Data-Labor-Technology

Three months ago, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk warned of the company’s production issues. On Wednesday, a day after his SpaceX rocket blasted into space, Mr. Musk was upbeat, again boldly predicting his company would make one million vehicles a year in 2020.

As ad blockers become more prevalent, the digital ad industry is fighting back, according to a new academic research paper that finds “anti-ad-blockers” have been deployed by publishers much more than
previous research would indicate — about 52 times greater.

Rewards are a time-tested, effective way to motivate people: Think about the child who will clean dishes, vacuum the house and tidy their room just for a few allowance dollars. We love receiving rewards, especially when the work necessary to secure whatever object or compensation is being offered is simple or convenient. This drive and…

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Joan FitzGerald, founder at Data ImpacX. Major media companies are taking new steps to include sales response performance metrics in their commitments to advertisers. But, TV ad sellers: beware. Most research on sales response… Continue reading »

The post Forget Demographics. TV Advertisers Must Focus On The ‘Persuadables’ appeared first on AdExchanger.

The last time NBC aired an Olympics opening ceremony, during the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, the telecast sparked a social media firestorm. Viewers objected to what seemed to be an overabundance of ads, and blasted the network for airing the ceremony on a tape-delay. As NBC Sports prepares to air the Winter Olympics opening…

In this week’s Rundown: Distributed media still isn’t pulling in big bucks for publishers, and why Vice Media’s revenue woes could be a setback for digital media hopefuls.

Promises, promises
Trade group Digital Content Next is out with its second Distributed Content Revenue Benchmark Report, examining revenue publishers are receiving from the third-party platforms they distribute their content to. It’ll come as no surprise that the amount is small — it works out to $1 million per publisher per year — but given the promises platforms have made to publishers this past year about improving monetization, it’s surprising how little that revenue has grown. The report also reinforces the different classes publishers find themselves in — most of the revenue shared with publishers is generated from video, which favors TV/cable companies, while legacy text publishers are left to feed on the scraps. But if you factor in the high cost of producing video, those numbers still aren’t particularly impressive. Where it all points is that publishers can’t ignore the platforms — audiences are there — but they can’t count on them for money. — Lucia Moses

The post The Rundown: Vice is a headwind for digital media hopefuls appeared first on Digiday.

Google and Facebook are the biggest tech companies in terms of advertising and biggest traffic sources for publishers, but they still only account for less than 5 percent of publishers’ digital revenue, a new report from publisher trade group Digital Content Next shows.

Looking just at the revenue publishers make from their distributed content, across sources like Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP and Instagram, Google and Facebook account for about 30 percent, according to the Distributed Content Revenue Benchmark Report, which will be released Feb. 8.

The report is notable because there isn’t a lot of industry data about how much revenue publishers are getting back from the platforms they heavily lean on to distribute their content. A survey last year by WAN-IFRA members similarly found that Facebook was responsible for an average of 7 percent of digital revenue.

This is the second year DCN has done the report, and what’s significant is that the revenue publishers are taking in from third-party platforms has barely budged in a year — despite platforms’ gestures to help publishers to help them better monetize their content as the platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, tighten their grip on digital ad spending.

In the first half of 2017, publishers took in $10 million from third-party platforms, representing 16 percent of their total digital revenue. That’s nearly flat with the first half of 2016, when third-party revenue was 14 percent. That’s pocket change for Google and Facebook, which together took in more than $52 billion in digital ad revenue just in the U.S. in 2017.

“The biggest surprise is how little has changed,” DCN CEO Jason Kint said. “You’re still looking at a situation where the best in class in news and entertainment isn’t being supported in a way it should be.”

The report was based on numbers reported by 20 members of DCN, which represents 75 digital content publishers including The New York Times, ESPN and PBS. (About two-thirds of that 20 are the same as the comparative group of the earlier report, so the comparison isn’t perfect.)

The report also shows that video revenue continues to drive monetization for publishers. Video represented about 85 percent of all third-party revenue. That might seem like a vindication for publishers that have organized their businesses around video, but the reality is that most of the video dollars went to companies that were established video producers. TV/cable companies reaping a disproportionate share of third-party platform monetization and growth through OTT and syndication partners including YouTube. OTT sources like Roku and Amazon represented more than half the distributed content revenue (see chart below). Also, video is more expensive to make than text content, which makes the distributed video dollars less impressive.

For all the attention the social platforms outside of YouTube get, they accounted for a smaller chunk of the revenue. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram represented just $2.5 million of the total $10 million in publishers’ distributed-content revenue. Facebook drove more than half of the social media revenue pie (see chart below), increasing slightly from the second half of 2016 to the first half of 2017. Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram each represented a sliver, reflecting the fact that those platforms are hard to scale and it can be labor-intensive to create content for them. Snapchat is a closed platform, and publishers have to be picked to join its publishing section, Discover.

The DCN report comes at a time of growing publisher frustration with the monetization they’re getting from the platform giants, which has led some to scale back the amount of content they distribute there and think twice about dedicating resources to make content specifically for those platforms with too little or uncertain benefits in return. They’re also facing fresh concerns with Facebook announcing in January it would show less news in the news feed.

More than the revenue share, the traffic cut will have a bigger impact on publishers, most of whom weren’t living on distributed-content revenue anyway, said Jim Spanfeller, founder of Spanfeller Media and now a consultant.

“The revenue stuff was gravy,” he said. “The traffic people get from Facebook is going to go down dramatically, which is probably the most important thing. If you get 40 percent of your traffic from Facebook and if that gets cut in half, your business is crushed. The second issue is, publishers were getting relatively cheap reach on Facebook for native content. If that costs more, that’s obviously a big issue.”

The big catch for publishers is that they have little leverage individually with the platforms and they still get a lot of audience exposure by being seen there, which makes pulling out unrealistic.

“A lot might say it’s not worth it to give up prized assets if you get such a small percent of revenue,” Kint said. “But users are going to Facebook more and more for news and information. You have to match up the interest with the value in the platforms. There’s two big gaps: Where users are going and whether content’s properly valued, and where people are going and do they trust those platforms.”

The post Google and Facebook make up less than 5 percent of publishers’ digital revenue appeared first on Digiday.

After years of decline, the number of arrests made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement climbed to a three-year high in fiscal 2017.

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Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability… Continue reading »

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