Data-Labor-Technology

CES is a relentless beast as media companies, marketers and tech giants spend the week in Las Vegas rotating through countless meetings, tech activations and parties. The official story of this year’s conference has been around Google and Amazon’s battle over voice assistants, over-the-top video streaming and one poorly timed blackout. Confidential chatter, however, centers on media companies’ fear of platforms, the difficulties plaguing the video industry and the ultimate value in coming to this trade show.

On Facebook and Google:
“Facebook has infinite talent. They have all the money in the world. Yet somehow, they can’t figure out how to make mid-rolls work. This is something that others figured out years ago!”

“At some point, Facebook is going to give up on Watch. Or they’ll stop funding shows. But there’s no way that lasts.”

“I don’t know how you can continue to hope that Facebook will figure things out for publishers. That’s not their business. That’s never been their business. So why now? Because we’re more upset than we were last year?”

“YouTube’s finally getting serious about its ‘adpocalypse’ issues — and guess what? YouTube’s going to win out in the long run.”

“YouTube is the only real game in town. Facebook’s buying stuff — and we sold them a few shows — some others might buy stuff. But for most of us, YouTube’s the only game. Not everyone can get onto Netflix.”

On video:
“I’ve gone from competing with digital companies to competing with the entire universe. And everybody just wants to make TV now. The digital entertainment world is [screwed].”

“Verizon owns how many screens and they somehow can’t get Go90 to work? It amazes me.”

On CES:
“I’m just happy it’s not a third straight AR/VR conference.”

“CES is good for business but bad for your soul.”

“I’ve been coming to [the piano bar inside the Bellagio] for 10 years. Talk to your boss; I’ve sat at this spot every year. It’s my spot.”

“The power just went out in Central Hall, and they kicked everyone out. It’s dark in here. What a disaster.”

“The lights went out at the Consumer. Electronics. Show.”

“Google had to shut their tent down because it was raining into it. There are flooded sidewalks — you have to be kidding me. It’s a sprinkle!”

On Amazon and voice:
“Every time I see an Amazon ad person here, they turn and hide their [computer] screen — like relax, these are not state secrets you’re hiding.”

“Across the four main [voice] players — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple — there’s nothing that really differentiates one platform from another. We can help them fix that, with our content and our ability to promote, so we are absolutely open for business. But we want them to pay for quality content.”

“The best use case for these things remains listening to music and the radio — and we don’t see that changing, no matter how many pizzas you can order. Forty percent of usage on these types of devices is still listening to music and radio.”

The post ‘Good for business but bad for your soul’: Overheard at CES appeared first on Digiday.

Instagram is quickly becoming Nike’s go-to social network. The brand uploaded over a third of its social content to its global @nike and London @nikelondon Instagram accounts last year, while more than half went to Twitter and 13 percent went to Facebook, according to social analytics firm Share Creative.

People are talking about the brand on Instagram, regardless of whether it has an active presence there. In the U.K. in 2017, for example, most Nike mentions from fans (55 percent) happened on Instagram, where just 35 percent of the brand’s own content was uploaded to the @nike and @nikelondon accounts, revealed Share Creative.

Nike’s social buzz isn’t reliant on its own communications, said Laura Daniells, analyst at Share Creative. “Fans want to share their love for the brand and do so regardless of Nike’s owned activity.”

As loved as Nike is, the brand is the 16th-most-liked Instagram account globally. But that consumer love is ebbing away, at least on Instagram. Between May and December 2016, the average number of likes and comments per month on the @nike Instagram account hit around 2.4 million, according to Socialbakers. Over the same period in 2017, the average number of monthly likes and comments was 1.3 million.

People seem to like fitness content on Instagram, according to Share Creative. The top-performing posts in the U.K. on the @nike and @nikelondon accounts last year were those that shared motivating quotes with ordinary and relatable people rather than celebrities, appealing to a more “niche fan base,” said Daniells. Nearly all (95 percent) of the posts from fans in the U.K. to the global and local accounts mention #fitness, per Share Creative.

Nike’s decision to post less and focus more on its fitness-related posts may have partly contributed to its lack of resonance on Instagram beyond the fitness category last year. The brand posted 50 times on the @nike Instagram page between May and December 2016, but it posted 39 times over the same period in 2017, according to Socialbakers.

According to YouGov BrandIndex, Adidas narrowly leads Nike in Impression score — which measures whether someone has a positive or negative impression of a particular brand — in the U.K., with Adidas at 37 points and Nike at 36 points.

With so little separation between the brands, product choice may depend on an individual’s perception of the specific product’s quality or value, said Amelia Brophy, head of data products at YouGov. Of course, metrics can vary across the brands’ diverse product range, Brophy added, but generally speaking, Adidas is seen as being kinder to the purse strings.

Alan Bryant, a strategist at youth agency Livity, said Nike has let its “youth culture game slip,” and, in turn, its social engagement is suffering in key areas. It has been clear in sneaker culture and in “youth culture generally that Adidas has made huge inroads into Nike’s historical ownership of this area,” he added.

Just one of the top six engaging posts on the @nike Instagram account between May and December 2017 used an influencer to promote a sneaker, according to Socialbakers. That post featured rapper Kendrick Lamar for the relaunch of Nike’s retro classic Cortez shoe. Despite Lamar’s inclusion, a post promoting soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was twice as engaging as the one for the Cortez, per Socialbakers.

Nike still holds around a 50 percent market share in the U.S. market, but Adidas surpassed Nike’s Air Jordan brand last September to become the No. 2 shoe brand there behind Nike as a whole. In the U.S., Nike has a lead over its rival in Impression score; Nike has 47 points, while Adidas has 41, per YouGov BrandIndex. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, the scores are higher, but Nike (56) still has the advantage over Adidas (51).

It would be wrong to call Nike’s social media strategy a failure, argued Devran Karaca, co-founder of Kyra TV, which works with Nike-owned Converse. “What Nike did with [designer] Virgil Abloh last year for the Off-White x Nike The Ten series completely revolutionized marketing around sneakers. This was arguably the biggest trainer release of 2017 and has blown the door wide open for the future of collaborations and a post-modern approach to design,” he said. “If Nike had a quiet year last year, then it probably means that we will be seeing some huge moves from them in 2018.”

The post On Instagram, Nike posts less content but gains more mentions appeared first on Digiday.

Investopedia didn’t set out to become a subscription- and commerce-focused publisher. But that’s what it’s staking its future on.

Less than six months after launching its first batch of Investopedia Academy courses, the IAC-owned publisher enters the new year focused on dramatically ramping up this nascent side of its business. On Jan. 15, Investopedia will roll out its 10th course, on cryptocurrencies.

After publishing just nine courses through the second half of 2017, Investopedia will publish two or three new courses per month this year, and it expects to grow the total number of employees working on the Academy to 50 — up from 30 last year.

The video courses, which run a minimum of three hours and cost between $99 and $399 apiece, are part of a bid to diversify its revenue away from advertising for the first time in the company’s 19-year history. The Academy is on pace to earn $5 million in revenue this year, four times the total it earned in 2017.

“This is the big bet. We are all in on this,” said David Siegel, Investopedia president and CEO. “I think that in two to three years, the revenues from Investopedia Academy could exceed the revenues from Investopedia.com.”

Investopedia earns almost all of its money from advertising. A large repository of evergreen articles, some 200,000 of them, on topics ranging from interest rates to cryptocurrency to individual retirement accounts, attracts a steady stream of referral traffic and display advertising. It also has a content studio for more involved advertising programs.

To find an alternate source of income, Siegel turned his attention to digital education, which is a $165 billion-plus market worldwide, according to Orbis Research. Siegel estimates about 10 percent of that is focused on financial topics, and while Investopedia has to compete with incumbents like Udemy and Lynda for customers, he feels the company is well-positioned.

The company decided it wanted to create the courses in-house, rather than position itself as a kind of platform. Siegel boasts that Academy courses so far have a 96 percent customer satisfaction rate and that the Academy has a net promoter score of over 50 percent.

To build a new course, one of the editorial staff’s subject matter experts will decide on a topic for a class, like options trading, futures or IRAs. It will then scour the internet, searching through YouTube and other platforms, for finance experts with the right combination of charisma and knowledge. Investopedia’s subject matter expert, along with the selected talent and a small team of education product designers, then work out the course’s subject matter.

After a few days of shooting, they spend a few weeks editing the course together. On average, each course takes between two and three months to create.

To promote the courses, calls to action and offers to sign up are put at the foot of Investopedia articles on related topics. They are also promoted through Investopedia’s newsletters and on Facebook, which has taken on an unprecedented amount of importance; while Facebook accounts for less than 5 percent of Investopedia’s referral traffic, it drives nearly 20 percent of Investopedia Academy’s revenues.

“We’re really good at retargeting people on Facebook,” Siegel said.

The post How Investopedia shifted to subscription revenue with video courses appeared first on Digiday.

The end is nigh. Facebook is planning a major change to its news feed, starting as early as next week, that will decisively favor user content and effectively deprioritize publishers’ content, according to three publishers that have been briefed by the platform ahead of the move.

Those who have been briefed say that under the new test, Facebook told them it will favor content that’s shared by users or otherwise actively engaged with. The thinking goes, according to those briefed, that Facebook believes prioritizing content that’s acted on will reduce the occurrence of fake and offensive content in the news feed.

Publishers still have many questions about the impending news feed change. Facebook told them that content from reputable publishers will also be surfaced. It didn’t specify how it would define “reputable publisher” or how their traffic would be impacted, though. The worry for publishers is that such an approach will have the unintended consequence of hurting high-quality content because a lot of legitimate news articles, while they may get read, tend not to get shared or commented on.

A Facebook rep wouldn’t confirm (or deny) these changes on the record.

Facebook has been taking steps in this direction for some time, making tweaks to amplify users’ content while weeding out spam and clickbait. Publishers who have been briefed by Facebook believe this latest move would cause a more dramatic decline in publishers’ ability to reach audiences in the news feed, though. Although Facebook isn’t the referral source it once was for publishers, it remains a major source of referral traffic for them, only recently surpassed by Google. Facebook hasn’t confirmed or denied the new reports. We’ll update this story when they do.

“They’re breaking the bad news one by one,” said one person who was briefed by Facebook on the changes, adding that along with the user content change, Facebook also was prioritizing its scripted Watch shows, its major video initiative, as it tries to grab TV ad dollars. “My impression is they’re going to move away from what we think of as Facebook videos.”

As Facebook sends them less traffic, publishers have been diversifying away from Facebook and fishing for traffic on other platforms such as Google, Apple News and Twitter. Another downgrade in the news feed is likely to accelerate publishers’ shift in resources away from Facebook. Even some of Facebook’s strongest publisher boosters express mounting frustration. “We’re losing hope,” said one.

Last year, Facebook tested a newsless news feed called the Explore Feed in six countries outside the U.S., causing publishers to freak out and spurring speculation that Facebook would replicate that approach in the U.S., despite Facebook saying it didn’t expect to roll out the test further. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has publicly acknowledged problems wrought by technology, including misuse and abuse of the platform, which has amplified the spread of hate-filled content and misinformation and has been used to attempt to influence voters in the presidential election. Facebook has made a number of moves to stamp out fake news, but their results have been mixed.

Another big downgrade in the news feed won’t necessarily come as a shock to publishers, but it conflicts sharply with Facebook’s public stance about how it’s trying to help publishers. That was the stated aim of the year-old Facebook Journalism Project, which Facebook launched to much fanfare about helping support publishers’ business models.

The post ‘We’re losing hope’: Facebook tells publishers big change is coming to News Feed appeared first on Digiday.