Amid ongoing negotiations with the Australian government over proposed legislation, Google has signaled cooperation by signing a multimillion-dollar news deal.
The Australian government is working on legislation that would force companies like Google and Facebook to pay for the news they quote and link to. Google has long been opposed to paying for news, claiming that publishers benefit from its actions far more than it does.
The legislation has been a point of major contention, with Google threatening to pull its search out of Australia altogether if the government proceeds. That threat has opened the door for Microsoft, who has supported the legislation and tried to assure officials it could meet consumer demand in Google’s absence.
In the latest signal Google is working to appease lawmakers, the company has inked a deal reportedly worth $30 million with Seven West Media, one of Australia’s biggest news publishers, according to Business Insider.
Seven West Media’s content will be available via Google’s News Showcase platform, which it rolled out in Australia last week. The company is clearly trying to show the legislation is not needed, although it’s unlikely the government will abandon its efforts.
Beyond Australia, the implications are far-reaching for Google and Facebook both. Should Australia pass the legislation, and especially if Google does not follow through on its threat to withdraw, other countries may pass similar laws. In fact, Microsoft is already pushing for the US to do exactly that.
ViacomCBS has sold legendary tech news site CNET to South Carolina based Red Ventures LLC. The company announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CNET Media Group from ViacomCBS for $500 million. Red Ventures purchased Bankrate in 2017 for $1.24 billion and Healthline Media for an undisclosed amount last year. Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias told WSJ that CNET’s value is due to the fact that digital technology has spread to many sectors of American business.
Technology news leader CNET paved the way for CNET Media Group, a portfolio of digital media brands that advise consumers across leading consumer tech, business tech, gaming, and entertainment. Their brands include ZDNet, Gamespot, TVGuide, Metacritic, Chowhound and several others.
“Red Ventures believes in the power of premium content from trusted brands that help people make better life decisions,” said Ric Elias, Red Ventures CEO and Co-Founder. “Over the last 25 years CNET Media Group has built a dynamic portfolio of brands with well-earned authority on such topics as consumer tech and gaming that play an increasingly important role in people’s lives. Red Ventures is eager to invest in CNET Media Group’s growth with more personalized consumer experiences that will reinvigorate CNET Media Group’s brands and unlock unprecedented opportunity for all.”
“I am incredibly excited about CNET Media Group’s future. I believe that the combination of Red Ventures customer experience platform and CNET Media Group’s rich content and deep editorial expertise greatly benefits both our audiences and our partners,” said Mark Larkin, Executive Vice President and GM of CNET Media Group. “Red Ventures shares our vision and is committed to realizing the full potential of our portfolio of world-class brands.”
Red Ventures was formed in 2000 as a performance marketing startup and has since grown to include more than 100 digital brands with more than 3,000 employees across 10 US cities, the UK and Brazil. It has two sides to its business – one is a sophisticated, partner-centric platform for performance marketing, and the other is a robust, consumer-centric platform for digital brands. Red Ventures’ existing brands operate in the Home Services, Health, Finance, Travel, Education, and Entertainment verticals. The acquisition of the CNET Media Group accelerates Red Ventures’ entry into new verticals, including Consumer Tech and Gaming.
“Every aspect of our lives – from our homes to our jobs, our income, and our well-being is impacted by the technology around us, so the content we consume and the brands we choose are highly personal,” said Marc McCollum, President of Red Ventures’ Media & Technology group. “Adding CNET Media Group to our portfolio will further advance our mission to help people make some of the most important decisions of their lives. It will be a win for our teams, for our businesses, and most of all, for visitors and fans of the CNET Media Group’s brands.”
“Ad-pocalypse Now? I Think Not!” exclaimed Steve Chester, Director of Data and Industry Programmes at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK). Adblocking is the cause of huge headaches for internet publishers, gaming companies and advertisers.
It’s a huge problem and many in the industry think that it’s immoral, illegal, anti free speech and is killing journalism. Some also point to one positive that was spawned by adblocking, making sites leaner and more enjoyable to the consumer. Adblocking has forced publishers and advertisers, however unfairly, to own up to their own faults.
This report is designed to bring perspective to the rise of adblockers and how they are impacting the internet ecosystem and what the future is likely to bring.
Some in the industry are exasperated that we continue to let adblockers have such a negative impact on publishing and advertising.
“The reason it has to happen is just like video didn’t kill the radio star and just like Netflix hasn’t killed live TV and just like Napster never killed music, adblocking will not be allowed to kill journalism,” stated Anna Hickey, Managing Director Maxus UK at the 2016 Shift conference. “Journalism is too important to us culturally and economically and we all have our part to play in making sure that it survives.”
“Why did we lose track of user experience?” asks IAB President Randall Rothenberg. “For much of the past decade, the digital ad industry, aided and abetted by venture capitalists with no long-term stake in the viability of media and marketing businesses, have been in a headlong rush to subvert industry standards, hoping they can own the single business model that can lock in proprietary advantage and lock out competitors in the $600 billion global ad industry.”
As Much as 40% of Ads Are Blocked
“Where is it heading and will it actually be more of a storm in a teacup when we look back on this or is it the beginning of a major reform of the advertising ecosystem?” asked Rufus Olins, CEO at Newsworks, a UK based marketing body for national newspapers. “Adblocking is a key topic for this industry and it continues to develop as an issue not just in the UK but around the world.”
A March 2016 IAB/YouGov study on the state of ad blocking in the U.K. shows that 22% of British adults currently use adblocking software, up from 18% in their Oct. 2015 study. According to “The Cost of Ad Blocking” 2015 report by PageFair and Adobe (PDF), 16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015, which is just slightly less than in the UK, and at this point in August 2016 is likely the same or higher than the UK.
An IAB study in 2014 paints a much grimmer picture, concluding that over a third of US users, and 41% of Millennials, had installed ad-blocking software. The main reason people was a concern that advertising could infect their computers or smartphones with viruses. However, more than two-thirds also believed that advertising slowed interrupted their online experience and slowed them down.
40% THINK They’re Using an Ad Blocker, 26% Actually Are
According to a July 2016 IAB report, “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why and How to Win Them Back” (PDF), the actual number of consumers blocking ads is 26%. Many people think they are using adblock software when they are simply blocking popups.
This recent IAB report says that most adblock users are men 18-34 years old and that these same men make up the 15% of smart phone users that block ads.
Of consumers not blocking ads, 20% are past adblockers that were motivated by publishers who are blocking their content from them. The study also found that 17% of users not blocking ads may do so in the future.
So, why do people block ads? The study concluded the obvious, that consumers using ad blockers, want uninterrupted, quick browsing and a streamlined user experience. There is a perception that sites are easier to navigate without ads. This is also true for mobile phone users with adblockers.
The most annoying ads; Ads that block content, long video ads before short videos, ads that follow down the page as the user scrolls and auto-start ads. The main difference between people who use adblockers and those that don’t is that they are simply less tolerant of ads.
Adblocking Costs $12.1 Billion Now and by 2020 it will be $27 Billion
According to The Drum News adblocking will cost US publishers $12.1 billion in lost display ad revenues. Optimal.com predicts that this will is 23.8% of total earnings.
A new study from Juniper Research estimates that online publishers will lose over $27 billion by 2020, which will account for almost 10% of the total digital advertising market.
Is Adblocking Stealing?
Rufus Olins hosted a session on adblocking at the 2016 Shift Conference in London. The session looked at where adblocking would be in 5 years and how it would impact online publishing and advertising and whether or not adblocking would put us all out of a job, as Piers North put it.
North equates adblocking to literally stealing, the same as someone breaking into his house and taking property. “As we speak there are tens of thousands of people coming into our properties and consuming our content and there is no value exchange, absolutely none,” said North. “Should I be worried about that? Can I do anything about it? Is it worth me doing anything about it?”
“Adblocking continues to grow and if we do nothing about it, it will continue eating into our audiences and therefore taking away revenues from publishers and also take away audience from agencies and brands,” North said.
Adblockers Are Profiteers Holding Us For Ransom
“Adblocking has reached a tipping point,” said Hickey. “We know this because, bizarrely enough, adblocking was featured in an episode of South Park recently, which is very odd. Adblocking is literally being written about in hundreds and thousands of articles, but the thing that i think is not being spoken about enough is the truth behind this trend. The truth is that adblocking is really a bunch of profiteers that are holding our industry for ransom.”
“What’s actually going on is they are going into our publishers and demanding a significant proportion of their revenues in order to be included in a white list,” she said. “It simply is not acceptable. The reality is that if you play that scenario out of the next 4-5 years, it causes the death of journalism, because journalism is funded by advertising.”
“Most important, the publishers are starting to take action already,” says Hickey. “They are starting to deal with adblocking in a way that suites their audience. What I believe will happen next and is absolutely critical, is that the publishing industry will come together and act collectively to tackle the racketeers. Probably it will get legal quite soon which means it will get messy before it gets better.”
“Many of their business models are undoubtedly illegal,” says Rothenberg. “Already, Shine’s model of ISP-level ad-blocking has been cited by regulators as a probable violation of net neutrality principles.”
Is adblocking really about censorship? “This is why I hate the ad-block profiteers,” Randall Rothenberg told the audience at the opening keynote of the 2016 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Rothenberg is President & CEO at Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about 10 days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had “disinvited” them to this convention. That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world.”
Rothenberg continued. “We had never invited them in the first place. They registered for this event online. When we found out, we cancelled the registration and reversed their credit card billing. Why? For the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information.”
“AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism,” says Rothenberg. ”
“I’m far from the first person to notice this,” he said. “Writing up an interview with AdBlock-Plus’s leaders more than two years ago in Salon, Andrew Leonardsaid: “It still sounds to me like something that bears more than a passing resemblance to a protection racket. Pay up, or we’ll break your windows! Pay up, or millions of Adblock Plus users will never see any of your ads.”
“Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content,” Rothenberg said. “Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are subverting the will of consumers.”
The Bad News is AdBlock-Plus is Not Alone
IAB President Randall Rothenberg noted that for-profit adblockers have become the “darlings of the venture capital industry and angel investors” and include otherwise mainstream advertising technology and publishing companies.
There’s Shine, an Israeli startup that sells adblocking software for mobile phone networks so that they can block ads at the network level. Shine is backed by Horizons Ventures which backed Spotify and Facebook.
Then there’s Brave, that was launched by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Rothenberg says that “his business model not only strips advertisements from publishers’ pages – it replaces them with his own for-profit ads.”
“The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers,” says Rothenberg. “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.”
Can Consumers Be Persuaded to Stop Using Adblockers?
Can adblocking kill the free internet? “It’s inconceivable, I think, that we would simply just allow this threat from adblocking to continue without actually having a strategy,” says IAB UK’s Steve Chester. “It’s something which we will have to develop. I don’t underestimate that it’s potentially an existential threat.”
The IAB study looked at how many people would turn off adblocking if requested to by a site as a condition to view content. Of those that are using adblocking software, 64% have seen notices on a website requesting that they turn off their adblocker. Over half (54%) said that they would sometimes temporarily switch off the software if it was the only way to access the content. For 18-24 year olds, 73% are willing to turn off adblocking.
The IAB study showed that 20% of people who have tried an adblocker no longer use one. The main reason is because of changing to a new device but the second most popular reason, not being able to access content, gives hope to publishers and advertisers that they can eventually change the mindset of people.
“The IAB believes that an ad funded internet is essential for providing revenue to publishers so they can continue to make their content, services and applications widely available at little, or no cost,” stated IAB UK’s CEO, Guy Phillipson. “We believe ad blocking undermines this approach and could mean consumers have to pay for content they currently get for free.”
“Part of the solution to tackle adblocking lies in making consumers more aware of the consequences, which seems like it’s starting to filter through,” Phillipson added. “If they realize it means they can’t access content or that to do so requires paying for it, then they might stop using ad blockers. It requires reinforcing this “trade-off” message – ads help to fund the content they enjoy for free.”
“More and more publishers are initiating what IAB calls “detection-notice-choice-and constraint” regimes,” says Rothenberg. “They are installing scripts that enable them to see when consumers coming to their sites have ad-blockers installed; they are providing notice to consumers about that and about publishers’ business models, which largely require advertising to support otherwise free content.”
“They are offering consumers choices – to turn off their ad-blockers, to pay a subscription fee, or another alternative,” he added. “And absent one of those choices, the publishers are constraining consumers’ access to content, reinforcing the immense value of what they deliver.”
Less Ads Would Be Blocked if Ads Weren’t So Annoying
The IAB study found that 45% of people would be less likely to use an adblocker if ads didn’t interfere with a page. In other words, people are tired of bloated Flash ads or sites that block content with popups or interstitials and the use of adblockers are simply a logical response to them. If there were less ads, 29% would be motivated to not use an adblocker and 12% would consider this if the ads were more relevant.
Adblocking has had some positive impacts on publishing by motivating publishers to stop serving annoying ads like pop-ups and interstitials. “We are organically moving towards formats that are more acceptable,” Piers North, the Strategic Director of Trinity Mirror Solutions told the Shift audience. “Yet having said that, if you look at the mobile experience, in-specials and pop-ups have had a resurgence. Adblocking is accelerating the need for us to get our house in order to make sure that the ad experience is as good as possible.” He noted that pop-ups and interstitials are a short-term play and that if you continue to do that you are going to kill your audience.
A Better Ad Experience
“If you provide website visitors with choice, and that’s what we advocate at the IAB and that’s where we see the industry going,” North said. “We’ve created the idea of lean standards or lean ads which are much leaner. We are looking to create a charter around that, so we are asking businesses, no matter where you sit, the buy side, sell side, intermediary to sign onto this charter as best practices.”
“LEAN stands for advertising and ad operations that are light, encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and non-invasive,” says Rothenberg. “We believe LEAN will be as important to the future of the digital advertising industry as the first IAB Universal Ad Package was to its creation.”
Rothenberg says the the IAB intends to make LEAN the foundation of their activities for the foreseeable future. “And among our very first goals is introducing a public LEAN scoring system by which all publishers, all advertisers, and all agencies will be able to measure their activities against rational, reasonable, and consumer-friendly performance benchmarks,” he said.
“LEAN is the basis for a sustainable advertising ecosystem. We firmly believe that a combination of LEAN advertising and media, and publisher implementation of detection-notice-choice-and-constraint, will limit the impact of ad-blocking.”
“We want to actually give people a choice at the point of access,” says North. “You can come into this property and have a range of choices. It might be pay for this content, accept the ad experience, but it will be a better ad experience, or it might be some other form of payment like micro-payments or even a survey in exchange for access to content.”
“I think in 5 years ad blocking will continue to exist, but it will be on the fringes because we will have gotten our house in order, delivering a great ad experience and giving people choice,” he said. “I also think that we will move more toward native advertising in order to avoid adblockers. Remember, adblocking doesn’t kill all forms of advertising.”
“As agencies we are already taking significant steps to add value back into that consumer journey,” Hickey said. “Let’s face it, things like programmatic, launched a few years ago, some of it was done really badly, so we understand that younger people have had really bad advertising journeys and were incredibly annoying. Really good agencies are getting really good at adding value back into that whole journey and also getting much better at the nuts and bolts behind it.”
“The major driving force behind adoption of blockers is because users feel that advertisements are intrusive and detrimental to the user experience,” says Sam Barker, an analyst for Juniper Research and author of the May 2016 study ‘Digital Advertisers Vs the Ad Blockers’. “To make the browsing experience user friendly, advertisers need to find ways to serve ads that do not obstruct the objective of the user. Ad formats such as interstitials and pop-up ads are seen as very intrusive but, on the other hand, native advertisements work very well.”
Adblocking is a Brutal Countermeasure
“I’m not to make any predictions about adblocking, and nor should you, at least not with confidence,” says Ian Lesley, author and brand strategist at the Shift adblocking session. “Ten years ago everyone knew that TV advertising was dead and DVR’s meant that ad skipping was about to become the norm.”
“Skip to 2016, last years spend on interactive TV broke the $5 billion barrier for the first time,” said Lesley. “The question is why didn’t we see this coming or rather why didn’t we see it not coming? Simple, we fixated on the technology and we forgot about the human.”
“TV or print ads don’t take much time,” he said. “They don’t require anyone to think or make a choice or do anything. The cost of ignoring them is zero and when they are good, they are really good. Forgetting about the human is a perennial problem. Five years ago everybody knew that digital data meant that we could send people relevant information instead of this terrible flimflam called brand image. Clever us. Lucky consumers.”
“What’s the reality? Humans care about all sorts of things, but most of them most of the time do not care about brands,” stated Lesley. “I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s why the dream of interactivity, engagement and brand conversations has all but died and it’s why people will reach for the ad blockers if the ads continue to be so insanely annoying.”
“Here’s another thing about humans, they make terrible predictions,” commented Lesley. “I’ve almost given up on prediction but not quite. I will predict that unless online advertising changes its form radically in the next five years humans are going to send it the way of interactive TV.”
“The point is that adblocking is an equal and opposite reaction to the brutally bad nature of online advertising,” says Lesley. “This is not a platform that has found its form. There was a moment when TV advertising discovered that you could do stuff with a 30 second ad that was really great and entertaining. People found ways to make that a very rich experience. That hasn’t happened yet with online advertising.”
“The experience of online ads is not pleasant and it actually gets in the way of them enjoying what they want to enjoy,” Lesley said. “So there is a distinct possibility that they will reach for a brutal countermeasure. Unless we get better at doing online advertising, creating things that people enjoy or at least can passively disregard and passively absorb when they want to then I’m afraid the adblockers will march on.”
At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9bn smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
As of March 2016 in Europe and North America there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
“Although consumer adoption of mobile level ad blockers is lower than the desktop market, Juniper Research believes that adoption is set to witness a sizable increase,” said Juniper Research analyst Sam Barker. “Drivers of this include Apples inclusion of ad blocking compatibility with Safari and increasing consumer awareness.”
He adds, that much like desktop browsers, mobile ad blockers are not able to block all types of advertising:
Internet Search and Display Adverts will be blocked, however like the desktop space, native adverts are not able to be blocked.
Video Display Adverts are able to be blocked, except if the video is channelled through a mobile application.
The possibility of blocking in-app advertising has been explored, however when speaking to players in the market many feel the practice to be morally unethical or the technical challenges too costly.
“In comparison to the desktop space, the mobile ad blocking market is still fairly nascent,” said Barker. “Since the announcement from Apple in September 2015 that iOS’s native browser would be able to support ad blocking applications there has been a rise in the number of users adopting the technology.
Sites are Fighting Back Against Adblockers
Forbes has taken an aggressive approach to adblocking, revealing that of those blocked, 44% of them turned off their ad blockers in order to access their content. Forbes is continuing to test other strategies including a version of the IAB Lean Ads concept.
According to Digiday, Slate has been using messaging to try and persuade users to turn off ad blockers and to sign up for their premium low ad content plans.
Wired says that 20% of their traffic comes from people using adblockers and in response to that they have restricted access to those using them. They offer 2 options to site visitors with adblockers:
You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view ads. When you do, we will keep the ads as “polite” as we can, and you will only see standard display advertising.
You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.
Bloomberg has taken a different approach, cleaning up their site and adding more white space. “Everyone’s screaming and yelling, so let’s not scream and yell — let’s do the opposite,” Chris Briseno, digital creative director at Bloomberg LP, told Digiday.
Outspoken Vice Media CEO Shane Smith predicts, “A bloodbath in the next 12 months of digital, mobile and terrestrial (media).” Smith was interviewed by Hearst Magazine’s digital media president Troy Young as part of Hearst’s Master Class interview series, according to Digiday.
Smith said he expects Viacom to “implode” and something similar will happen at other media companies, like Time Warner and Fox.”
Some other interesting nuggets from the interview:
– But how do we take it to the next level? How do we take on CNN? How do we take on BBC? And Josh (is that guy. Josh (Tyrangiel) is a fucking angry young man who wants to shove it in their asses.
– We have the number one, out of all networks in America, the most highly educated demo, the most affluent demo, now the fastest “younging down of a network.” It’s true, we’re bring millennials back to TV.
– You have to be on all screens, at all times.
– There’s a whole generation that came up with no advertising but yet ads paid for everything, so there’s this whole disruption happening…
– When you really get into VR, you see it’s the future.
And then Smith slammed publishers reliance on Facebook:
This is the biggest problem of the world: Facebook has bought two-thirds of the new media companies out there without spending a dime because they own a majority of their mobile. That’s great for Facebook, but bad for their platform. That’s why we’re trying to get on all platforms because we can monetize on all platforms then we can get away from the patrimony of Facebook.
Google just announced a new family of ad formats called Page-level ads, which it refers to as “AdSense’s next generation ads.” They’re designed to help publishers make money from their mobile content.
To use them, you place the same code once on each page you want to show ads on, and they’ll automatically show at the right time and in the right format. Google says this will potentially increase your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience.
Product manager Matthew Conroy says, “The benefits of Page-level ads include: optimized ads that show when they’re likely to perform well and provide a good user experience; one-time set-up that only requires you to place the Page-level ad code once on each page you’d like the ads shown; ability to adjust the settings in your account and to enable new ad formats without having to change the code on your site; [and] additional ads on your site that don’t count towards your AdSense per page ad limit.”
For now, Page-level ad formats include anchor/overlay and vignette, but more will be available in the near future.
Back in February, Google introduced AMP content in search results on mobile devices. These appeared in a new carousel that says “Top Stories” on mobile search results pages:
On Wednesday, Google announced it is doing the same thing across mobile platforms: web, Android, and iOS.
In a post on the Google News blog, Google News engineering director Maricia Scott explains, “So – what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.”
“Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly,” says Scott. “That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.”
The update is for English in the U.S. for now. More languages and regions will roll out soon.
Google announced the release of its new “AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement”. This helps educate publishers on how to help their audience become more familiar with their brand, best practices for designing user journeys, and developing resonating content that’s easy to consume.
“In a world where people are making split decisions about what to consume, it’s increasingly challenging but critical for publishers to figure out how to effectively engage their audiences on their sites,” says Google’s Jay Castro. “To help lay the foundation to a winning engagement strategy, we’ve created the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.”
“This guide help you drive toward your goals for growing your site – from defining your brand voice to tips to make your site’s content easy to consume,” Castro adds. “Don’t waste another moment developing web pages that leave you with little opportunity to engage with your audience.”
When it comes to helping your audience become familiar with your brand, the guide discusses defining your voice, being consistent, and relating to users’ interests. For designing user journeys, it talks about creating a “moments map,” making it easy for users to reach your desired outcome (in as few steps as possible), and creating clearly defined, interactive calls to action.
You can download the free guide here. It’s 21 pages long.
Twitter, compared to Facebook, Google, and even Yahoo, really isn’t very good for driving referral traffic. This is at least the case when it comes to news publishers as new data from Parse.ly finds.
This week, Nieman Lab shared data from the company, which looked at 200 of its client websites. These include Upworthy, Slate, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider. While Twitter’s value for breaking news is certainly acknowledged, it concludes that Twitter is a small source of traffic for most publishers with less than 5% of referrals coming from Twitter in January and February.
The following chart illustrates how Facebook and Google completely dominate referrals compared to everything else. It’s not as if Twitter is the only small piece of the pie here. It’s just that you might expect it to be bigger considering its place in the media. It certainly doesn’t help that the company continues to struggle to grow its user base.
Of course there are exceptions. Some publishers are able to squeeze more out of Twitter than their peers. In fact, Nieman Lab says about 15% of its traffic comes from Twitter, pointing to its “digitally savvy journalists” audience.
The very nature of the Twitter timeline is likely a major obstacle for referral traffic though. It’s often a case of information overload and excessive noise. Twitter’s recently introduced algorithmic timeline changes could help in that department for those that manage to cut through. This only became the default in March (after the Parse.ly data was recorded).
Twitter made another recent change that will only make it harder to track referrals though. Earlier this month, Twitter announced the launch of a new message button it actually pre-announced two years ago. The button appears on tweets to let users share the tweet via direct message.
“Every day, millions of people send Direct Messages to communicate privately with friends, family, experts, brands, and anyone else they find interesting on Twitter,” says product manager Somas Thyagaraja. “In fact, we’ve seen the number of messages sent grow over 60% in 2015. And the number of Tweets shared privately has grown even faster, at 200% in just the second half of last year.”
“With all this interest, we’ve also heard from many of you that it could be easier to share a Tweet using Direct Message,” adds Thyagaraja. “So now — in just a few taps — you can share unique Twitter content from your timeline right into your private conversation.”
According to Patricio Robles at Econsultancy, referrals from these private tweets will fall under “dark social,” meaning you’ll not be able to track their source. Dark social traffic shows up as “direct” in analytics tools like Google Analytics. Simply Measured has a great explainer on this here.
Google announced that First Look is now available to all DoubleClick for Publishers clients around the world and that it has begun testing exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation.
DoubleClick for Publishers First Look was first announced in beta several months ago, and in the meantime, the company has accumulated over 200 partners to test it. Publishers have seen their programmatic revenue increase by double-digit percentages, Google says.
“While First Look makes it easy for publishers to capture new revenue from high-paying buyers, we are also testing a new technology to help publishers manage yield between multiple exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs),” says director of product management Jonathan Bellack.
“Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls,” he explains. “These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad. Exchange bidding also empowers publishers with unified and accurate reporting on the revenue they are earning from each exchange/SSP. And just like First Look, exchange bidding works with no additional client-side code.”
The company is working with Index Exchange and Rubicon Project as well as About.com, Hearst, Meredith Corporation, and Zillow on the new technology. They’ll be testing this before rolling it out to more partners.
Two months ago, Facebook announced that on April 12, it would open Instant Articles to all publishers. That day has arrived, and Facebook has made good on its promise.
With the company’s F8 developer conference underway, the company announced that publishers of any type or size can now utilize Instant Articles. You can now go to instantarticles.fb.com to join the program.
“More than one thousand publishers worldwide are officially part of the program, and at every step of the way, we see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook,” says product manager Josh Roberts.
“Additionally for many people around the world, it’s challenging to get news on mobile simply because it takes too long to load,” he adds. “We’ve invested heavily in optimizing performance on Android, with the goal of providing the best mobile reading experience for people everywhere, no matter where they are in the world or what connection or device they’re on. In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and others, we’ve found that people on slower connections read 20-40% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average as a result.”
Facebook also announced new partners and tools for Instant Articles. Publishing tool partners now include WordPress, Drupal, Atavist, Medium, Perk, Distributed, RebelMouse, ShareThis, Sovrn, Steller, and Tempest. Analytics tool partners include Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, comScore, Nielsen, Parsely, and SimpleReach.
As previously announced, Instant Articles also now support branded content as a result of Facebook’s recent policy change.
Soon, any publishers – big or small – will be able to use Facebook Instant Articles. In February, Facebook announced the feature would be opened up on April 12.
Now, news has emerged that Facebook will ad support for video ads as well as an additional ad unit at the bottom of Instant Articles, which it believes will increase ad impressions by roughly 20%. This is according to The Wall Street Journal, which spoke with Josh Roberts, product manager on Instant Articles.
According to the report, Facebook is tweaking its ad policies to accommodate the video ads, and publishers will be able to place autoplay (with sound disabled) or user-initiated video ads. They’ll also be able to include pre-roll ads before their editorial videos.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has adjusted its ad policies for Instant Articles. Late last year, the company made changes after complaints from publishers, enabling them to include more ads in each article and sell Facebook-only ad campaigns to marketers. They also got the ability to link to sponsored content in the “related articles” section.
In other video ad news, Pinterest is reportedly testing them, though it remains to be seen when they’ll be come available.
Medium announced that it is introducing a new browsing and reading experience, which it refers to as Collections. The goal is (of course) to make it easier to find content of interest on a personalized basis.
The feature is for both iOS and Android and integrates your own interest with “explorable threads of content” and “diverse viewpoints” across various topics.
Medium’s Katie Zhu explains, “Our new home experience is powered by a feature called Collections. The top list of sections on our home screen will be a mix of popular verticals (like Politics or Culture) and more specific, timely events (think the Oscars or Apple vs. the FBI). You’ll be able to find new Collections in these sections every day, curated by Medium and a handful of trusted testers—for now. If you’re interested, you can also read about our curation principles. Collections are homes for topic or theme-based content from Medium and beyond — they will allow users to bring together Medium stories, people and publications to follow, as well ideas from the rest of the web.”
“We believe that in order to create a great reading experience for humans, other humans should be part of that process,” she adds. “There’s a unique sensibility that individual curators bring, whether that’s a specific tone, voice, or simply good taste. They can help act as a filter for readers in guiding our limited time and attention to things that matter, calling out stories that haven’t yet been seen by many, helping to easily showcase the big stories of the day, or sometimes just adding a dose of weird and wonderful.”
For now, the experience is only open to a small group of people, but it will become available to all in time. You can stay updated by getting on the interest list.
Last month, everyone that publishes content on the Internet got some big news. Facebook said it would open up Instant Articles to all on April 12. This week, Facebook announced a WordPress plugin, which should make it much easier for many, many site and blog owners to implement.
Do you publish with WordPress? Do you intend to take advantage of Facebook’s Instant Articles? Discuss.
What Instant Articles Are
Instant Articles first emerged about a year ago when Facebook let a handful of big publications like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic take advantage of testing the format, which involves Facebook hosting content to show to users in a quicker, more user-friendly manner on mobile devices.
Using the same technology it uses to load photos and videos quickly in its mobile app, Facebook says Instant Articles load as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles. They also come with some content feature options like tilt-to-pan photos, auto-play videos, embedded audio captions, and interactive maps.
What You Can Do With Instant Articles
You can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue and/or use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory.
When it comes to content and audience analytics, Instant Articles supports comScore attribution, and you can use their existing analytics systems or providers like Google Analytics or Omniture. The company is also in talks with European attribution and measurement providers.
Facebook also lets you track reader-engagement with its own analytics tools. In addition to aggregate activity data, it provides info on article reach and engagement, time spent in each article, scroll-depth and engagement with rich media assets like photos and videos.
Over the past year, Facebook has given more and more sites the ability to use Instant Articles, and the articles only recently became supported on Android alongside iOS.
In a month, any content site big or small will be able to publish them.
When Instant Articles opens up to all next month, those using standard WordPress templates will be able to activate the plugin to create Instant Articles.
The plugin is open source, so the developer community will be able to participate in its continued development. WordPress discusses the plugin more here.
Instant Articles Mean More Shares, What About Reach?
According to Facebook, Instant Articles get more shares. Instant Articles product manager Michael Reckhow recently told Nieman Lab:
It’s really early in terms of understanding how people interact with Instant Articles, and we’ll continue to learn a lot. But the first thing we’re seeing is that people are more likely to share these articles, compared to articles on the mobile web, because Instant Articles load faster; the majority load in under a second, and that means people are getting to the content immediately.
We believe that sharing is the strongest signal that someone can give that it was a great experience. We’re really happy to see that improving the speed, improving the experience inside the article, is being reflected in more shares.
According to Reckhow at the time, most of those using Instant Articles were planning to put their entire catalog or at least the majority of it on the platform.
Facebook says using Instant Articles won’t directly help you in the News Feed ranking and organic reach, but you see what he said about sharing being the strongest signal, and Facebook does seem to favor Facebook videos over YouTube videos. Facebook would no doubt love to show more Facebook-hosted content.
Facebook announced last month that Instant Articles will be available to all publishers on April 12. This means any publisher, regardless of size, will be able to have the same content advantage as the major players Facebook has already given access to the feature.
To help these publishers, which by Facebook’s definition, includes any content publisher or blog, a new WordPress plugin is available.
Facebook’s Chris Ackermann writes in a blog post, “We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for publishers to share their content on Facebook, so we’ve partnered with Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com VIP, to build a free plugin for Instant Articles, which simplifies the process of generating and publishing Instant Articles from WordPress. The open-source WordPress publishing platform now powers more than 25% of sites on the web, so we are excited to help millions of publishers all over the world bring the Instant Articles experience to their readers.”
“We’ve worked with a small group of publishers on WordPress to beta test the plugin as a seamless way to adapt web content for the Instant Articles format, with a built-in suite of interactive tools that help stories come to life on mobile,” he adds. “For example, the plugin recognizes the image found in this Foreign Policy article and specifies the correct markup so the photo renders properly in the Instant Article. The photo expands to fill the screen when tapped and allows exploration by simply tilting the phone.”
When Instant Articles opens up to all publishers next month, those using standard WordPress templates will be able to activate the plugin to create Instant Articles.
The plugin is open source, so the developer community will be able to participate in its continued development.
Have your AdSense earnings been in a slump? This could be for for any number of reasons, and Google took to its Inside AdSense blog on Friday to help publishers troubleshoot the problem.
As the company notes, there are many factors that can have an impact on your earnings, but you should start by looking at clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), page revenue per thousand impressions (page RPM), and page views.
All of this information can be found in the Performance reports tab in AdSense.
“When troubleshooting changes in page views, it’s a good idea to extend the date range of your reports out to 30 days or more to help identify trends or specific issues,” writes Google’s Rachel Barrett. “A drop in page views could simply be seasonal; retailers, for instance, tend to see a traffic drop after the holiday season. But a decrease can also be due to a change in your content.”
If page views are the problem, Google suggests promoting your site with other major sites that cover the same topics and through social media (including groups), using Google Search Console to make sure your site is being properly crawled and index, updating your site regularly, and sending an email newsletter.
If your search rankings have dropped, Google offers a Webmaster Troubleshooter to help you address issues.
Regarding CPC, Barrett says, “See if you’re using the best-performing ad sizes. Generally, our most successful sizes for CPC and CTR are 720×90, 336×280, 160×600, and the 320×100 mobile banner. Make sure you’re not blocking ads you don’t need to. Blocks on too many advertisers, ad networks, general or sensitive categories will often decrease CPC because there are fewer advertisers in the auction bidding on your inventory. The more inventory your site has access to, the greater the chance that auction pressure will drive up your CPC. Look at how seasonality can affect your advertisers’ bids. For instance, swimsuit advertisers often increase their bids in the early weeks of summer. But if your site caters only to students, you should expect traffic to fall in the summer.”
As she notes, CTR and page RPM issues could stem from issues with your site design or targeting. She runs down some best practices in the blog post while providing additional resources for addressing the various issues mentioned.
Google and the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project announced a new Drupal 8 module that provides support for AMP. Google has been working with Lullabot to create the module, and the beta version is now available.
The two are starting to work on a Drupal 7 version of the module as well, which will be available later this month if everything goes according to plan.
“One of the most touted features of Drupal is its flexibility, so making Drupal produce AMP HTML has required a lot of careful consideration of the design approach,” says Lullabot’s Matthew Tift. “To make Drupal output AMP HTML, we have created an AMP module, AMP theme, and a PHP Library.”
“When the AMP module is installed, AMP can be enabled for any content type,’ Tift adds. “At that point, a new AMP view mode is created for that content type, and AMP content becomes available on URLs such as node/1/amp or node/article-title/amp. We also created special AMP formatters for text, image, and video fields.”
With the module, the AMP theme is triggered for any node delivered on an /amp path, and can be extended using a subtheme to give publishers more flexibility. This enables them to place AMP ad blocks on the AMP page with Drupal’s block system.
Tift discusses the module more in this post on the AMP blog.
About a year and a half ago, Yahoo launched Yahoo Recommends as a new monetization platform for publishers and part of its suite of publisher solutions.
The product suggested other articles at the bottom of publishers’ content, not unlike offerings from Taboola, Outbrain, and the like.
The service is now closed to new sign-ups. It’s not clear if Yahoo is going to pull the plug on the whole thing, but it seems somewhat likely, especially considering that the company has been shutting down various other properties.
The Yahoo Recommends site simply says:
Yahoo Recommends signups are now closed. Please check out our other partner programs at the Partner Portal.
Digiday shares a statement from the company saying, ““We have not made the decision to shut down Yahoo Recommends, however, we are not actively signing up new publishers at this time.”
Yahoo Recommends is powered by Yahoo’s personalization technology, and enables publishers to display its articles in a variety of layouts on desktop and mobile. It also features ads served through Gemini.
Facebook announced that on April 12, it will open Instant Articles to all publishers. This means that any publisher, regardless of size, will have this same content advantage as the major players Facebook has already catered to with the offering. If you create content, listen up!
So far, Facebook has been allowing a few hundred publishers to take advantage, but this should mean a better user experience for many more pieces of content in users’ News Feeds.
To be clear, Facebook says it’s extending the offering to any content publisher or blog. If you have a blog, you’ll be able to utilize Instant Articles.
If you don’t have a blog, why the heck not? As we recently saw in a study from TrackMaven, blogs are frequently overlooked by businesses these days in favor of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But blogs can still be very effective and utilizing them more often can help you out a lot. Hopefully Instant Articles will only add momentum.
You can sell and serve your own display ads in Instant Articles and keep 100% of the revenue. You can also monetize unsold inventory using display ads from Facebook’s Audience Network.
You don’t have to create original content for Facebook. It’s just another way to distribute content you’re already producing. When someone shares an Instant Article on Twitter or by email, it also shares a link to your site.
Beyond loading quickly, Instant Articles offer publishers some other interesting functionality such as autoplay videos that begin as readers scroll, the ability to zoom in on photos while tilting the phone, the ability to like and comment on individual photos and videos in a story, geo-tagged images, and swipable photo galleries.
Media organizations and journalists are an integral part of Facebook, and we’re committed to delivering products that will create the best experience for publishers and their readers. With Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network. Additionally, publishers can use their existing web-based analytics systems to track article traffic or use third-party providers. They can do all this while accessing a rich suite of multimedia tools to create dynamic, interactive stories, that will load quickly everywhere on Facebook, regardless of where in the world their readers are.
We’ve made it easy for publishers to join by building a system based on the tools they already use. Instant Articles uses the languages of the web and works with publishers’ content management systems, and we have documented an open standard that is easy for publishers to adopt. We encourage all interested publishers to review our documentation and prepare for open availability in April, at which point they will be able to share this fast, interactive experience with their readers.
Regarding content and audience analytics, Instant Articles supports comScore attribution, and publishers can use their existing analytics systems or third-party providers like Google Analytics or Omniture. The company is also in talks with European attribution and measurement providers.
Facebook also lets publishers track reader-engagement with its own analytics tools. In addition to aggregate activity data, it provides info on article reach and engagement, time spent in each article, scroll-depth and engagement with rich media assets like photos and videos.
The Instant Articles themselves so far appear for iPhone and Android users. Facebook says they work for any article type from daily coverage to long-form, in-depth articles.
In case you’re wondering how much work it’s going to take to implement Instant Articles, Facebook says it has tried to make things as easy as possible.
“After some basic setup, publishers can automate Instant Article production directly from their own content management systems, via RSS,” the company explains in an FAQ document. “Facebook provides tools so publishers can see all the items in their Facebook publishing feed and edit or revise content manually. Facebook also provides tools for publishers to preview articles before publication.”
You’re no doubt wondering if using Instant Articles will help you in News Feed ranking and organic reach. Facebook’s official answer is no, but I’m sure it won’t hurt. They certainly seem to favor Facebook videos over YouTube videos.
The April 12 launch date coincides with Facebook’s f8 developer conference, so there will no doubt be plenty of related takeaways coming out of that.
F8 registration opened up earlier this month. You can apply here. They’ll also stream the event online.
Google’s answer to Instant Articles – the open source AMP (which is being adopted by a variety of other organizations) – will get its real start for users this month when Google starts sending search traffic to the pages.
Between AMP and Instant Articles, the mobile user experience in general is probably about to get a lot better over the coming months.
Very soon, Google will begin sending search traffic to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This will begin on an unspecified date later this month.
To get webmasters and publishers prepared, they’ve been posting about how AMP’s relationship to various website elements will be carried out. They’ve discussed ads and analytics. Now, they’re talking about paywalls and subscriptions.
“One of the great challenges to designing a paywall solution is the wide range of strategies that publishers employ to control access to their content,” says Ashwin Limaye, Product Manager for Accelerated Mobile Pages. “There are different identity and authentication systems and many approaches to user management and access control. In addition there are a host of different payment options, subscription product offerings, single sign-on solutions, geo restrictions, etc. With AMP, pages need to be able to load on any domain (e.g. a publisher.com AMP page can load on google.com) in a secure manner while preserving user privacy. The lack of commonality in how various publishers achieve these objectives today meant that it was very hard to build a unified system within AMP for addressing all of these needs.”
They’ve been working with publishers and have devised a set of principles to guide a solution. It includes special AMP markup for paywalled and subscription content that indicates sections that are visible to different types of users.
“When the AMP document loads, the AMP Runtime asks the Publisher for instructions on how to show the document, which the publisher typically bases on the user type,” explains Limaye. “The AMP Runtime puts together the publisher instructions with the document markup to show the user exactly what the publisher intended. For instance, this could mean showing full content to a subscriber, a metering message to an anonymous user, or a snippet followed by a subscription upsell message to a user who has exhausted their metered quota. In cases where the document asks the user to log in or sign up, the user is taken to the publisher’s website to complete this process. This keeps the publisher in control of its users’ data and any related financial transactions.”
Medium announced three new publishing features, which it is rolling out this week.
For one, users can now schedule posts with the new “schedule to publish” feature. You can specify the date and time you want a post to be published, bringing Medium more in line with other blogging platforms.
“Clicking on ‘schedule to publish’ from this screen will enable you to queue up stories to be published when you want instead of when you have the time,” Medium says on its official blog. “You can now set your schedule to publish at peak traffic times and reward your followers with a steady stream of new material released on a more regular basis.”
The second new feature lets you connect your Twitter account to your Medium blog. Your Twitter followers who have Medium accounts will automatically become followers of your publication. You can set it up from your publication’s about page.
The third feature is the ability to view stats for letters sent through Medium publications. You’ll see these when you go the Letters page of your publication.
News Pro helps you search for news around your work every day. Fuel your unique interests with over a million topics to choose from. Get informed efficiently by locating the most important and relevant articles each day based off what interests you. Leverage the power of social networks for your daily news. You can sign-in on Facebook and LinkedIn to tailor your daily news highlights to your work experience and interests.
Find articles and topics you didn’t know you needed. News Pro allows you to extend the scope of your daily news updates by suggesting new topics to search based off your current interests and by helping you discover websites where you can read articles that are interesting to you. You can also search for news related to any topic right in the app so you can always be fully informed.
Here are the screenshots:
We haven’t seen an official announcement from the company, but the app was first reported on by Microsoft News, which says the app is powered by Bing News and comes from Microsoft Garage.
