media tools complement the old broadcast and publishing methods with the most effective modern propaganda – and marketing – campaigns cleverly using the strengths of each medium to create an amplifying effect.

Propaganda is nothing new, many of the Ancient Greeks’ stories were written to discredit their enemies, and every technological advance has seen new ways for people to spread misinformation.

In that respect it shouldn’t be surprising that we should take with everything we read on, or off, line.

Being SWAMed

LinkedIn shows once again why businesses can’t rely on social media.

One of the constants of social media services is their habit of penalising users without giving any avenue of appeal or recourse.

The latest example of this is Box Free IT’s story of how LinkedIn’s blacklist censors thousands of legitimate users.

Should the moderator of a LinkedIn discussion group choose to ‘block and delete’ a members’ message, that user is thrown out of the group, prevented from re-joining and have their posts in other groups pushed into a moderation queue.

‘Block and delete’ is a very powerful feature – a thin skinned administrator or a vindictive competitor can damage an individual or a LinkedIn reliant business – yet users have no means of challenging the block or undoing the effects.

This is fairly typical of social media sites; Facebook sanctions anyone who falls foul of their war on nipples while Google users who fall of the company’s algorithms find themselves in an administrative maze similar to something from a Kafka novel.

In every case, the social media service shows it’s unaccountable and opaque, which is ironic as these sites’ proponents preach about the new age of openness.

Once again, the Box Free IT story shows that businesses can’t afford to depend upon social media sites as primary marketing platforms. It’s essential that businesses use social media services to drive traffic to their own websites rather than risking losing their online presence because of an administrative mistake.

These risks are something that everyone using new media should keep in mind when building their online marketing channels.

57 million websites and nothing on

TV stations can get away with showing irrelevant, empty rubbish. Websites can’t.

Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about TV having 57 channels and nothing on.

While little has changed on TV, today the web has 57 million websites* offering little beyond click bait and a quick rewrite of someone else’s work.

At the moment that model works for the kings and queens of the digital manor who pocket a few pennies for each of the ten stories their overworked interns pump out in a day but it’s hard to see how that form of publishing adds value to the audience.

The 1990s television stations and cable networks got away with no adding value – and still do today – because they are in industries that are tough for new entrants to enter.

But on the web there are far fewer barriers to new entrants which means offering 57 channels with nothing on, or 57 million websites with no real content, isn’t a long term path to success.

*a wild guess