I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF and Visualizing Impact launch Onlinecensorship.org to collect reports on content takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services
Onlinecensorship.org Tracks Content Takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Sites
New Project Will Gather Users’ Stories of Censorship from Around the World
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/onlinecensorshiporg-tracks-content-takedowns-facebook-twitter-and-other-social-media
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Google expects to launch Accelerated Mobile Pages, its version of Facebook’s Instant Articles, early next year — Google says its version of Facebook’s instant articles will arrive early next year — Last month Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, its open-source program designed …
Google says its version of Facebook’s instant articles will arrive early next year
AMPing up
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9795442/google-amp-mobile-web-2016
Last month Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, its open-source program designed to make web pages load much more quickly on mobile devices. AMP, which comes in the wake of similar efforts from Facebook and Apple, has been in a technical preview since then. But the first accelerated pages will come “early next year,” the company said in a blog post today. Google says 4,500 developers are following the project on Github, and 250 contributions of code and documentation have been made so far.
The AMP project has attracted publishers including The Guardian, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company. It’s also attracted a number of advertisers; today Google announced that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick, and AdSense are developing ads that conform to the quick-loading specifications of the project. If history is any guide, you can expect those advertisers to push for more intrusive and data-intensive specs over time, until AMP becomes so bloated that it’s nearly as slow as the mobile pages it was designed to replace, and a new initiative is launched to promote even-more-accelerated mobile pages (EMAMP), with the full support of the advertisers who ruined the original project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
1 in 5 kids believe search engine results are always true
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/11/23/1-in-5-kids-believe-search-engine-results-are-always-true/
About one in five children aged 12 to 15 believe that information found in search engines like Google or Bing must be true.
In fact, more kids are more likely in 2015 vs. 2014 to believe various kinds of online information are always true, according to a study just out from Ofcom, the UK regulator of media and communications industries, which has been tracking kids’ and parents’ media habits since 2005.
Some other key findings from the study, which relied on in-home interviews with 1379 parents and children aged 5-15:
In 2015, kids aged 8-11 and 12-15 are more likely than those studied in 2014 to believe that all information on news sites or apps is true (23% vs. 12% for 8-11 year olds, and 14% vs. 8% for 12-15 year olds).
The BBC remains the preferred source for truthful information about the world among 12-15 year olds, but a growing number said they would turn to YouTube for truthful information (8% vs. 3% in 2014).
In addition to the one in five (19%) 12-15 year olds who believe search engine results must be true, 22% of them don’t consider the veracity of information but just visit the sites they “like the look of.”
Despite being distinguished with an orange box containing the word “ad,” only 16% of 8-11 year olds and 31% of 12-15 year olds could correctly identify sponsored ads in search results.
45% of 12-15 year olds were aware of personalized advertising, but 18% thought everyone would see the same ads and 38% were unsure.
Looking at these results it seems obvious that many children nowadays are unprepared to withstand the onslaught of online hoaxes, scams and social engineering tricks employed by predators, cybercriminals and fraudulent advertisers.
Digital natives often lack online nous
http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/news/digital-natives-often-lack-digital-nous/
Children are becoming more trusting of what they see online, but sometimes lack the understanding to decide whether it is true or impartial.
, published today, reveals that children aged 8-15 are spending more than twice as much time online as they did a decade ago, reaching over 15 hours each week in 2015.
But even for children who have grown up with the internet – so-called digital natives – there’s room to improve their digital know-how and understanding.
For example, children do not always question what they find online. One in five online 12-15s (19%) believe information returned by a search engine such as Google or Bing must be true, yet only a third of 12-15s (31%) are able to identify paid-for adverts in these results.
Nearly one in ten (8%) of all children aged 8-15 who go online believe information from social media websites or apps is “all true” – doubling from 4% in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Marketing Land:
Google announces ad partner support for Accelerated Mobile Pages, its version of Facebook’s Instant Articles, launching early next year — Google Announces New Advertising Support For AMP Pages — Fast-loading pages may also mean fast-loading ads, with advertising platform support for AMP that’s been announced.
Google Announces New Advertising Support For AMP Pages
Fast-loading pages may also mean fast-loading ads, with advertising platform support for AMP that’s been announced.
http://marketingland.com/google-advertising-amp-pages-153499
Google plans to rollout fast-loading AMP pages into its mobile search results early next year — and now it says there are advertising partners set to help publishers earn off those pages.
Accelerated Mobile Pages — known as AMP for short — is a project backed by Google and intended to make pages appear super-fast for those using mobile devices. Since AMP was announced in October, it has gained support from publishers, platforms like Twitter, analytics providers and now today, advertising networks and platforms.
The latest news came in a post that Google made through a new blog hosted on WordPress.com, one of the AMP partners. Google also has a similar area just started on Medium, where the news was also supposed to be shared, but it has yet to appear there.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The world buzzes on “Big Five” pace: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.
They have huge market shares of the fields and a large impact on the functioning of small businesses and startups.
- For example, Google has a 89 percent share of Internet searches. Almost every one of us merely the first 10 search results list. Search engines look for trends, but their results can already deduce much more
Ekström explained before the finale (Google owned) YouTube competitor whose pieces were considered the most. Google Trends service, and the search engine produced the same answer. Then he went to talk to the German Lena Meyer-Landrut, with and told him: “you win this competition.” The singer did not believe in, but did not drive away at all. On the basis of small talk Ekström wrote the article beforehand and sent it to the newspaper, when the results were announced.
Ekström does not want a consultant, but intends to retain the supplier of their work.
- I find it hard to see a larger journalistic topics than this. Large open-ended questions are many. For example, who can grant a digital identity certificate. In Sweden, it is the task of the banks, but could it be in the future such as Facebook?
Source: http://haloo.atea.fi/pinnalla/maailma-sykkii-big-fiven-tahtiin/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Simonite / MIT Technology Review:
Wikimedia Foundation announces a new machine learning tool aimed at helping Wikipedia editors differentiate between honest mistakes and intentional vandalism
Artificial Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544036/artificial-intelligence-aims-to-make-wikipedia-friendlier-and-better/
The nonprofit behind Wikipedia is turning to machine learning to combat a long-standing decline in the number of editors.
Software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism is being rolled out in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia.
One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy (see “The Decline of Wikipedia”).
Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation who helped diagnose that problem, is now leading the project trying to fight it, which relies on algorithms with a sense for human fallibility. His ORES system, for “Objective Revision Evaluation Service,” can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not.
Halfaker believes his new algorithmic editing assistant will be accepted, because although it’s more sophisticated than previous software unleashed on Wikipedia, it isn’t being forced on users. “In some ways it’s weird to introduce AI and machine learning to a massive social thing, but I don’t see what we’re doing as any different to making other software changes to the site,” he says. “Every change we make affects behavior.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social media censorship in Bangladesh hints at long-term problems for publishers
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/bangladesh_social_media.php
Two weeks have passed since the government in Bangladesh blocked access to Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, and other social media sites. In Dhaka, some people have crowded into hotel lobbies to access private networks, while others are gaining access through proxy servers. The reason for the ban, according to the government, has to do with security, in light of the recent terrorist attacks and local political violence, but there is concern that it’s part of a creeping pattern of censorship that’s having a negative impact on publishers, especially after the temporary block in January and reports of journalists being harassed.
The government called the blackout “a mistake,” but then said the social media block would remain in place until the security threat had passed.
Fourteen days later, those sites are still down. Asked when access would be restored, the State Minister for Posts and Telecommunications said, “When the home ministry and law-enforcing agencies feel it’s safe.”
In a country where the ruling party once offered a transformative vision for media (its slogan in 2008 was “Digital Bangladesh”), and Facebook dominates online activity in a way that doesn’t happen in the US, the shutdown is a frustrating, unsettling setback for those who have come to depend on the site for news and information.
From a business perspective, the shutdown should also be a red flag for Facebook, which just announced its plan to bring Instant Articles, a mobile service that allows media organizations to publish directly to Facebook at faster speeds, to more emerging markets in Asia, where social media and mobile use is booming.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’
http://www.cjr.org/first_person/misinformation_and_misconceptions_how_not_to_report_on_the_encryption_debate.php
Rarely has a public debate been ignited so fast as the one about whether to ban online encryption after the tragic Paris attacks two and a half weeks ago. And rarely has the coverage of such a debate been so lacking in facts—especially considering that encryption is a tool reporters increasingly need to do their jobs.
The deplorable terrorist attacks in Paris occurred on the evening of Friday, Nov. 13. By the end of that weekend, news organizations had published dozens of articles linking the Paris attackers with the use of encrypted messaging apps that prevent the companies that make them—and therefore governments—from easily accessing the messages their users send back and forth. By the following Monday, there were literally thousands of articles questioning whether such apps should be outlawed, spurred on by the Sunday talk shows that gave intelligence officials license to speculate on the “likely” use of encryption as a catchall excuse for why the attacks had not been detected, and to condemn the technology without a single skeptical follow-up.
Why were officials saying it was “likely”? Not because they had actual evidence, but because they assumed that if authorities didn’t know about the plot in advance, the terrorists must have used encryption.
Meanwhile, an early New York Times article on the attackers’ supposed use of encryption—sourced to anonymous European officials, whose assertions became the launchpad for many of the weekend’s think pieces—was quickly rewritten and the anonymous reference to encryption removed (without a note to readers about why).
By Monday night, the Times made clear in its lead story about the still-raging encryption debate that there was “no definitive evidence” that encrypted communications had been used by any of the attackers, but by then the terms of the discussion were already set, and the CIA had no problem continuing its epic game of blame deflection throughout the week.
To this day, there’s hardly any publicly available evidence that the Paris attackers used encrypted communications to plan their attack. It’s important to point out, as journalist Dan Gillmor astutely writes, that whether these particular terrorists did use such technology should not matter in the debate over whether to ban it. But it does prove how easily the CIA can still mislead and steer the media while diverting attention from its own potential failures.
What have we learned since the “ban encryption” movement gained full steam on the first weekday after the attack? It turns out that most of the attackers were already known to intelligence agencies. Within a week of the attack, we found out they had used Facebook to communicate, as well as normal SMS text messaging.
By this week, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Paris attack had been “hatched in plain sight”: The terrorists used their real names and identification cards for hotel and rental car reservations and did not noticeably try to cover their tracks.
But cable news, which sadly often reflects the national agenda more than print, had no interest in the truth, and as Glenn Greenwald wrote, “neither CNN nor MSNBC has put a single person on air to dispute the CIA’s blatant falsehoods about Paris despite how many journalists have documented those falsehoods.”
Part of the problem is that many reporters—television anchors in particular—apparently don’t understand the basics of how encryption works and what it does and does not do.
First, even if terrorists do use encryption, that doesn’t mean a giant black cape has been thrown over them so they can work in complete secrecy. Far from it: Authorities can still track the precise location of terrorists 24/7 if they carry a mobile device. Even if suspects encrypt their communications, intelligence agencies can get information about who they’re talking to, when, and for how long. They can also hack into individual terrorists’ computers or phones and read their messages, no matter what type of encrypted apps they are using. (For more, read Nathan Freitas’s “6 Ways Law Enforcement Can Track Terrorists in an Encrypted World.”)
Ask any national security reporter who has tried to completely switch to encrypted and anonymous communication with a source and you’ll find that it is virtually impossible unless you have weeks or months of training.
While end-to-end encryption certainly gives us an extra layer of privacy protection at a time when our rights are constantly being eroded, this is actually a security vs. security debate. Encryption’s main purpose is to protect us from hackers of all sorts
The government is complaining that companies cannot unlock certain communications because only the sender and the receiver hold the key—the company itself does not. When tech companies do not have a way to access all their customers’ data at once, neither do hackers. As a commentator said last week in response to the new push to ban encryption in the name of “security”: “Weakening security with the aim of advancing security simply does not make sense.”
There are, of course, many questions reporters can and should be asking intelligence officials: Don’t you still have many other ways to track terrorists, even if they use encrypted messaging apps? If the terrorists planned so much of this out in the open, and they were known to intelligence agencies, why didn’t you catch them with the resources you already had?
Encryption is not an issue about which reporters should be “neutral”—it directly affects their wellbeing. Encryption is increasingly an important tool for journalists of all stripes
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Fortune:
Snapchat moved into real-time, crowdsourced news with San Bernardino shooting story
Snapchat’s Move Into Real-Time News is Fascinating
http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/snapchat-news/
Once known only as a sexting app, Snapchat is becoming a force in real-time news.
For an app that many—possibly even most—initially dismissed as a trivial tool for teens to send sexy texts that would automatically disappear, Snapchat has certainly come a long way. Not only does it have an estimated market value of about $16 billion, but it is also now seen by many media outlets as a viable platform for their news, thanks in part to its Discover feature.
More recently, Snapchat has started to dip its toes into the world of real-time, crowdsourced news. And the results have been fascinating and/or disturbing, depending on your perspective.
The Snapchat “story” was pulled together over time from users who were near the attack when it occurred, with images and videos that these users had uploaded—creating a live stream of pictures and clips from people who were near the shooting location. Some of the shots included behind the scenes images of police activity, as well as shots of the wounded being airlifted away.
Snapchat creates stories based around geographic locations such as Los Angeles every day, with random content uploaded by users about the city. The service usually employs GPS location tools to show that kind of story only to those who are in that city. But in the case of the shooting, the company made the San Bernardino stream available to everyone in the U.S., for the first time.
The results of Snapchat’s news gathering can be seen in a post that Mashable did, as well as a similar piece that Business Insider did on the phenomenon.
Snapchat positions itself as breaking news platform with San Bernardino coverage
http://mashable.com/2015/12/03/snapchat-san-bernardino/#0Mz3pfheKqqq
Snapchat is not typically a place you’d go to for information about a breaking news story. But the messaging app ran a story on the San Bernardino mass shooting Wednesday, providing its 100+ million users with updates and images from people at the scene.
Besides photos and videos from the scene, the story, which went up hours after the shooting started, brought updates on the developments and statements from the authorities.
“We published this story because we felt that the content, which comes from the LA local Story, was newsworthy and held national significance,” Mary Ritti, Snapchat’s vice president of communications, told International Business Times.
Many users voiced their opinion on the coverage on social networks. Some were impressed with the way Snapchat handled the story, with one calling it “democratization of news coverage.”
Originally a photo and video sharing messaging app, Snapchat has strongly positioned itself as a news platform this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alexandra Valasek / The Twitter Blog:NEW
Most influential moments on Twitter 2015 include: #ParisAttacks, #RefugeesWelcome, #FIFAWWC #TheDress, #IStandWithAhmed #PlutoFlyby, #MarriageEquality
This #YearOnTwitter
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/this-yearontwitter
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sinclair Acquired and Will Relaunch Mobile News Site Circa
TV station owner plans to hire 70 journalists for new push in digital media
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/sinclair-acquired-and-will-relaunch-mobile-news-site-circa-1449506665-lMyQjAxMTA1MjA3NzQwNTc0Wj
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc., the owner of the most local TV stations in the country, has purchased and next spring will relaunch the defunct mobile news site Circa, the company announced Monday.
Sinclair has hired John Solomon, formerly the vice president for content and business development for The Washington Times, to lead the effort as chief creative officer. Mr. Solomon said he plans to hire 70 journalists to do original reporting, in addition to having access to video feeds from the 172 television stations that Sinclair owns and runs.
Circa was founded in 2011 as a way of making news more easily digestible on mobile devices. It became particularly well known for its feature that let users sign up to receive rolling updates on breaking stories via push notification. Matt Galligan, the site’s founder, wrote in June that the site shut down after failing to close a needed round of funding. It had raised nearly $6 million.
“We were intrigued by their mobile app tech stack with a ‘follow me’ feature that allowed content personalization by the end user,” he said in an interview. Circa will run as its own independent company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Sluis / AdExchanger:
Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store says if he didn’t work for the company, he’d block ads; says ad tech not good at identifying unsavoury advertisers and ads — Guardian CEO: Why Is It So Hard To Keep Gun Ads Off Our Site? — “If I didn’t work for the Guardian, I would block ads,” said Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store.
Guardian CEO: Why Is It So Hard To Keep Gun Ads Off Our Site?
http://adexchanger.com/publishers/guardian-ceo-why-is-it-so-hard-to-keep-gun-ads-off-our-site/
“If I didn’t work for the Guardian, I would block ads,” said Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store.
He’s fed up with the poor-quality ads that slip through on the Guardian and other trusted sites.
As an avid reader of the Guardian, he sees ads for loan sharks and other unsavory ventures slip through frequently, leading to a game of whack-a-mole for the ad ops team. These advertisers often change their names frequently to escape blockage by scrupulous publishers.
But what most infuriated him was seeing ads from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which have popped up multiple times on the Guardian site through different campaign names and channels.
Such ads would never be accepted at the Guardian if they came through a direct sales channel.
“Repeat offenders often rebrand themselves under new company names, accompanied by new URLs, which enable them to slip past our blocks,” Soch said.
Store doesn’t profess to be an advertising guru. But as an outsider to the ad tech world, he has little patience for such slip-ups.
“What bothers me is that as a normal media expert, I can’t understand how we can’t be guaranteed control of the third-party ads on our site,” Store said.
If ad tech can do precise targeting, why can’t it remove ads with precision?
“The idea that in a programmatic world, we just have to get used to the fact that we never know what quite is going to appear in our most valuable places until it actually appears, doesn’t seem logical or acceptable,” Store said.
Digital advertising has gotten a free pass the way that other mediums haven’t. Store comes from TV advertising, where every ad requires approval.
“You couldn’t run a magazine company like that either,” Store said. “If you’re Anna Wintour [of Vogue] and an ad like that got into the magazine, someone would get fired.”
The digital ad industry is going down a dangerous path if it ignores how ad quality affects the user experience – with ad blocking as a prime example.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:
In places where data is more expensive, ad blockers help manage the cost, for customers and carriers
The Ad Blocking Industry: Global, Large, Threatening
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/12/06/the-ad-blocking-industry-global-large-threatening/
First ignited by anti-advertising zealots, ad blocking is now a growing business involving an “interesting” set of players. These range from opportunistic startups intending to leverage the power of cell phone carriers, to large multinational groups wanting to control the ad supply aimed at the Internet’s Next Billion.
When European or American publishers rant about the ad blocking plague, they tend to focus on browser extensions such as AdBlock Plus that eat a sizable part of their business. But the scope of the problem does vary with territories and demographics. At a European gaming site, 90% of users run an ad blocker, and a major German publisher recently stated that 40% of its monetization evaporated for the same reason. In the news business, roughly 30% of desktop users watch contents with no ads
Google gathered a couple of hundreds of its advertising partners, 23% of the audience admitted using an ad blocker. The very same crowd that sells or buy ads eliminates them while browsing the web. Interesting.
As big as it already is, this might in fact just be the tip of the iceberg. The ad blocking picture in even more startling when considered on a global scale and when the mobile internet enters the picture. There, new players are staking strategic positions.
In countries such as India, China and Indonesia (altogether 1.1 billion internet users), mobile browsing is much more prevalent that in Western countries. As one of my interlocutors explained, new digital users often go online with smartphones that don’t have sufficient capabilities to accommodate a large number of applications. In addition, data plans are expensive. In Asia, owning a mobile phone eats about 5% of the average salary, vs. 1% or 2% in Western countries (where the data consumption is at least three times higher.) Once an Indian user gets a new phone, s/he won’t go online to get his apps but go to a local store that will connect the handset to a cable and load a small number of programs. The process is often repeated as churn rates are high in these markets.
These peculiar economics make the task of selling ads on mobile quite hard. As an engineer who works in Asia told me: “It’s difficult, especially if you consider local market conditions, prices [of ads] are so low that they can fall below the cost of the data that transport them…”
Hence the appeal of adblockers.
In India (and in most Asian markets), the n°1 mobile browser, UC Browser, commands a 51% market share, leaving its competitor in the dust
Here is the catch: UC Browser comes with an ad blocker set to “on” by default. This browser promises to consume 79% less data than its competitors…
Even more interesting, UC Web is part of Alibaba Group, the giant Chinese e-commerce site: with the the equivalent of $248bn in revenue, Alibaba is bigger than Amazon and eBay combined. Hence the question: What is the n°1 e-retailer in the world doing in the ad blocking business?
It could be two things. One is that Alibaba sees ads as deteriorating the mobile browsing experience so much that they hurt e-commerce revenue. This makes sense: Google found that 49% of people leave a mobile web site if it takes longer than 6 to 10 seconds to load. The other reason could be that Alibaba wants to control the flow of advertising, to favor its own. Operating a largely deployed ad blocker means retaining a tight grip on ad filters, that is manipulate UC browser settings that selectively let “good” ads go through.
This is happens to be the very model at the core ad blocking business Eyeo GmbH, the creator of AdBlock Plus. The company might say it puts the consumer first, but when an advertising player decides to pay up, Eyeo’s virtue yields to cash.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook:
Facebook Pages can show visitors how quickly their owners respond to messages, and page owners can set messaging status to “away”
New Tools for Managing Communication on Your Page
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/new-tools-for-managing-communication-on-your-page
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Apple News app updates with a “Top Stories” tab curated by editors and adds Comscore integration so publishers can get credit from advertisers for traffic
Apple Updates Its News App to Make It More Like a … Newspaper
http://recode.net/2015/12/08/apple-updates-its-news-app-to-make-it-more-like-a-newspaper/
Apple is tweaking its News app, with hopes of making the personalized newsreader more appealing for both users and publishers.
Apple’s update for its iOS app, which begins rolling out today, has two components. Only one of them will be visible to regular users: Apple’s editors will curate a list of “top stories” they’ll display for all of the apps’ users, at least a couple of times a day.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapchat’s Crowded Publisher Platform Is Starting to Feel Like ‘The Hunger Games’
http://recode.net/2015/12/07/snapchats-publisher-platform-has-gotten-so-crowded-its-like-the-hunger-games/
Snapchat’s publisher platform is getting crowded.
What started as a group of 11 publishers almost a year ago is now up to 17 and counting.* That’s not a lot when compared to the broader Internet, but it’s definitely a lot to fit on one screen within Snapchat, where these publishers are competing for time with the app’s millennial-heavy audience. Make no mistake, publishers are getting competitive. One publisher we spoke with referred to it as “The Hunger Games.”
This crowding and competition is one of the reasons Snapchat opened up deep linking to its publishing partners last week. The move means that publishers can share a link in places outside of Snapchat, like Facebook, Twitter or the publisher’s homepage, to drive traffic back to its publisher section, called Discover.
As the section grows, it’s the kind of publisher-friendly move Snapchat will need to do more of to ensure its partners continue to devote resources to creating content that disappears after just 24 hours.
But it’s also easy to understand why Snapchat hasn’t offered this yet. For starters, it doesn’t want to give people an easy way to leave the app. Linking does just that. It could also pose problems for Snapchat’s advertising efforts. Right now, advertisers are paying for TV-style brand awareness, and that’s tough to measure. Click-through rates are not so tough to measure, and could be risky for Snapchat if it leads to less appealing, click-through-dependent advertising.
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Barboza / New York Times:
Alibaba Buying South China Morning Post, Aiming to Influence Media
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/business/dealbook/alibaba-scmp-south-china-morning-post.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.worldpay.com/future-of-digital/?utm_source=TM&utm_medium=display&utm_term=Q4%252015&utm_campaign=FODP%2520launch#.VmxFab84KMY
Tomi Engdahl says:
WeMedia’s Andrew Nachison Discusses the Future of Online Journalism
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/12/15/1844231/wemedias-andrew-nachison-discusses-the-future-of-online-journalism?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
WeMedia is partly a think tank and partly a consulting firm that advises news organizations on how to deal with the ever-changing world of online journalism. Andrew Nachison cofounded WeMedia with Dale Peskin (who went back to newspaper editing in 2014)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook excludes sad moments from ‘Year in Review’ photosets
The social network promises your photoset won’t make you bust out Adele’s ‘Hello.’
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/17/facebook-year-in-review-filter/
Facebook messed up its “Year in Review” slideshow programming in 2014. A number of photosets didn’t only use images that dredged up painful memories, they also ended with “It’s been a great year” regardless of their content. It looks like the social network has taken great care not to repeat the same gaffe, though, since 2015′s version can automatically block out certain pictures. According to Techcrunch, it uses the same filters as Facebook’s Timehop clone On This Day. A spokesperson said: “We won’t show you photos where memorialized accounts or exes are tagged, or photos with people you’ve blocked or added to your On This Day preferences.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Diginatives written too much potash
You know Diginatives that swim like a fish in water, internet, communicate with friends to mobile phones in almost real time and know the first all new social media goggles? They reject the traditional Authorities and apply themselves to reliable information online using social networks. At school, they get bored and prefer to apply their doctrine on-line communities. They are also masters at creating for himself the charismatic personality of the brand and produce online content, especially images and videos.
The first Diginatives – or z-generation representatives – are now in the twenties and gradually moving into the world of work. The companies expect the water in order to get the most talented young people to digitize their organization. Who could it do better than Diginatives?
Everything that is said to Diginatives of course, is true. But only if you believe click bait headlines.
Hard facts show otherwise.
When you look at the narrative use of young people’s social media inquiries for the years 2013 and 2015, it soon becomes apparent that Diginatives tend to curl up their own small social circles – do not network widely with different people. Young people are particularly popular WhatsApp, which is based in closed groups and bilateral communication.
A lot of media exhibition, which was tubettaminen also gets closer inspection, a strange light. YouTube is the most used by young people in the social media service, but few, if any of them edits and publishes yourself online videos, about 5 per cent. – the remaining 95 per cent just watch them
What about young people much vaunted social skills? For them will not go any more: young people’s interest to follow the familiar news and chatting, telling their own news and chatting, real time chat and for discovering new people have clearly declined over the past two years. Young people are not only a passive also anti-social than in the past.
Most everything that Diginatives is written, it is therefore potash. It is rather a digitally passive than active.
One thing digitally passive feel better skilled than their parents. Namely, some friends to the protection of selection and privacy. Almost half of 13-29-year-olds reported that they have a threshold register for online services, which require the use of your name. And when the name is displayed, over 80 percent said herself wondering exactly how they commented.
Digipassives have pre-blood self-critical and prudent manner.
Source: http://www.mikrobitti.fi/2015/12/diginatiiveista-kirjoitetaan-liikaa-potaskaa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:
New York Times needs systemic changes to fix problems that led to errors in San Bernardino shooting story — Systemic Change Needed After Faulty Times Article — Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others. — What I’ll lay out here was a bad one.
Systemic Change Needed After Faulty Times Article
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/new-york-times-san-bernardino-correction-margaret-sullivan-public-editor/?_r=0
Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.
What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.
Here’s the background: A Times article Sunday reported that the U.S. government had missed something that was right out there in the open: the jihadist social-media posts by one of the San Bernardino killers.
It was certainly damning – and it was wrong. On Wednesday, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, referred to such reporting as “a garble.”
On Thursday evening, an editors’ note was appended to the article; it appeared in Friday’s paper. Editors’ notes are sometimes used instead of corrections to provide more context and explanation. But there’s no question that this also functioned as a correction.
I have two major and rather simple questions: How did this happen? And how can The Times guard against its happening again?
All described what happened as deeply troubling. Mr. Baquet said that some new procedures need to be put in place, especially for dealing with anonymous sources, and he said he would begin working on that immediately.
“This was a really big mistake,” Mr. Baquet said, “and more than anything since I’ve become editor it does make me think we need to do something about how we handle anonymous sources.”
He added: “This was a system failure that we have to fix.” However, Mr. Baquet said it would not be realistic or advisable to ban anonymous sources entirely from The Times.
How did this specific mistake happen?
“Our sources misunderstood how social media works and we didn’t push hard enough,” said Mr. Baquet, who read the article before publication. He said those sources apparently did not know the difference between public and private messages on social-media platforms.
I asked him why reporters or editors had not insisted on seeing or reading the social media posts in question, or even having them read aloud to them; he told me he thought that this would have been unrealistic under the circumstances, but that without that kind of direct knowledge, more caution was required.
All the editors said that slowing down, despite the highly competitive nature of a hot news story, is a necessary measure.
The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Social Media Affects Journalistic Objectivity
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/how-social-media-affects-journalistic-objectivity/
NYT Public Editor Sees Social Media as ‘Double-Edged Sword’ That Is Changing Objective Journalism
http://shorensteincenter.org/speaker-series-with-margaret-sullivan/
Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of The New York Times, outlined two opposing sides on the issue of how social media is changing traditional reporting and objectivity. To illustrate the distinction, Sullivan used examples written by two thought-leaders in journalism: Tom Kent, standards editor for the Associated Press, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.
Kent, Sullivan explained, falls on the traditional, conservative side of the issue, and believes that because “everyone understands objectivity differently…it is a dangerously fuzzy concept…and we dismiss it at our peril.” Journalists should keep their own personal opinions and beliefs to themselves, he says, in order to keep a “commitment to balance.” Sullivan added that Kent has stated that social networks have the potential to “undermine the credibility of journalists, if used carelessly.”
On the other hand, Sullivan pointed out, Rosen thinks that objectivity is an “outdated concept” and that journalists should let their audience see their own point of view. What he calls the “view from nowhere” – traditional journalistic impartiality – “is getting harder to trust, and ‘here’s where I’m coming from’ is more likely to be trusted.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Caitlin Dewey / Washington Post:
Washington Post “What was fake on the Internet this week” column ends because readers who share hoax stories aren’t convinced by debunking — What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column — There is nothing — NOTHING — too crazy for the Internet hoax beat.
What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/18/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-week-why-this-is-the-final-column/
There is nothing — NOTHING — too crazy for the Internet hoax beat. Pregnancy by flu shot? Six days of total darkness? In the past 82 weeks, I’m prettyyyy sure I’ve seen just about everything.
We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks: light-hearted, silly things, for the most part, like new flavors of Oreos and babies with absurd names.
Since then, those sorts of rumors and pranks haven’t slowed down, exactly, but the pace and tenor of fake news has changed. Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case.
There’s a simple, economic explanation for this shift: If you’re a hoaxer, it’s more profitable. Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes.
Needless to say, there are also more complicated, non-economic reasons for the change on the Internet hoax beat.
Frankly, this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment. This format doesn’t make sense. I’ve spoken to several researchers and academics about this lately, because it’s started to feel a little pointless.
the nature of Internet misinformation has changed
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Chariton / The Wrap:
Guggenheim Media Spins Off Money-Losing Hollywood Reporter, Billboard to Company President Todd Boehly
http://www.thewrap.com/guggenheim-media-spins-off-hollywood-reporter-billboard-to-company-president-todd-boehly-exclusive/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Katherine Seligman / Cal Alumni Association:
How hyperlocal news site Berkeleyside averages 200K visitors per month and why it was awarded two SPJ excellence awards
Berkeleyside: The Nimble Hyperlocal News Site is Winning Awards and Attracting Eyeballs
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2015-breaking-news/berkeleyside-nimble-hyperlocal-news-site-winning
They hear from their readers, who often tweet out when they hear sirens or helicopters overhead. “@Berkeleyside, what is going on?”
The founders still take virtually no salary, although they are hoping that will change as membership (now at 1,000), ad sales, and attendance at sponsored events rise. Last year, the site’s TED-like event, Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas (“Don’t call it a conference; that’s boring,” says Knobel) drew 400 people. This year’s Uncharted, held in mid-October and costing $345 for two days, featured a range of speakers, including bioethicist Alice Dreger, authors Masha Gessen and Robin Sloan, federal court of appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.
Challenges lie ahead, but Knobel says some sites have spent too much time agonizing over the process and not enough—as one large sneaker company would say—just doing it. “There has never been a more fertile time to commit journalism,” he insists.
Will they get rich? Probably not.
Knobel still does other work, as does Dinkelspiel, whose second book, Tangled Vines, about murder and greed in California vineyards, came out this fall.
“But it’s fun,” says Dinkelspiel, who usually gets up at 6 a.m. to check wire stories and writes from four to five posts a week. “I’m still working as a reporter, and we get to make a difference.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
BBC launches machine-translated synthetic voiceovers
https://thestack.com/world/2015/12/21/bbc-launches-machine-translated-synthetic-voiceovers/
The BBC has announced the launch of a new production tool to provide audio in alternate languages for its news outputs, apparently incorporating existing translation technologies.
Built by BBC news labs, the workflow involves uploading the script of a video news item and the subsequent voice-synthesis of the resulting translation. The service is launching initially in Japanese and Russian. The video, embedded below, shows the process in action, with the narration provided by one of the synthetic voices – and even if the Hawking-style choppiness gives the simulant away immediately, it does appear to provide an above-averagely authentic flow of speech.
Digital Development Director James Montgomery comments in the post “I’m very excited about this trial. The BBC has some of the best original journalism in the world, with correspondents around the globe. Technology like this means we can bring more of our international journalism to more people.”
The initial pilot will run until April of 2016, with the Japanese iteration already available at bbc.jp.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Is So Much Reported Science Wrong
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/167251/why-is-so-much-reported-science-wrong?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
An article from Berkeley’s California Magazine explains some of the reasons science reporting is often at odds with actual science. Quoting: “Where journalism favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and misdirections in a long, uneven path to the truth—or at least to scientific consensus. The types of stories that reporters choose to pursue can also be a problem, says Peter Aldhous, [lecturer and reporter]. ‘As journalists, we tend to gravitate to the counterintuitive, the surprising, the man-bites-dog story,’ he explains. ‘In science, that can lead us into highlighting stuff that’s less likely to be correct.’ If a finding is surprising or anomalous, in other words, there’s a good chance that it’s wrong.
Giving Credence: Why is So Much Reported Science Wrong, and What Can Fix That?
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2015-breaking-news/giving-credence-why-so-much-reported-science-wrong-and
1998 Year in which the British medical journal The Lancet published a study suggesting a link between autism and vaccines.
2010 Year The Lancet published a retraction of the discredited study.
33 Percentage of American parents surveyed by The National Consumers League in 2014 who believe vaccines are linked to autism.*
10 Factor by which retraction notices in scientific journals increased between 2000 and 2010.
44 Percentage of retractions attributed to “misconduct,” including fabrication and plagiarism.*
44 Percentage of health care journalists who said, in a 2009 survey, that their organization sometimes or frequently reported stories based only on news releases.*
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Under Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post is focusing on what made Amazon successful: customer service, a long-term vision
Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post
Amazon founder increasingly is making his mark, with a focus on customer experience
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/bezos-takes-hands-on-role-at-washington-post-1450658089-lMyQjAxMTE1NTI4MTYyNTE3Wj
When Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos received an email from a reader complaining about the time it took for the mobile app to load, he immediately fired off a note to the newspaper’s chief information officer. The message was simple: fix it.
“We looked at the problem and I told Jeff I thought we could improve the load time to maybe two seconds. He wrote back and said, ‘It needs to be milliseconds,’” said Shailesh Prakash, who heads the Post’s technology team as chief information officer. “He has become our ultimate beta tester.”
Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by suggesting loading low-resolution images onto the app first, allowing the page to load on readers’ screens more quickly.
In the more than two years since Mr. Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million, the billionaire Amazon.com Inc. founder has increasingly made his mark on how the paper is run. His focus on customer experience has become a near mandate within the news operation.
“Jeff has told us repeatedly that we have a long runway, but we are trying to make prudent business decisions,” Publisher Fred Ryan said. “We are looking at the long term and not just for quick and temporary gains.”
Mr. Bezos has been willing to invest in the paper’s transformation, although executives say they aren’t working with a blank check.
“He does not get involved in the journalism except to encourage us to hire the best journalists that we can,” Mr. Ryan said. “He has really focused on the technology and customer side, which has been one of the hallmarks of Amazon. Our engineers have an open line to him and he has made his expertise available to us anytime.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Javascript User Prohibitions Are Like Content DRM, But Even Less Effective
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/2249217/javascript-user-prohibitions-are-like-content-drm-but-even-less-effective
It always puzzles me whenever I run across a post somewhere that uses Javascript to try to prevent me from copying and pasting text, or even viewing the source. These measures are simple enough to bypass just by disabling Javascript in my browser. It seems like these measures are very similar to the DRM publishers insist on slapping onto e-books and movie discs—easy to defeat, but they just keep throwing them on anyway because they might inconvenience a few people.
Javascript user prohibitions are content DRM in microcosm—and even less effective
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/javascript-user-prohibitions-are-content-drm-in-microcosmand-even-less-effective/
What’s more, when I hit Ctrl+U to try to view the source (as you can often get around copy-paste blocks by doing that), another little Javascript window popped up to tell me that was forbidden, too.
That made me a little angry
So I took about thirty seconds to look up how to do it, then I went into my Chrome settings and turned off Javascript. I still couldn’t copy and paste directly from the page, but viewing source worked just fine. A quick copy-and-paste of the relevant portion of the page source into Notepad, a little bit of clicking around and backspacing to get rid of the HTML formatting, and I could copy and paste it into the Hangouts window with no problem.
What on earth moves someone to try to lock their words down to the point where you can’t copy and paste them out of an ordinary web page? It’s counterproductive.
Furthermore, it’s ineffective. This isn’t a form of DRM where you need to crack encryption. All you need to do is tell your web browser, “Okay, stop doing what that web site tells you and do what I tell you instead.” Is trying to lock down content like that really doing to do anything more than annoy someone who knows their way around web browsers?
And what kind of contempt does that show for your readers? Copying and pasting a relevant paragraph here and there is one of the primary ways people relate to content now.
If you don’t want your words copied and shared, don’t post them in public on the Internet. If someone is going to copy your entire post and try to pass it off as their own, most of them will be savvy enough to do that whether you use Javascript or not.
And when you get right down to it, this is effectively a parable for digital rights management in general. Yes, stripping the DRM from e-books is a little more complicated and involved, and it relies on someone out there being willing to do the grunt work for you of coding up a way to crack the digital lock. But once that code is out there, anyone willing to Google it and download it can do it, so any e-book you buy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or even check out of your local library can be freed of its fetters just by dragging and dropping it into Calibre.
The same holds true for movies. The DRM on DVDs was defeated long ago by DVDJon. Even the DRM on Blu-rays, which changes every so often, is re-cracked just as soon as it changes
That doesn’t make it legal, and it certainly doesn’t make it morally right to redistribute those cracked copies via peer-to-peer. But illegal isn’t the same as infeasible—and prohibiting a user operation such as copying and pasting or viewing source doesn’t make it infeasible either.
Incidentally, it’s against the law in the US and a number of other places to tell people how to bypass DRM. In theory, it could be illegal to tell people how to turn Javascript off, too—except that the US law only applies to effective protection measures. And while I’m not a lawyer myself, and there’s some debate over how effective DRM is in general, it seems unlikely that anyone could see a “protection measure” you bypass by simply turning Javascript off as being “effective” enough to come in for that kind of legal protection. Some people keep Javascript turned off in their browsers as a matter of course, and they wouldn’t even encounter the pop-ups or the lock out of viewing the source.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Retrotechtacular: Electronic Publishing in the 1930s
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/22/retrotechtacular-electronic-publishing-in-the-1930s/
We are living in the age of citizen journalism and the 24-hour news cycle. Reports about almost anything newsworthy can be had from many perspectives, both vetted and amateur. Just a few decades ago, people relied on daily newspapers, radio, and word of mouth for their news. On the brink of the television age, several radio stations in the United States participated in an experiment to broadcast news over radio waves. But this was no ordinary transmission. At the other end, a new type of receiver printed out news stories, line drawings, and pictures on a long roll of paper.
Radio facsimile newspaper technology was introduced to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair at two different booths. One belonged to an inventor named William Finch, and one to RCA. Finch had recently made a name for himself with his talking newspaper, which embedded audio into a standard newspaper in the form of wavy lines along the edges that were read by a special device.
The Newspaper of the Air:
Early Experiments with Radio Facsimile
http://www.theradiohistorian.org/Radiofax/newspaper_of_the_air1.htm
Tomi Engdahl says:
Noah Kulwin / Re/code:
FTC issues new rules for native advertising on the Internet, which are in line with FTC’s broader stance on deceptive advertising
FTC Issues New Rules for Native Advertising on the Internet
http://recode.net/2015/12/22/ftc-issues-new-rules-to-native-advertising-on-the-internet/
The Federal Trade Commission today unveiled its rules for how native advertising on the Internet has to look, spelling out what qualifies as deceptive and what doesn’t.
The FTC’s “Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements” is a wonky 16-page document that fundamentally affirms what the FTC has already said about deceptive advertising more generally. Here’s the part that best sums up its message:
“Regardless of the medium in which an advertising or promotional message is disseminated, deception occurs when consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances are misled about its nature or source, and such misleading impression is likely to affect their decisions or conduct regarding the advertised product or the advertising.”
Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is an ad that’s dressed up to look like editorial material, but theoretically has a clear designation that distinguishes it from editorial content.
For a number of digital media companies, native advertising has become a vital revenue stream that isn’t tied to the whims of Facebook traffic. Gawker Media pulls in a third of its revenue from native ads, and digital heavyweights like BuzzFeed and Vox Media* have established in-house ad agencies to focus on crafting the stuff.
A number of years ago, before Facebook completely overwhelmed digital media publishers, there was a grand debate about the ethics of native advertising and sponsored content.
FTC Issues Enforcement Policy Statement Addressing “Native” Advertising and Deceptively Formatted Advertisements
FTC Staff Also Releases Business Guidance on Native Advertising
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/12/ftc-issues-enforcement-policy-statement-addressing-native
Tomi Engdahl says:
George Slefo / Ad Age:
Video game and entertainment site IGN says 40% of its audience uses ad-blockers — For IGN, a Tech-Savvy Audience Means a Big Hit From Ad Blockers — IGN’s Ad-Block Rate Balloons to 40% — $137.8B … In an effort to better understand IGN’s audience, VP of Product
For IGN, a Tech-Savvy Audience Means a Big Hit From Ad Blockers
IGN’s Ad-Block Rate Balloons to 40%
http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad-blockers/301767/
In an effort to better understand IGN’s audience, VP of Product Innovation Todd Northcutt installed ad blocking software on his browser for the first time last week. “The biggest difference to me is speed,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me; I know the load times for our pages, but man, a website that loads in 3 seconds versus 10 seconds has a difference of night and day.”
Mr. Northcutt has been watching the website’s audience use ad blocking software at an alarming rate. Last year, about 25% of IGN’s audience were using ad blocking software. Today, that number has ballooned to 40%. He says the video game and entertainment news site suffers more from ad blockers than other publications because of its audience.
“They are definitely tech-savvy,” Mr. Northcutt said. “We’re not the reason that ad block is growing, but we are caught up in that net. I think it is more of a direct reaction as what ads are doing”
The video game and entertainment news site says it attracts about 80 million users each month, with the majority of them falling into the coveted 18-to-34-year-old category. IGN, which is owned by Ziff Davis, has been relentlessly expanding onto as many different devices — from Xbox consoles to Roku devices — to increase its reach.
“We don’t have a lot of data on who an ad blocker is, but my guess is those are some of the most valuable people that advertisers want to reach the most,” Mr. Northcutt said. “How do you appeal to your audience in ways where they are not explicitly telling you ‘I don’t want this?’ I do wonder if they are objecting to display ads and pre rolls ads with ad blocker and if reaching them through another vehicle will be effective.”
About half of IGN’s traffic comes from people on mobile devices, “Mobile ad blocking is our new worry,” she said.
Running ads that require a lot of bandwidth might turn a mobile reader with a limited data plan to ad blocking, Ms. Prough said. To help counter that, IGN will run fewer ads on its home page starting next year.
Publications with different audiences may be less exposed.
Purch has a portfolio that includes Tom’s Hardware, Business News Daily, Space.com and Top 10 Reviews, among others. The media company says it has a combined reach of 100 million monthly users.
The company sees an ad block rate from 9% to 25% domestically across its portfolio, said Mike Kisseberth, chief revenue officer at Purch. “The more technically advanced the user, the more likely they are to block. We definitely see that,” Mr. Kisseberth said. “Our block rates are higher on Tom’s Hardware because those users are more tuned in and are more likely to jump at installing an ad blocker.”
In Europe, ad block rates reach as high as 40% for Purch. “That’s a foreshadowing clue of what’s to come here in the U.S.,” Mr. Kisseberth said. “I think it has been more talked about in Europe and people are taking advantage of it.”
“If you are in this business and you are not using ad blockers you’re crazy,” Mr. Kisseberth said regarding his recent install of ad blocking software on his browser. “It is a better experience and that’s scary.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Davies / Digiday:
Incisive Media becomes second UK publisher to ban ad blocker users — Incisive Media, home to titles including The Inquirer and Risk, could become the second British publisher to ban ad blocker users on some of its websites in the new year. — The publisher, which has a mix of subscription-based …
Incisive Media becomes second UK publisher to ban ad blocker users
http://digiday.com/publishers/incisive-media-become-second-u-k-publisher-ban-ad-blocker-users/
Incisive Media, home to titles including The Inquirer and Risk, could become the second British publisher to ban ad blocker users on some of its websites in the new year.
The publisher, which has a mix of subscription-based and ad-funded magazines, is seeing 40 percent of its traffic affected by visitors with ad blockers enabled, across the titles with more technology-savvy audiences, with other titles such as subscription-based financial brand Risk, seeing 10-15 percent of traffic affected.
Incisive Media’s managing director and former AOP chairman, John Barnes, said publishers must step up and take responsibility for their own part in the ad-blocking debacle, rather than “feel sorry for themselves” and continue to shift blame around.
“Publishers have partly caused the problems by letting their sites become too open and letting too many ads in, which clearly led to us not respecting the user or the content,” he said.
Now it’s tackling the issue at its source, overhauling its digital properties to ensure user experience is at its best, which in turn creates better experiences for advertisers. “Imagine if you walked into Harrods and were hit by a wave of people trying to stuff leaflets in your pockets — it would ruin the experience. It’s exactly the same thing,” he added.
On the other hand, it’s no charity. If visitors want to continue consuming content for free they must be prepared to accept that Incisive must fund them via advertising, according to Barnes. Therefore, in the new year, it will trial a mix of approaches across its titles.
Currently, the publishers to have openly banned website visitors with ad blockers enabled include Axel Springer-owned Bild, City AM and the Washington Post. Just yesterday, Forbes joined their ranks. Barnes praised all approaches, adding that their more aggressive stances had led to visitors switching off their ad blockers. He said it will take an approach “akin” to these titles next year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sean O’Kane / The Verge:
Facebook tests multiple, topic-based feeds on its mobile app in place of one main News Feed, also tests wider rollout of Marketplace feature with its own tab — Facebook is testing multiple news feeds on mobile — Facebook is testing multiple, topic-based feeds on its mobile app in place of one main News Feed.
Facebook is testing multiple news feeds on mobile
And a ‘Marketplace’ section, too
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10683722/facebook-news-feed-customize-interests-update-shopping
Facebook is testing multiple, topic-based feeds on its mobile app in place of one main News Feed. It’s the next step in a process started by the company in October when it began allowing some users to see specialized interest feeds on the web. The new feeds were spotted by Jason Stein on Twitter.
The new mobile design borrows heavily from the way Facebook’s Paper app works, with the app automatically sorting posts from the people and pages you follow into different sections (and, perhaps, customizable ones) or feeds. While the traditional “News Feed” remains, it is supplemented with secondary feeds — like “Style,” “Travel,” and “Headlines” — that are just a swipe away.
“People have told us they’d like new options to see and have conversations about more stories on Facebook around specific topics they’re interested in,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge. “So we are testing feeds for people to view different stories from people and Pages based on topic areas.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
A conversation about Facebook’s responsibility, and self-interest, in distributing news to keep people well-informed — Why is the media so afraid of Facebook? — This year, in lieu of the traditional Best Of Lists, we thought it would be fun to throw our editors and writers into a draft together and have a conversation.
Why is the media so afraid of Facebook?
It’s all going to be okay, unless it isn’t
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10662356/facebook-instant-articles-future-of-media-2016
Casey Newton: By almost any measure, Facebook had an impressive year. Its revenue was up more than 40 percent in the last quarter, its stock price is a third higher than it was a year ago, and it dominates our attention on mobile and desktop devices. More than a billion people are now using Facebook every day. And even as it dominates the present, it’s made some prescient-looking bets on the future — particularly on messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger) and Oculus (virtual reality).
Because of its sheer size, Facebook makes lots of people nervous — its new focus on events, for example, ought to send a shiver down the spine of Eventbrite. But no one was more nervous about Facebook in 2015 than the media, which relies on it heavily for traffic and audience growth. Most publications saw their traffic referrals from Facebook decline this year. At the same time, Facebook introduced its own fast-loading “instant articles” format — which offered publishers the promise of more traffic, in exchange for less control over how their pages look.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Oremus / Slate:
Facebook’s News Feed team on algorithms, relevancy scores, and the importance of giving users more control over their feeds
Who Controls Your Facebook Feed
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.single.html
Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action. It scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. For the average Facebook user, that’s more than 1,500 posts. If you have several hundred friends, it could be as many as 10,000. Then, according to a closely guarded and constantly shifting formula, Facebook’s news feed algorithm ranks them all, in what it believes to be the precise order of how likely you are to find each post worthwhile. Most users will only ever see the top few hundred.
No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you. And yet the results of this automated ranking process shape the social lives and reading habits of more than 1 billion daily active users—one-fifth of the world’s adult population. The algorithm’s viral power has turned the media industry upside down, propelling startups like BuzzFeed and Vox to national prominence while 100-year-old newspapers wither and die. It fueled the stratospheric rise of billion-dollar companies like Zynga and LivingSocial—only to suck the helium from them a year or two later with a few adjustments to its code, leaving behind empty-pocketed investors and laid-off workers.
And yet, for all its power, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is surprisingly inelegant, maddeningly mercurial, and stubbornly opaque. It remains as likely as not to serve us posts we find trivial, irritating, misleading, or just plain boring. And Facebook knows it. Over the past several months, the social network has been running a test in which it shows some users the top post in their news feed alongside one other, lower-ranked post, asking them to pick the one they’d prefer to read. The result? The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges, declining to get more specific. When they don’t match up, the company says, that points to “an area for improvement.”
A panel of news feed testers has become Facebook’s equivalent of the Nielsen family.
A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
ProPublica becomes first major news site on the dark web, running as a hidden service on the Tor network, offering stronger privacy than SSL to readers
ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/propublica-launches-the-dark-webs-first-major-news-site/
The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
“Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,” says Mike Tigas, ProPublica’s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. “We don’t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tigas first began considering launching a hidden service last year when the news site was working on a report about Chinese online censorship and wanted to make sure the reporting was itself safe to visit for Chinese readers.
Source: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/propublica-launches-the-dark-webs-first-major-news-site/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
German Publishers Still Upset That Google Sends Them Traffic Without Paying Them Too; File Lawsuit
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160106/11082433256/german-publishers-still-upset-that-google-sends-them-traffic-without-paying-them-too-file-lawsuit.shtml
Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That’s the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new “ancillary copyright” right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.
Let me repeat that for you, in case you missed it: the publishers insisted that Google’s News search was somehow illegal and taking money away from them, and thus they demanded money from Google. When Google responded, instead, by removing the snippets providing summaries to their stories, the publishers claimed it was unfair and blackmail. In short, not only do these German publishers want Google to pay them to send them traffic, they want such payments and traffic to be mandatory.
However, with Google removing the snippets, VG Media granted a “free” license to Google just to get the snippets back into Google News — even though Google didn’t need such a license.
If you thought the situation was over, you underestimated the short-sightedness of VG Media and the German publishers. They’ve now apparently filed a lawsuit against Google over all this, taking the issue into court. Again: this is all because Google is sending their websites traffic… for free.
Meanwhile, these geniuses at the German publishers might want to actually play out this game strategy a little further. Should they actually win the case, they need to look no further than Spain to see what might happen. Remember, Spain passed a ridiculous law that not only put such a tax on aggregators but made it mandatory. It was clearly nothing more than a “Google tax” for Spanish publishers. Google’s response? It pulled out the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain.
So even if VG Media and the German publishers “win” this lawsuit, there’s a decent chance that they still end up shooting themselves in their collective foot, by pushing away one of the most popular news aggregators that drives a tremendous amount of traffic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What We Can Do with Ad Blocking’s Leverage
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-we-can-do-ad-blockings-leverage
“Never waste a crisis,” Rahm Emanuel is said to have said. And publishers — including Linux Journal — have one now. According to PageFair and Adobe, the number of people blocking ads on their browsers has passed 200 million, worldwide, increasing annually by 42% in the U.S. and 82% in the U.K. Most of the blockers also block tracking, which is a main way that ads are aimed at readers through online publishers.
It’s interesting to see how closely the rise in ad blocking follows the rise in discussion of surveillance-fed advertising.
2005 — ad tag, mobile engagement
2006 — ad-tech, search analytics
2007 — behavioral targeting, retargeting, third party data, SEM tools, content analytics, microtargeting, do not track
2008 — deal id, ad fraud, social marketing management
2009 — real time message
2010 — demand side platform, cross-device, advertising beacon, social ad network, predictive marketing
2011 — in-stream, real time bidding, creative optimization, search retargeting
2012 — clickstream data, data management platform, mobile reengagement, native advertising, adblock war
2013 — programmatic marketing, programmatic advertising, subscription push, agency trading desk, content marketing platform
2014 — supply side platform, data aggregators
2015 — cross device tracking
By blocking ads and tracking, users are marking down the value of digital advertising to that of spam while also giving themselves a great deal of leverage, both individually and collectively.
How will they use that leverage? I see two ways: 1) encouraging adverting with high signal value; and 2) signaling their own intentions, which will be far more valuable than adtech’s expensive guesswork could ever be.
The highest signal value is in old-fashioned brand advertising. This is the uncomplicated kind that sustained all of commercial publishing and broadcasting for centuries, never tracked anybody, and still comprises most of the world’s advertising (including your monthly Linux Journal). At worst it’s annoying and wasteful; at best it’s useful, interesting and a form of art. (Seen any beautiful adtech lately? Or ever?),
Yet lots of pipe dreams do come true. Back in the ’80s, when I worked with Sun Microsystems and other competing UNIX makers, I despaired that there would ever be a free (as in freedom) *nix in the world. Too many giant tech companies were rolling their own, while weirdly trying to reconcile all of them to AT&T’s SVR4 (System 5, Release 4). Then Linux happened. And the Web. And universal email, file transfer and the rest of it. Can we do it for intentcasting?
Don’t tell me. Just point to whatever work is happening.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adam Gaffin / Universal Hub:
Publishing and tech consulting firm IDG, which publishes Macworld, Computerworld, and PCWorld, retains Goldman Sachs to prepare for sale
Global publishing and consulting company in Framingham could be up for sale
http://www.universalhub.com/2016/global-publishing-and-consulting-company
Tomi Engdahl says:
You say advertising, I say block that malware
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/
Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers then immediately served them pop-under malware.
The real reason online advertising is doomed and adblockers thrive? Its malware epidemic is unacknowledged, and out of control.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.
One researcher commented on Twitter that the situation was “ironic” — and while it’s certainly another variant of hackenfreude, ironic isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what happened.
That’s because this situation spotlights what happened in 2015 to billions — yep, billions — of people who were victims of virus-infected ads which were spread via ad networks like germs from a sneeze across the world’s most popular websites.
Less than a month ago, a bogus banner ad was found serving malvertising to visitors of video site DailyMotion. After discovering it, security company Malwarebytes contacted the online ad platform the bad ad was coming through, Atomx. The company blamed a “rogue” advertiser on the WWPromoter network.
It was estimated the adware broadcast through DailyMotion put 128 million people at risk. To be specific, it was from the notorious malware family called “Angler Exploit Kit.” Remember this name, because I’m pretty sure we’re going to be getting to know it a whole lot better in 2016.
Last August, Angler struck MSN.com with — you guessed it — another drive-by malvertising campaign. It was the same campaign that had infected Yahoo visitors back in July (an estimated 6.9 billion visits per month, it’s considered the biggest malvertising attack so far).
It’s crazy to consider what a perfect marriage this is, between the advertisers and the criminals pushing the exploit kits. They have a lot in common.
Both try to trick us into giving them something we don’t want to.
It actually makes business sense to think about malware attacks like an advertiser. You want to deliver your infection to, and scrape those dollars from, every little reader out there. You need a targeted delivery system, with the widest distribution, and as many clueless middlemen as possible.
It’s easy to want to blame Reader’s Digest, or Yahoo, or Forbes, or Daily Mail, or any of these sites for screwing viewers by serving them malicious ads and not telling them, or not helping them with the cleanup afterward. And it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’ve compelled us to turn off our ad blockers to simply see what brought us to their site.
But the problem is coming through them, from the ad networks themselves.
So, to my friend on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list — a malware researcher, which I’ll concede is actually ironic — I’m sorry I won’t be seeing your time in that particular spotlight.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Jeong / Motherboard:
From impersonation and spammers to Gamergate: how Twitter’s rules evolved from the tension between its free-speech ethos and business reality
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules
The first Twitter Rules were fairly slim: 568 words, divided up under the headings of Impersonation, Privacy, Violence and Threats, Copyright, Unlawful Use, Serial Accounts, Name Squatting, Malware/Phishing, Spam, and Pornography.
As of January 2016, the Rules are—at 1,334 words—over twice as long, and now contain sections barring trademark infringement, hate speech, and harassment.
The evolution of the Rules was gradual, with incremental changes introduced in response to legal threats or big news stories. Twitter Verified Accounts were introduced in response to a trademark lawsuit over a fake account in 2009, and many current anti-harassment policies came into place after increasing media coverage of Gamergate. As of this year, the Rules now reflect a ban on hate speech.
The gradual changes in the Twitter Rules reflect a story about Twitter, and shine light on the story that Twitter has tried to tell about itself. The latest changes in the Rules represent a significant rewriting of both the Rules and of the mythology that Twitter projects about itself.
2016: The End of the Free Speech Party (+178 words)
On December 29, 2015, Twitter unveiled its new Rules. One hundred and seventy-eight words were added, but nothing in the new rules were technically new policies—as described above, the policy changes had already been rolled out elsewhere and were being actively enforced. Every major change—the bans on hate speech, promotion of terrorism, incitement of harassment, and revenge porn—had already been in place for months. But they were at last being laid out in the Rules, which had been largely unchanged for years.
The old preamble had focused on giving users both rights and responsibilities. It described a generally hands-off policy, even ending with a promise not to “censor user content, except in limited circumstances described below.”
The new preamble doesn’t mention censorship, and it doesn’t mention users’ responsibility for their own tweets.
The newest reiteration of the Rules isn’t radical for introducing new policies, since it doesn’t.
The new Rules are radical because they rewrite Twitter’s story of what it is and what it stands for. The old Twitter fetishized anti-censorship; the new Twitter puts user safety first. While Twitter still pays lip service to “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly,” it’s a far cry from the “free speech wing of the free speech party” of 2012.
“Striking the right balance” is one way to describe the tightrope that Twitter is walking on. Even while insisting that free expression is an ideological priority, the company has backed away from the full-throated defense of free speech.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ginny Marvin / Marketing Land:
Google offers more details on ads in AMP, which is set to launch in search early February with more than 20 ad tech vendors including AOL, AdSense, and OutBrain
Google Offers More Details On Ads In AMP, Set To Launch In Search Next Month
http://marketingland.com/google-offers-more-details-on-ads-in-amp-set-to-launch-in-search-next-month-160992
With more than 20 ad tech vendors joining the initiative, publishers should be able to support most ad serving scenarios in AMP pages at launch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Reaches 1.59 Billion Users And Beats Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/facebook-earnings-q4-2015/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_8833995700530840123#.ojwuxm:0hzp
By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That’s up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue growth is stunning, and it’s up 51% vs Q4 last year.
Facebook’s monthly user count grew a bit slower at 2.58% quarter over quarter from Q3’s extremely strong 4.02% growth. It shows Facebook is hitting saturation in some markets but still has room to grow in many developing countries.
Though not as flashy as the big monthly number, daily user count is a better way to chart Facebook’s progress. Facebook’s DAU hit 1.04 billion compared to 1.01 billion in Q3, up 2.97%. Facebook’s DAU to MAU ratio, or stickyness, held firm at 65%. That means users aren’t visiting less even as the service ages.
Mobile now makes up a massive 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, up from 78% in Q3. $5.63 billion of its total revenue came from advertising, overshadowing Facebook’s old payments business. Mobile-only users now number 827 million, up a swift 13.2% from 723 million last quarter. That’s a testament to Facebook growth in the developing world that largely skipped the full-sized computer age.
Update: Mark Zuckerberg also released a slew of new stats during the Q4 Earnings call:
100 million hours of video watched per day
1 billion users on Groups
80 million users on Facebook Lite
500 million users on Events
123 million events created in 2015
50 million small and medium sized business on Pages
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Digital assistant bots like Siri, Google Now, and Alexa undermine the open internet by only indexing select apps
The internet bundle is already here
…and it’s a bot
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10858728/internet-bundle-siri-alexa-google-now-cortana-bots
For the past six years or so, this image that (as best I can tell) was created by Reddit user quink has been making the rounds as the “nightmare scenario” if net neutrality dies. It’s the bundle: your favorite websites tiered up into different packages, forcing you to pay different rates just to access different sites. A significant thread through the net neutrality debate was making sure ISPs (read: cable companies) didn’t turn the free and open internet into the thing those ISPs actually want, cable packages.
We had to stop the bundle.
We have, thus far, been mostly successful in stopping it. We’ve been less successful in stopping the inverse-yet-also-bad idea of zero-rating, thanks to companies like T-Mobile and Facebook offering access to certain internet sites and services for free. That battle is more complicated, because saving people money is as well-liked as making them pay extra or blocking access is well-hated.
In these battles, people who care about keeping the internet from turning into cable have been assisted by companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and even Facebook. These companies built their businesses on the back of the internet and helped craft the tools we use to freely surf (remember web surfing?) across the internet.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook have defended net neutrality and fought the bundle. But, deep inside the software that powers their empires, they’re each creating a different kind of bundle.
The bundle is already here, it came from places we haven’t been watching closely enough, and it has many names. There’s more than enough doomsaying about the issues related to Instant Articles, Internet.org, and Binge On. Instead, I’d like to take a minute to doomsay what could become the other opponents to the kind of free, transparent, and open internet we all want: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Facebook M, and Google Now.
These intelligent assistants are great. I use them every day and expect I will continue to use them for, well, ever. But there’s a problem that’s built into them: they only seem to work with certain parts of the web and — here’s the real rub — certain apps.
http://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png
Tomi Engdahl says:
It killed Safe Harbor. Will Europe’s highest court now kill off hyperlinks?
Intriguing legal case over leaked Playboy pics may impact web
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/04/eu_highest_court_may_kill_off_hyperlinks/
The European Court of Justice heard arguments in a case Wednesday that may have internet-wide consequences, since it considers the legal nature of hyperlinks.
The continent’s highest court, which recently annulled the Safe Harbor agreement that covered transatlantic data flows, is now considering whether people should have to consider whether material is infringing copyright before posting a hyperlink to it.
It will also decide whether there are effectively two types of hyperlink: one that points to easily findable public resources (like news articles) and one that points to specific files or locations that would not be easily discoverable, e.g., zip files held on obscure servers.
Fairly obviously, the implications are huge.
The questions
There are three questions in front of the ECJ, two of them broken out into multiple parts.
The main point of interest is what the phrase “communication to the public” means in the context of the internet era. This is the legal aspect that the ECJ previous dug into in another famous case over hyperlinks, when a journalist argued that a company that provided links to articles had violated his copyright by not asking permission.
The ECJ decided that since the article was posted publicly, the link was not a “communication to the public” – a right that belongs to the copyright holder – because it had already been communicated by being posted on a newspaper site.
The question the ECJ now has to consider is effectively: ok, what if the information being linked to was not communicated to the public? What if it was posted without permission and then someone else linked to it? Does that equate to a “communication to the public”?
The subsequent questions dig into the questions that sprout from this main one: does it matter if the material has never been posted before? Does it matter if the person posting the hyperlink is aware or not aware that the material is in fact infringing copyright? And then: does it matter if the link is to an obscure part of the internet or to something readily and easily findable?
Depending on what the court decides, it could impact the entire world wide web. It would almost certainly have huge implications for search engines like Google, but it would also impact Facebook and Twitter, depending on what their users link to. It would also have an impact on any website that links to websites like Cryptome or Wikileaks.
http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=164772&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=435371
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Celebrates Turning 12 Today
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/04/1746201/facebook-celebrates-turning-12-today
12 years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, and since then the site has grown at a nearly unbelievable pace. Now, with about 1.6 billion monthly active users, Facebook makes an average of $3.73 in revenue per user worldwide. And as the company continues to grow, engagement is only getting higher. According to an analysis by CNBC, users spend an aggregate of 10.5 billion minutes per day on the social media platform — that’s around $3.5 trillion in squandered productivity, by their estimate.
Facebook turns 12 — trillions in time wasted
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/04/facebook-turns-12–trillions-in-time-wasted.html
Twelve years ago Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with a simple dream: to have everyone spending as much time as possible clicking around on his website. Today, the social network site’s users are closing in on $3.5 trillion in squandered productivity.
The company has about 1.6 billion monthly active users, more than the population of any single country on earth. And those users are valuable — Facebook makes an average of $3.73 in revenue per user worldwide (and much more for Americans), according to quarterly results reported last week. By market cap, each of those users is worth more than $200 in valuation.
Facebook’s users spend an aggregate of 10.5 billion minutes per day on the platform (excluding mobile), according to the company’s 2012 IPO filings. And engagement — based on the number of monthly users who visit the site daily — is even higher today.
Assuming that users spend about the same amount of time today, that means people all over the world have spent a collective 55 million years on Facebook since the beginning of 2009.
Twenty minutes a day is a lot of time — well more than a year over the course of the average life span.
If users spent just that time working for minimum wage instead of liking and poking each other, each would pull in about $880 a year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg Business:
Wired to start offering ad-free version of its website for $3.99 a month from Feb 16, will block visitors using ad blockers
Wired Is Launching an Ad-Free Website to Appease Ad Blockers
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-08/wired-is-launching-an-ad-free-website-to-appease-ad-blockers
Readers can pay $3.99 for a four-week subscription to a version of its site without advertising.
More than 1 in 5 people who visit Wired Magazine’s website use ad-blocking software. Starting in the next few weeks, the magazine will give those readers a choice: stop blocking ads, pay to look at a version of the site that is unsullied by advertisements, or go away. It’s the kind of move that was widely predicted last fall after Apple allowed ad-blocking in the new version of its mobile software, but most publishers have shied away from it so far.
Wired plans to charge $3.99 for four weeks of ad-free access to its website. In many places where ads appear, the site will simply feature more articles, said Mark McClusky, the magazine’s head of product and business development. The portion of his readership that uses ad blockers are likely to be receptive to a discussion about their responsibility to support the businesses they rely on for information online, McClusky said.
The magazine’s editors are explaining the move in a note to readers:
“At WIRED, we believe that change is good. Over the past 23 years, we’ve pushed the boundaries of media, from our print magazine to launching the first publishing website. We even invented the banner ad. We’re going to continue to experiment to find new ways to bring you the stories you love and to build a healthy business that supports the storytelling. We hope you’ll join us on this journey. We’d really appreciate it.”
This idea didn’t originate with Wired. Many publishers have been flirting with a subscribe-or-see-ads model. Google has even offered a way for websites to accept donations in exchange for ad-free experiences, although it hasn’t gotten much uptake. So far, though, the fear of alienating readers has outweighed the fear of losing revenue to ad blockers.