The signs point to an answer that’s not encouraging. Independent publications, large and small, are struggling or shuttering. Legacy publications, too, are contracting. There are a few standout successes, and there’s still a path for the would-be journalistic entrepreneur – but that path is narrowing.

Examples of the struggles abound. The Awl, beloved by a passionate core audience for what its editor called its “uncompromising” and “intelligent” take on the news, is dead. DNAInfo and Gothamist, two digital-first pillars of independent local news, were shuttered late last year after their staffs unionized because, said CEO Joe Rickets, they were not financially sustainable.

Larger independents are showing strains, as well. BuzzFeed is reportedly struggling with revenues, Mashable was acquired at a “fire sale” price. Gawker, that icon of independent, snarky and profitable journalism, was, as previously noted here, decimated by a lawsuit financed by deep pocketed investor Peter Thiel. Some of Gawker Media’s blogs are now owned by Univision.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, a political blog he formed in 2000, confirmed what I’ve heard for months from publishers looking for outside investment: It’s a lot tighter than a few years ago. “Investors realize they were investing in a mirage and don’t want to invest any more,” Marshall wrote in a column titled: “There’s A Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It.”

You could be correct in thinking it’s the end of an era: that independent, open-ended, free-wheeling, blogging style journalism that was once a staple of the web is coming to an end; that the best end game for independents, from Buzzfeed on down, is, like Mashable, try to be acquired, as Business Insider succeeded in doing after years of up-and-down profitability, and Complex Media did via Verizon and Hearst.

Dreams that the internet would herald a new era of opportunity for journalists and those aspiring to the profession may be withering as well. Even at self-sustaining independent news organizations, journalists feel they need to unionize to ensure work practices and compensation under which they can live. After months of negotiation and an hour-long “Slack strike”, the management of Vox Media in January recognized the staff’s right to form a union. CEO Jim Bankoff wrote that hiring will slow in 2018 and that some projects will be scaled back. At Vice, a majority of the content creators unionized last fall.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all dwarf what were once the most powerful mainstream media organizations (Recode image edited by DCN CEO Jason Kint, from his Twitter feed)

The HuffingtonPost, once a trend setter and now part of Verizon, has shut down its blogger network of about 100,000 contributors. There are, editor in chief Lydia Polgreen wrote, too many voices on the Internet.

Meanwhile, it may be harder than ever for newcomers to break through. Facebook has choked the traffic spigot with Newsfeed algorithm changes, so it may be back to the days of milking Google’s search algorithm for what amounts to transient, disloyal visitors. With net neutrality in abeyance, smaller entrants may have fewer means to compete for attention from the people they’re trying to reach.

Legacy Leaders News Organizations Also Suffering

At many of the more mainstream legacy news organizations, the outlook is also discouraging. In that sector, the pace of layoffs and downsizing “seems to be picking up speed,” the Columbia Journalism Review said on Feb. 1.

Top management at the LA Times has, again, been reshuffled. Digital First Media, parent of multiple local newspapers such as the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Daily News, expects “significant layoffs” in coming months, as does The Oregonian.

CJR reports that Foreign Policy magazine is shutting its foreign bureaux (yes, you read that correctly), and that the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia has filed for Chapter 11.

As in decades past, it’s once again the financially sound, entrenched players today, who have the upper hand, though the names changed. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all dwarf Disney, Time Warner and any U.S. newspaper.

There Are Successes — of a Type

You could at this point be forgiven for sensing a certain amount of dissonance. If you’re reading this, after all, you’re reading a column from a financially self-sustaining, independent news organization.

And you may enjoy favorite news and opinion blogs, certain writers on Medium, posts from your favorite writers on your favorite platforms. There’s plenty of news and information to consume, from both the mainstream and independent outlets.

Therein lies the rub. It is still possible for independent journalists and news organizations to make a go of it, and perhaps become financially self-sustaining.

A very few — the New York Times comes to mind —  have the standing and resources to fight giant legal cases, sustain losses for years, bolster subscriptions and turn to profitability even after years of losses. The venerable Washington Post seems to have turned to profitability after Jeff Bezos used a fraction of his billions to buy it and applied his acumen to give it new life.

Others, like the publication you’re currently reading, are much more niche, and much smaller. Some niche players, notably at the Verticals Collective, a group of subject-focused media publishers with which I’m affiliated, are financially self-sustaining and growing. Usually, they’re in the range of a handful to dozens of employees, and cover particular niches particularly well, such as ad tech, lawyer gossip, the business of senior living, a fashion niche, travel, food, and so on.

New York continues to have a vibrant local blogosphere (Sergi Reboredo/VW PICS/UIG via Getty Images)

Some other publishers — there are a few I’m aware of but confidentiality agreements prevent me from saying which — make money, but not enough to fully support the person or people working on them.

Among them is a political newsletter that has a half-dozen volunteers working for it. The owner makes a living with a day job, managing finance for not-for-profits. Another publisher earns five figures in a travel niche, but consults and does web work to help make ends meet. Yet another gives people information on coupons, and after good growth in the first year is now looking for a job because he seems to have reached the limit of what Google will give him in traffic or ad revenue. Growth has stalled, as so often seems to be the case today.

Other people I know with financially successful text-first publications run them purely for profit and are less concerned with journalistic quality than with traffic and serving ads. They spend their time on coding, SEO, and on optimizing for ad revenue. It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game, in which they sometimes shutter one site that’s not growing and open another, simply to get growth, serve more ads, and maintain a livable income.

Writing And Opinions Can Thrive (But Will There Be Money?)

Still, there’s nothing keeping anyone from blogging, writing, covering a neighborhood or their passion or politics — especially if they don’t need to earn a living from their efforts.

The region I live in features dozens of blogs and websites covering local scenes, some boisterous, others boosterish, and some downright grumpy about how New York City is evolving. It’s obvious that many of them are run on a frayed shoestring, if they can even be said to be “run” at all. Commitment to a cause or a community may mean that it’s not necessary to earn a living from the journalism produced.

As Polgreen wrote, a multiplicity of ideas does still reign, and there’s no reason someone can’t produce any media they want — at least as long as they don’t come up against someone with much deeper pockets who wants to sue them out of existence.

The solo blogger or small team can still make a go of it, if they stay as focused on the business aspects as the editorial mission. They must learn to turn the financial knobs and levers to reach the right combination of revenue types — from advertising, subscription and memberships, to events, eCommerce, and perhaps grants from foundations, or support from those who are ideologically or commercially aligned.

They need to keep the end game in sight, whether it’s to get acquired by one of those looking for acquisitions, or to achieve financial self-sustainability. Those with the drive and the moxie can still get something going, and create a way to become self-supporting over time.

An award-winning former managing editor at ABC News Digital and an MBA, Dorian Benkoil handled marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site. He is COO at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on media-tech, ad-tech and finance. He tweets at @dbenk and you can find him on LinkedIn.

The post Another One Bites the Dust: Can Independent Web Journalism Survive? appeared first on MediaShift.

Click the image to read our entire series.

It’s time to ignore the warning that past results are no guarantee of future success, stick a wet finger into the cold winter wind and make some 2018 predictions. (Here my predictions for 2017, if you’d like to evaluate my previous performance.)

This year, I’m predicting more uptake of AI and the blockchain for media, some business turmoil, and more battles with the duopoly (need we say who that is?).

AI Gets Real-er

In late 2017, it seemed that every media conference had a session about artificial intelligence, how it would boost media’s revenues, trustworthiness, curation and maybe even editorial capabilities.

Ad-tech companies are leading the way already, they say, employing artificial intelligence and machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, natural language processing and other related technologies.

In 2017, Google acquired at least two AI startups. Amazon and Microsoft, too, revealed major AI initiatives. Meanwhile, Facebook’s head of AI Research, Sarah Bird, lectured a NY Tech Meetup gathering last fall on ways her team was making AI easier for the platform’s less technically inclined “customers” to employ.

AI, she said, was being used to help advertisers earn more revenue, to place more relevant ads, and to improve people’s news feeds by better serving them the content they want. Facebook, she said, is working with “algorithms that can sense the world and automatically adapt.”

Others are experimenting with AI to help curate media, predict upcoming hot topics, inspect video and photos for objectionable content.

Some are using AI to help mimic human interaction in chatbots and apps, including Betaworks, according to CEO John Borthwick.

“A startup we’ve backed called Hugging Face is an app designed for kids and teens who want to have an experience with pet AI,” Borthwick said at a NYC Media Lab gathering. “People know they’re talking to a machine but they’re having a social companion-like experience.”

Artificial intelligence: a pupil attends a lesson in robotics at the IT Lyceum in Kazan, Russia (Photo by Yegor AleyevTASS via Getty Images)

Blockchain Moves Into Media

The number of explanatory articles on blockchain — such as “Four Ways Blockchain Will Transform Marketing and Advertising” (Forbes) or “27 Ways Marketers Can Use Blockchain” (AdAge, by my friend David Berkowitz) — that appeared last year are a sure sign we’ll be seeing more of it.

Blockchain can be used to increase the level of trust in an advertising supply chain currently rife with fraud. A secure, blockchain-generated code exchanged between ad buyer and publisher can give assurance that an ad is appearing as promised on the page said to be receiving it. It can also be used to help confirm users’ identities, share data with them and help verify that reported metrics bear a semblance to reality.

“Initial areas of scope are fraud, measurement, discrepancy reconciliation for billing purposes, financial transactions, and validation of advertising resources and assets,” Richard Bush, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NYIAX, a media contract exchange system being developed in partnership with NASDAQ, wrote for the IAB, an industry trade group.

“By 2019, I think that at least 20 percent of payments by [advertising] agencies are going to be stored in some sort of encrypted ledger, a.k.a. blockchain,” says Kyle Csik, managing partner at GroupM, the world’s largest media buying company (and, full disclosure, a Teeming Media client).

Blockchain can be used for micropayments, to verify subscriptions, to help verify identities (you listening Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, et al?) — anything that requires verification that relies on an unbreakable, encrypted network.

A caveat: when it comes to blockchain and AI, it’s important to remember that the hype machines will be in full swing. Some folks will walk the walk, but others will be just talking. Keep your thinking cap on.

Business Realignments

2017 saw some important business realignments, and in 2018 we’ll see more of the same, with media hunting for revenue models that can sustain their operations, and mergers and acquisitions as the more solvent players look to pick up skills and capabilities.

In the hunt for revenue, media companies will continue to try subscription models. They’ll play with new ad models, too. Vox and Buzzfeed took on programmatic advertising in 2017, after eschewing the technology for years. Buzzfeed also moved away from sponsored content, laying off about 100 people who helped produce it.

Layoffs also came to a “handful” of people at Complex and still more at mic.com, MTV, Fox Sports and Mashable. Former Gawker Media employees are taking a stab at buying their former flagship, gawker.com, but with 11 days to go, the crowdfunding initiative had raised less than $85,000 of the $500,000 goal.

We can expect more acquisitions. Lower tax rates will mean more cash for companies — including the duopoly, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — that will have the funds to grow, and gain technologies and expertise through acquisition, as did Verizon, Capitol Broadcasting, Time Warner and Tribune Media in 2017.

Less “Pivoting to Video”

Many of the companies who laid off staff cited a “pivot to video” as a key reason. They want to capture the almighty video advertising dollar, which is many multiples above what display ads in typical text-based web pages can command.

But with Buzzfeed reconfiguring, Mashable acquired by Ziff Davis at a price well below previously reported valuations, and more video from more publishers coming on line (hence driving down prices), what had been a gold rush should return to a more rational effort to give audiences more of what they want, rather that what advertisers demand.

Ford CEO Mark Fields (R) and Greg Hart, Ford’s vice president for Amazon Echo and Alexa Voice Services, speak at a press conference on January 5, 2016. (ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

More Voice Applications

It’s been a big year for Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home lines of voice-activated devices. Amazon — which controls more than 70 percent of the market — claimed that “tens of millions” of devices were sold over Christmas, and Amazon Alexa was reported as the most downloaded app on Christmas Day.

Media companies have been incorporating their programing into both devices. Say “Play NPR,” for example, and either device will play a nearby public radio station, or “Play The Daily Show” to hear a clip of host Trevor Noah.

EMarketer predicts 35.6 million Americans will have used voice activated devices in 2017, up 129 percent over the previous year.

The Duopoly

Google and Facebook control the digital advertising landscape.

They will continue to do so. Efforts to make a dent will continue.

(I explored the issue at some length in last year’s column.)

The Rich and Powerful Affecting Freedom of Speech

As a former editor, reporter and foreign correspondent with friends and colleagues who have literally died on the job, I’m afraid we’ll see further attacks on reporting that those in power don’t like.

Gawker was brought to bankruptcy by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel’s support of a Hulk Hogan lawsuit against them.

Shiva Ayyadurai promised to appeal a judge’s ruling that he couldn’t sue TechDirt for saying he didn’t invent email.

Keeper Security filed a suit against Ars Technica and its reporter Dan Goodin, who wrote about a reported security flaw in Keeper’s software.

Expect more such SLAPP actions.

I am afraid we might also see the Trump administration or its supporters move to punish journalists who create what the president terms “fake news” — not just continued Twitter attacks and moves against leakers, but rather legal actions, either civil or criminal.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Don’t hold your breath.

An award-winning former managing editor at ABC News Digital and an MBA, Dorian Benkoil handled marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site. He is COO at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on media-tech, ad-tech and finance. He tweets at @dbenk and you can find him on LinkedIn.

The post What’s Ahead for Media in 2018: AI, Blockchain and Billionaires vs. Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

Compare Amazon with Netflix, for example. Based purely on success from its programming, Netflix is far ahead. Its subscribers account for a huge share of internet traffic in North America. It continues to increase viewership and membership, piling on hit shows and movies, generating great press and acquiring others’ popular movies and shows. Its original productions such as “House of Cards,” “Stranger Things,” “Orange is the New Black,” “Chelsea Lately,” and the documentary “Thirteen” have received far more accolades and awards than Amazon has. The conundrum for Netflix, though, is that its core business is media. It pays a hefty amount to produce and license movies and shows, and rely on that content to attract and hold members, generate revenue and fund operations. It owes lenders more than $20 billion and has borrowed to produce and acquire shows and movies, and is not generating enough cash to cover that debt.

By contrast, for Amazon the media business is a sideline. As an e-commerce and web services powerhouse, Amazon can subsidize its media operations. Amazon Prime members, who gain access to Amazon’s selection of movies and shows, also spend thousands of dollars per year through Amazon, averaging more than two times as much commerce as non-Prime members. Amazon makes still more cash by selling its own devices (Kindle readers and tablets, the voice-activated Echo line, among them) and multiple private-label fashion, food, health and electronics products that compete with vendors who sell through Amazon.

Amazon offers Prime membership at roughly the same price Netflix charges for equivalent access while also including free two-day shipping, a huge music library, special eCommerce deals, eBook lending and other enticements. As a bookseller, of course, Amazon is king.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget Amazon’s real 800-pound gorilla: Amazon Web Services (AWS). The division last year lifted Amazon’s profit to a record, accounting for more than 71 percent of the company’s total operating income while bringing in only eight percent of revenue. Web services are eminently scalable and thus can increase profit margins by adding servers and bandwidth; there’s no need for all those costly writers, actors, directors and producers required to make every movie and show.

With AWS, Amazon can pretty much predict profit margins before turning on whatever lights the humans working in their server farms might need. Not even the most creative Hollywood accountant can tell you how much a TV show or movie will make. “Amazon has come to depend on AWS to fuel the rest of its sprawling business and feed its global ambitions,” Geekwire’s Taylor Soper wrote earlier this year. Which means Amazon probably can afford to hire the likes of “Transparent” star Jeffrey Tambor because of all the cash it has on hand thanks to AWS. You could say the same for how it can afford the rights to so much music, so many TV shows and the millions it’s spending for rights to stream elite sports. All that cash also helps Amazon Prime gain headway with its own blockbusters and also through judicious licensing of shows such as “Veep,” “The Sopranos” and “Orphan Black” from producers and distributors such as Showtime, HBO and BBC.

Netflix and subscription streaming video competitors such as Sling TV, YouTube Red and Hulu are media businesses. Amazon is a platform. Beyond streamed media, it also sells shows and movies on demand, much as Apple does. Its offers subscriptions to services like Showtime, HBO and Sling, which consumers can then watch through Amazon not only on computers and smartphones but also on TVs made “smart” via the inexpensive Amazon Firestick. Amazon offers still more video — everything from exercise and recipe videos to clips from older PBS shows — through its Video Direct program, which lures publishers by offering them a cut of revenue earned from subscriptions, sales or advertising.

Amazon Serves Ads, Too!

Amazon is also fast-rising as an advertising technology and services vendor. It generated $1.4 billion in ad revenue last year, according to Barclays, and eMarketer predicts Amazon will be the third-largest digital advertising provider by 2019, after Google and Facebook. It also has a robust advertising exchange, is offering a “header bidding” programmatic advertising optimization solution to publishers, and provides search advertising through its A9 division. It can place ads on publishers’ pages and also have tons of advertising inventory on Amazon.com. Amazon is likely looking into advertising for various Alexa audio apps on the category-leading Echo line, as well.

The Amazon Echo is the market leader in voice-activated assistants.

Then there’s the data. Even when Amazon isn’t technically “advertising,” its algorithms are predicting and proffering items it knows we might want. Facebook and Google dwarf Amazon in ad dollars, but Amazon can continually make its ads more perfectly targeted by knowing not just what interests consumers have shown but also what they actually buy, watch, read and listen to. That’s a wealth of data whose worth builds over time as more of it is collected, compiled and cross-referenced. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (and not Amazon), is yet one more high-impact playground in which to create content, gather data, show ads, get information and create influence — commercial and otherwise.

The Long Media Game

Put it all together and you can picture a budding powerhouse against which few media companies could hope to compete. Unless, of course, those companies are Google and Facebook, which claim they’re not media companies even as they take the vast majority of all new digital advertising dollars.

There, perhaps is what may be a saving grace. While the behemoths battle for market and mindshare, they also run up against each other and thereby help keep each other in check. The traditional media companies — those mortals bringing in only single-digit billions, or less, each year — play the giants and their would-be competitors for ad dollars (Apple, Snap, Twitter, et. al.) against each other to eke out better terms for the media they distribute on each of their platforms. And, yet, nearly all those platforms rely on advertising to sustain themselves while Amazon can use the cash it generates in other ways to increase its capacity and competitiveness in media and advertising. Amazon recently even launched a social network, Spark, with a special e-commerce twist.

Amazon is expected to account for more than half of online retail sales by 2021.  Sen. Corey Booker is among those who have voiced antitrust concerns about Amazon’s impending $13.4 billion purchase of Whole Foods. In the foreseeable future, media and advertising companies could be raising similar objections to Amazon’s market influence in their spheres. If there’s one thing Bezos has shown us since he launched Amazon more than two decades ago as a seller of printed books, it’s that his company looks for areas it can dominate and it plays the long game to get there.

An award-winning former managing editor at ABC News Digital and an MBA, Dorian Benkoil and is the business columnist for the site. He is COO at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on media-tech, ad-tech and finance. He tweets at @dbenk.

The post Why Amazon is Poised to Kick the Media Industry’s Ass appeared first on MediaShift.

The ceremony — held once again at a tony midtown Manhattan venue converted from a former bank building  — as usual featured gliteratti of media and news, who gathered to honor the best journalism about, well, journalism and media.

NBC News’ newest star, Megyn Kelly, held court in a roped off area with media execs, event sponsors and officials of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, which runs the awards.

Megyn Kelly is here at #mirrors17. Doing photos in a roped-off area and probably trying not to get swarmed by all the media reporters here. pic.twitter.com/w7CmrKxERY

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) June 13, 2017

Mirrors emcee Jenna Bush Hager, a correspondent with NBC’s Today Show, joked about how Yahoo News Global Anchor Katie Couric kicked her under their lunch table to urge Hager to make the ceremony move quickly.

Brian Stelter, rising star at CNN (and a former colleague), was there griping, grinning and, as usual, tweeting. And the room was filled with suited and gowned executives who make the networks, studios and newsrooms run.

It was after the just-so avocado-topped salads were served and the uniformed waiters started pouring the wine, though, that the real spectacle began — when the stresses and divisions so many feel in today’s political climate showed in the chandeliered hall.

Taking the stage to welcome the assembled before the spotlights and a teleprompter, Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham commented on the importance of journalism in these “perilous times,” a “post-truth” age. Soraya Chemaly, accepting the award for Best Single Article* for “The Secret Rules of the Internet” published in The Verge, with co-author Cahterine Buni, talked of a “tumultuous” time for journalists.

‘The cancer of false equivalence’

But the biggest stir of the afternoon probably came from Eric Alterman, accepting the Best Commentary award for his scathing critique of how “False Equivalence is Distorting the  2016 Election Coverage,” published in The Nation.

In spreading the “the cancer of false equivalence… The New York Times is no better or worse than others” but, he said, mirroring the thesis of his piece, it has a special responsibility as a leading journalistic organization.

“I really don’t think we’d have a psychopath as our president if the New York times didn’t take the stance of ‘on the one hand, on the other hand,’ ” he said, drawing a few gasps from the crowd as Bush Hager, daughter of President George W. Bush, stood to the side, raising her eyebrows.

Alterman believes it is wrong to balance the pronouncements of right wingers with those who espouse truth-based news and opinion, he said in both his remarks, and the piece for which he won the award.

“Thanks, in part, to the willingness of most mainstream journalists to treat Fox News as just another news source, right-wing ideologues have shifted the political ‘center’ closer to the conservative fringe with every election,” Alterman wrote in the article.

“I”ll save the speech on Fox News, because Eric just gave it,” joked Gabriel Sherman, accepting the Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting award for his coverage in New York Magazine of sexual harassment allegations against Roger Ailes that led to the Fox News CEO’s resignation.

New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet then took the stage and gracefully defused some of the tension.

“Let me start by congratulating Eric,” Baquet said dryly, while going on to lionize his staff and bosses who “believe in the [Times] like a religion” for their support and “aggressive reporting in the face of great opposition” that put the “nuts and bolts of great journalism on display.”

“As much as we must change, and we must indeed change, we can’t lose sight of our great strengths,” Baquet said, which is “doing impactful stories, no matter the form.”

The Times won this year’s I-3 Award for Impact Innovation and Influence, which was accepted by Publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

A ‘profound and pernicious threat to our democracy’

2017 Mirror Awards Tom Brokaw Tribute – Syracuse University Newhouse School from Broadway Video on Vimeo.

Our times were evident, too, in the remarks of the most-heralded star of the evening, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who was paid tribute for more than seven minutes in a highly produced video featuring other media celebrities and former colleagues such as Anderson Cooper, Couric and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta.

Honored with the Fred Dressler Leadership Award, Brokaw lamented a close friend from childhood whom he cannot persuade to disbelieve the “untrue … offerings of various outlets,” instead accusing Brokaw of selling out and being “a part of it,” Brokaw said.

“We are facing the most profound and pernicious threat to our democracy [which is] the ability of people to create fake news with a keystroke,” Brokaw said. “It is not getting enough attention from those of us in this room.”

Photo by Dorian Benkoil.

“We have lost our way,” Brokaw continued, calling on journalists to find out what’s going on in much of the country and the world, in “industry, agriculture, politics” away from the daily goings-on in Washington.

He praised Iowa editor Art Cullen, who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials “that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests,” in the Pulitzer committee’s words and for, Brokaw said, calling out Congressman Steve King for “outrageous” views on immigrants.

Brokaw also held up ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis for his “aggressive investigative reporting.” MacGillis has most recently written of tenants’ suffering the disrepair of buildings owned by Jared Kushner, and of billions in grants and tax incentives handed out by Energy Secretary Rick Perry when he was Texas governor.

While also echoing Branham, calling this a “perilous era,” Brokaw ended on a positive note, saying he gained confidence from the award-winners and others in the room.

“That you can see Arthur [Sulzberger] and Eric Alterman on the same stage, then you know the strength of American journalism,” he said.

A full list of the winners of the 2017 Mirror Awards is here.

*Full disclosure: I was a “top-tier” judge in the category this year.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post At the Mirror Awards, Talk of Journalism’s ‘False Equivalence’ and the ‘Pernicious Threat to Our Democracy’ appeared first on MediaShift.

Click on the photo or here to see the full series. Creative Commons photo.

So, it’s time to gaze into my future-looking VR headset and predict what we’ll see in 2017 for the business of media. I predict something of a solidification of trends that started last year, with a few breakouts of new areas such as chatbots and AI. Here’s how.

It’s Everyone Against Google and Facebook

We’ve heard for awhile about the tension publishers feel between attracting eyeballs via Facebook and Google vs. concerns over ceding control and all new ad dollars to the two giants.

In the coming year, advertisers will join more forcefully in the fretting, and try to take action to preserve at least some alternatives to the Mothra and Godzilla of digital advertising.

At first glance, advertisers shouldn’t care. After all, Google and Facebook promise to reach the right person with the right ad as no others can, for which they are rewarded more handsomely than any other solo entities.

Sir Martin Sorrell, head of the world’s largest advertising holding company, WPP, at the UBS Media Conference in December, said his companies would increasing advertising spent on Google from $4 billion to $5.5 billion in 2017, which is more than anywhere else. Facebook, he said, will get $1.75 billion, up from $1 billion.

Yet, Sorrell has also complained of the giants’ “anti-competitive” natures, and has joined others with damning comments about Facebook’s recent advertising measurement gaffes.

Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategist of competitor Publicis Groupe recently lamented Google’s power in reaching audiences, too, saying:  “Google has 10 times more people for every one of my clients as I do.”

Facebook has more than 1.7 billion active monthly users and happens to own up-and-comers Instagram and WhatsApp. They have more audience than any publishing conglomerate.

Remember, too, that Google owns DoubleClick, through which most publishers run their advertising.

The agencies, like publishers, have become concerned about so much power concentrated in two “secretive empires” that can control pricing and targeting while revealing so little about how their algorithms actually work.

Publishers are being more proactive about making sure their ads don’t hinder the user experience. This popup appeared on DailyKos.

In private conversations, executives at advertising technology companies that aren’t owned by a platform or major media company have been telling me they plan to tout their independence from the big guns as strengths.

In part to combat the “walled gardens” like Facebook and Google, which collect data, but don’t share it openly nor reveal just how they’re measuring, WPP has formed the company MPlatform, which promises what Sorrell calls “an agnostic alternative” to search and social behemoths.

Publishers Will Look to Others …

The good news for publishers may that there are other behemoths stomping into the landscape.

Amazon in December made an announcement that’s all geek to some but got a lot of notice in publishers’ advertising operations departments. The commerce and Web services giant is building out capabilities as an automated advertising platform with features that favor publishers.

Publishers tell me Amazon is also enticing them to put their content into Amazon’s Video Direct service, which promises relative ease of participation for a decent share of revenue from ads or subscriptions.

Snapchat, too, has been gaining ground by attracting younger adults and teens and could get nearly $1 billion in ad revenue next year, according to eMarketer. Expect more publishers in 2017 to play around there.

And, remember that WeChat is the monster in China. They have created a gateway that’s overtaking social networks and is the next generation of interacting with the Internet via chat and chatbots, which we’ll look at below.

Publishing execs have recently been telling me they are more aggressive about getting onto new platforms, testing them, and moving quickly among them to try to keep any one from having too much sway.

The smart publishers in 2017 will know they can’t go it alone without the platforms that amass huge communities but will also avoid putting all their eggs in the Google or Facebook baskets.

Apple News is wooing publishers with expanded and more flexible advertising opportunities that give them more control than they previously had there. Twitter will also keep cutting deals for choice content.

Paid models will also keep growing as part of the mix. Entrepreneur Tony Haile, founder of successful media measurement company Chartbeat, has founded Scroll, a “Netflix-like startup” that promises to bring new revenues to news publishers by allowing them to share in subscription payments.

… and (I Hope) Get Better About Data and Tech…

Publishers seem to be wising up to the ways in which technology can help or hurt, and the advantages their capabilities may give them.

Premium publishers — ones that create great stuff for us to read, watch and listen to — do have at least one advantage: an innate understanding of how to create reliable content that sparks sharing and conversation, and is the kind of stuff advertisers want to be associated with.

That’s why Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat, Google AMP and the rest keep trying to woo them to put content on their platforms.

With their unique audiences and understanding of them, the publishers can get a lot of so-called first-party data that advertisers crave.

A media buyer for one major pharmaceutical company told me they have programs to compare their customer information with publishers’ data to better target their ads. An exec at a major technology publisher is similarly sharing data with choice advertisers such as Microsoft.

Publishers have started to understand the value of their data and try to protect it from ad tech partners who would skim and resell it without compensating anyone or getting permission. Expect to start hearing the term “data exhaust” more this year. It’s a term for the data that leak and are then taken by others.

Ad blocking has also widened publishers to the need to look at all the technologies on their pages. Expect more sophistication around header bidding — which helps increase ad revenues by leveling the programatic advertising playing field — and more streamlining pages, as The Washington Post, Vox and GQ have done.

… And Experiment More With Chatbots and AI

Photo by Arthur Caranta and used here with Creative Commons license.

This time next year, a human may not have to write this column. Just kidding. I think. I doubt that Google Home or Alexa, or your Facebook Messenger bot, will be able to craft 1,000 cogent words on what’s coming up in media and tech.

But similarly to last year’s prediction of more initiatives in VR, this coming year we’ll see more coming together around chatbots and artificial intelligence.

So far, the experiments are fairly rudimentary. Ask the Quartz or New York Times chatbots for updates, and you’ll get a modicum of interactivity that’s really just simple “yes” – “no” tree logic.

But experts developing the technologies predict we’ll see them hooked up with voice and a lot more intelligence. Chatbots could become our portal to communication, shopping and media offers that are ever-more incisive as the AI learns our preferences over time

“As a publisher network, we’re seeing how we’re helping drive traffic with the bots,” Ryan Maynard, Director of Advertising Solutions at Kik Interactive, said at a recent marketing industry breakfast focused on chatbots.

In 2017 we’ll also see more mentions of blockchain as a technology that can help solve some current problems such as ad fraud, facilitating micropayments and maybe for verification that helps suss out “fake news” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).

I hope some genius can also thwart more recent partisan attempts to label real news as fake, that great journalism will matter and the media will thrive.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post In 2017: It’s Everyone Against Facebook and Google. Plus, Chatbots and AI appeared first on MediaShift.

Lately, advertisers and media technology executives also say they’re trying to make sure those giants, and to a lesser extent Snapchat, Apple, Amazon and Twitter don’t control all the dollars and data that flow to media and advertising.

More hand wringing came Friday when word circulated that Facebook had for the past two years overestimated the average amount of time people spend looking at videos on its platform by as much as 80 percent. (See graphic below.)

That math matters because huge advertising conglomerates such as Publicis and WPP are pouring billions of dollars into the social network on behalf of their clients, many of whom are the big brands we all know. The more those dollars go to the platform giants, the less there is for everyone else.

The agencies justify a good deal of that budget based on the impact the ads are presumed to have on consumers. But if videos are viewed for less time than claimed, those videos are going to have less sway than predicted. Multiple research studies, including some cited by Facebook, have correlated viewing time with favorable effects for advertisers.

“Think of the advertising dollars that flowed to Facebook because of the inflated growth in their videos,” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint told Bloomberg Technology. “That’s money out of their pockets.”

And Then There’s Google

How Could A Few Seconds Mean so Much?
Facebook, in acknowledging its mistake in counting average viewing time for videos, said the error happened because they neglected to include views of less than three seconds. How could such a small factor distort calculations by 60-80 percent? Pretty easily, as shown in this sample spreadsheet. If we assume, as is usually the case, that a majority of video views are on the shorter end, then the sheer number of those short views would combine to greatly reduce the overall average. In this spreadsheet, we assume 10 million total views, 5 million of which are one second. The average seconds viewed for all 10 million videos is a duration of 1.15 seconds, but if we exclude those shorter views, the average jumps to 13 seconds, a differential of more than 90 percent.

An even bigger 800-pound gorilla than Facebook, as measured by advertising dollars, is Google, which not only gets about half of all money spent on digital advertising but also controls a huge portion of the automated advertising market through its programmatic advertising platforms.

WPP chairman Martin Sorrell said his company would spend more than $5 billion with Google this year, while increasing spending on Facebook 68 percent to $1.7 billion.

Google controls so much of the programmatic ad market that publishers complain they can have trouble getting bids from advertisers that don’t run through Google’s exchange, which may be worth more money.

The rub for publishers is they rely on the search and social giants for not just revenue but also exposure and lots of referral traffic.

Some publishers say they have received significant income from advertising that appears on articles they load into Facebook’s Instant Articles. Facebook also has paid publishers to run video in Facebook Live.

Google rewards publishers who optimize their mobile websites for Google’s AMP (accelerated mobile pages) standard with higher placement in mobile search and easier ad integration with Google’s DoubleClick ad platform.

It’s a tough balancing act, for both publishers and advertisers.

Publishers want the traffic and money, but they don’t want to lose control of their media or data on their visitors to companies that don’t necessarily have the publishers’ interest at heart.

“For my business, there’s a lot more to be gained from Facebook” than from avoiding it, Pete Spande, CRO, Business Insider told Digiday. The problem is, “they want 100 percent of the ad budget, and at some point, we’re competing for the same budget.”

Advertisers want access to the platforms’ huge audiences and targeting capabilities, but they grumble over the platforms’ “walled garden” approaches.

WPP’s Sorrell, for example, complained that Facebook and Google “mark their own homework” rather than let independent measurement companies verify audience and data.

Photo by Robert Scoble on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Developing Alternatives to Facebook and Google

The publishers and advertisers are developing new technologies and systems they hope will preserve at least some of the landscape for themselves.

News websites like the Washington Post and New York magazine are removing code and cutting file sizes to make their pages load faster and better compete with Instant Articles and AMP, according to The Information.

Verizon’s purchase of AOL and Yahoo has been interpreted (by me and others) as a way for them to offer enough “reach” — access to people on their various screens — to attract big advertisers away from the platforms.

Independent advertising, media tech and publishing executives have warned of Facebook as a Trojan Horse, while others have proclaimed themselves an alternate solution to Facebook for video advertising, with the ability to target people as they move across the open Web and the walled gardens.

Publishers are also implementing “header bidding,” which allows them to ping both Google’s AdX and other exchanges to see who might make the highest offer for a given ad spot.

Tech platform Xaxis (for which I’ve done some work), has developed technology to track people across Facebook, Google, other “walled gardens” and the open web to give clients the ability to track what people are doing wherever they are and get apples-to-apples comparisons.

Snapchat, Twitter and Others Can Be a Hedge, Too

Photo by Flickr user Adam Przezdziek and reused here with Creative Commons license.

While Facebook and Google are dominant today, they are not the only platforms warring for eyeballs and attention.

Discovery, Cosmo and Comedy Central are a few of the media companies putting content in Snapchat’s “Discover” area in hopes of reaching younger U.S. media consumers.

Twitter is hosting live NFL games, joining with Bloomberg to cover the presidential debate, and hiring well-known personalities to cover Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and other events.

Apple shut down its iAds program but hopes to keep attracting publishers with a new ad platform they promise will be effective for making money via the News app on iPhones, iPads and iPods.

Multi-platform media giants like Comcast and Disney are building technologies to deliver their media directly to consumers through set-top boxes, apps and the open web. Amazon is coming on strong as a media company, and Netflix has promised even more original programming.

International competition looms, too. All the U.S.-based platform giants have had mixed success at penetrating other markets, especially China, which has its own dominant platforms such as Alibaba and WeChat. Japan’s Line has made huge inroads with chat bots in the East.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post Advertisers, Publishers Look For Ways to Counter Facebook and Google appeared first on MediaShift.

One, for the first time ever, virtual reality took a prize. VR pioneer Nonny de la Pena won the i-3 award for impact, innovation and influence for her work in immersive and “experiential” journalism.

De la Pena is CEO of Emblematic Group and a former senior research fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She uses VR technologies to recreate real events her audiences can experience as if they were there.

The so-called first-person documentary “Use of Force,” for example, puts people on scene as police swarm over an immobilized subject. “Project Syria” puts people donning headsets into the situation of child refugees from that country’s war.

Accepting her award, de la Pena told the audience about spending $700 of her own money to make her first piece and cobbling together “crazy” goggles so she could show her work at Sundance when she couldn’t bring the $50,000 headset she’d been using. She used a paper clip to make some equipment work.

She alluded to the painstaking work that goes into capturing sound, layering images and textures, and making a scene so real that people watching and listening often literally cry.

“These pieces are not easy. They are hard to make,” she said.

She praised Dan Pacheco of the Newhouse School at Syracuse and others for their support in helping her get established as the “the godmother of virtual reality,” as Newhouse dean Lorraine Branham described her.

De la Pena noted too that what once seemed “crazy” is not anymore. Facebook paid more than $2 billion for Oculus Rift. Samsung, Google, AOL and Sony are investing in virtual reality. Facebook recently started supporting 360-video in their feeds.

The one exhibit at the Mirrors ceremony was from sponsor Discovery Networks showing off some of its adventure-themed VR scenes such as sharks swimming, elephants drinking nearby, and rope-walking a canyon.

De la Pena predicted a further VR boom this fall when Project Morpheus, Sony’s headset that attaches to their gaming console, comes out. “There are 60 million Playstations out there,” she said. “I’ll let you think about that one.”

Previous i-3 winners have included Twitter, big data, and work that brought presidential candidates to YouTube, Branham noted. She also praised the courageous and sometimes risky work journalists do.

Judges in the category I helped evaluate and in others that I spoke to agreed the entrants this year were the strongest they’d seen. This was the Mirrors’ 10th anniversary.

For the First Time, A Podcast Wins

This year, a podcast won for the first time ever. Music podcast “Between the Liner Notes” won for its episode about how MTV came to prominence, in the category for “Best Single Story – Radio, Television, Cable or Online Broadcast Media.”

“I thought there was nothing else I could learn about MTV,” one judge in the category commented, speaking to me privately. “But I couldn’t help but listen to the entire hour.”

Podcast host Matthew Billy, also a radio and record producer, called himself a “kid from Queens” who “records the voiceovers for his podcast in a closet.” He beat out segments from CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and the Retro Report.

The Mirrors are hosted annually by Newhouse to honor media that’s about, well, media. (Hence, the name.) This year’s other winners were from big media and another big institution, the Harvard-affiliated Nieman Reports.

Taffy Akner Brodesser of GQ won for her sometimes biting profile of CNN anchor Don Lemon. Accepting, she quipped that her editor assigned the piece by sending her “three lemon emojis” whose meaning she had to guess.

Marv Albert got laughs and groans, joking that the winner he was introducing, Turner broadcasting president David Levy, asked if the famous sportscaster believed in “free” because he’d be speaking for free.

Levy was honored with the Fred Dressler Leadership Award for his work in leading networks under his tutelage such as TNT, TBS and Adult Swim to success.

Media Glitterati Smile, Toast, Eat

Master of ceremonies and CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor (like so many in the room, a Newhouse alum), announced the winners, who also included:

• Best Single Article – Digital Media: Celeste LeCompte, “Automation in the Newsroom” – Nieman Reports
• Best Single Article – Traditional/Legacy Media: Peter Elkind, “Inside the Hack of the Century” (PDF) – Fortune
• John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting: Jonathan Mahler, “What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?” – The New York Times Magazine

The entire list of winners and past winners is here.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post Mirror Awards Mirror the Shifting Power in Media appeared first on MediaShift.

Click here or on the image for the full year in review.

In this look-ahead to 2016, I’ll avoid the temptation to simply repeat what I said last year.

Yes, measurement will still be a muddle, and marketers are still trying to track people across screens. Net neutrality rulings have inspired new lawsuits. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos announced even more original programs for 2016.

Here are some newer predictions.

Virtual Reality Takes Hold

Photo by Phil Whitehouse on Flickr and reused here with Creative Commons license.

Get your VR viewer ready. 2016 will be the year that virtual reality media enter the mainstream.

There’s a confluence of low price, low cost, “coolness” and commercialization that will get more of us pressing boxy devices to our eyes.

While some people made fun of The New York Times’ gift of 1 million Google Cardboard sets to print subscribers, and some recipients complained it made them dizzy, the NYTVR app launch was more successful than any by the Times.

The first stories the Times created — one about children struggling in war zones, another about an artist “Walking New York” — weren’t earth shattering journalism, but they showed the most mainstream of news organizations could capture imaginations and buzz with VR.

Big brands like Mini Cooper, GE and Nike have also been making forays. Absolut vodka created a rooftop concert VR stream that brand director Afdhel Aziz called the “world’s first virtual reality live show.”

In two hours, people claimed all 5,000 Absolut-branded Google Cardboard headsets, he said at the recent Ad Tech conference in New York. “People [told us] they wanted to throw a VR party at home,” he said.

Plus, people seem to enjoy what they’re seeing. Fans praised a VR app from Nike that let people “score” a goal from the perspective of soccer star Neymar. Even critics called the NYTVR stories “cool” and “neat.”

Consumers who aren’t given a VR viewer can buy Google Cardboard — into which a smartphone or other small-screen device is inserted— can buy one for less than $3. On Alibaba, knockoffs cost as little as 15 cents in large batches. In many browsers, you can get something of the VR experience on YouTube #360.

Producing VR videos is increasingly affordable, too. Rigs under $500 can mount six GoPro cameras ($215-$400 each). Software stitches the concurrently shot videos together into a VR whole. Simpler 360-degree cameras  sell for $299-$350.

That combination of easily available production, consumer-accessible technology and brands jumping in with financial support means it’s a matter of time before, immersed in your VR experience, you’ll find yourself in a sponsor’s environment inserted in the media you’re consuming.

We’ll probably see more augmented reality media, too, in which your headset or viewer is an overlay to what’s in front of you, such as the BMW application that helps a mechanic work on an engine.

“Augmented Reality will see a first SnapChat/Instagram level success, with a meteoric rise of a network that brings online/cyber realities into the physical world,” RebelMouse founder Paul Berry says in a column he shared with me before publishing. “We don’t know the name of the company or product yet, but by Cannes, we’ll all be saying some new word and it will be that product.”

Platforms Get More Control

Media consumers are tired of glitches, delays and difficult downloads on mobile devices. Apps from platforms like Facebook and Apple help solve the issues.

Facebook’s Instant Articles is blazingly fast, whether you’re scrolling through news articles, looking at videos or happening on an ad.

It’s Facebook and Google and Snapchat and WhatsApp and Medium (new venue of The Awl’s personal finance site) and, in China, WeChat, and even Apple that have aggregated the masses into one place on their applications.

Raise your hand if you’ve listened to Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music or another of the music listening platforms in the last month. Now, keep it up if you’ve bought a music album. See what I mean?

The platforms are where people live for their communication and media consumption. Those are becoming media brands as much as any newspaper, magazine, record label, or radio or TV network.

It’s not quite “game over” for mainstream publishers — as one PR executive quipped to me privately after Instant Articles was announced. Distribution isn’t everything. Content is still royalty, maybe even king. Facebook needs great journalism and entertainment, and so loosened terms for Instant Articles — allowing more ads and more aggressive links out to non-Facebook URLs — after big publishers complained.

But if Facebook (or Snapchat or Apple News or another favorite app) is where everyone wants to consume that content, maybe those of us in media have got to give it to them there.

“When it comes to making money on mobile Facebook is pretty much the only game in town for publishers – and mobile is where most of us spend our time,” Chris Sutcliffe wrote in a column explaining why The Washington Post is putting all its stories in Instant Articles.

Maybe we’ll see the rise of what the AP’s Francesco Marconi calls “homeless media” — organizations that are great at producing content doing that, only, and feeding it to others, not even bothering to host it themselves.

Content Marketing Gets Bigger and (I Hope) Better

Content marketing is only going to grow. Not only is there a “gold rush” as more companies try to capture the value of making media, but it’s also highly likely that the media tech behemoths (that would be Facebook, Google, Apple, et. al.) will continue to value, promote and highlight well-made “content” (a word I, similar to advertising executive David Berkowitz, don’t like but use).

The increased use of ad blocking means that marketers are looking for other ways to reach people. So-called “native advertising” that circumvents the ad blockers by going directly into feeds is a way to get messages onto screens.

PulsePoint CEO Sloan Gaon

Meanwhile, creating articles and web videos is usually much cheaper thank making glossy magazine ads and TV commercials. Plus, marketers can use the content to inspire through sharing and discovery through search, and they can then get good metrics about what’s getting the most attention.

“Content marketing will start to become more accountable in 2016,” PulsePoint’s Sloan Gaon said in an email. “Engagement metrics … will be used to measure the success of content marketing campaigns” instead of “old metrics” like clicks and views.

Publishers Get Smarter About Ad Tech, Fraud

Photo remix with images by Open Clips (graph) and Michael Zimmerman (magazines), both via Pixabay and used under Creative Commons license.

As more and more of advertising budgets are spent on automated, a.k.a. programmatic, platforms, publishers are working hard to capture those dollars via ad-tech partners such as networks, exchanges and verification tools.

They have started to guarantee that their ads can be viewed on pages, so they can try to charge a premium. They are trying to use header bidding — a technology to find the most valuable ad available from every tech partner — to further ensure they get the highest priced ad in every spot.

Publishers are using ad tech to “achieve sustained growth with a model built on value instead of volume,” according to a recent report by eConsultancy. They “are exploring the ways in which they can, independently and collectively, add a premium to their ad rates and compete with alpha publishers such as Facebook and Google.”

While the ad-pocalypse may be overstated, traffic is moving to mobile devices, where people don’t have the patience for glitches caused by advertising code, don’t want ads to eat up their data plans and so are installing ad blocking software.

Publishers have to pay attention if they want to keep being supported by ad dollars.

Publishers will also, finally, have to confront concerns over ad fraud, which have gotten important enough that they’ve reached the mainstream.

Fraud-meisters are increasing in sophistication. Some are injecting their ads into even the most top-flight media in order to make them seem legit. They are also able to spoof ad systems into thinking fraudulent pages are from legitimate media companies, Claudia Perlich, chief scientist of advertising platform Dstillery, told me.

Publishers who don’t weed out fraud will run the risk of having their pages devalued. market prices overall will drop. A reporter from a major, mainstream business publication told me he is working on a story about whether ad fraud has reached levels that will hurt media companies’ valuations.

Quality Will Matter

The latter half of 2015 has been a time of flux, and it’s hard to say for sure who’s going to win what. Google AMP, one of Alphabet’s plays to ensure more mobile advertising revenue, may not take hold, and we’ll then see Facebook overtake its Silicon Valley rival for good.

But whatever platforms take hold, they’ll want content from the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox  and Refinery29 — all of whom are on Instant Articles and say they are or soon will be profitable. Even the New York Times may survive into the next decade.

In 2016 quality will matter, whether in publishing, content marketing or advertising technology. Cickbait may abound, but there’s plenty of room for discerning media and consumers, as well.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post Predictions for 2016: VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud appeared first on MediaShift.

Click on the image for a look at the full series. Original photo by Jeff Djevdet on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

For publishers, incorporating branded content into their offerings for advertisers can be a way to make serious revenue and avoid some of the problems besieging the media industry.

To answer the question of why a publisher should bother with content marketing, I’ll risk quoting bank robber Willie Sutton: It’s where the money is.

“There’s a gold rush,” financial services media strategist Rod Kurtz said at LinkedIn’s Finance Connect conference in May. “Every brand in the world wants to do content.”

But not every brand knows how to produce good media that’s not just advertising, or how to make it fit seamlessly in a particular publication.

That’s why publishers from giants like BuzzFeed and The New York Times, upstarts such as Vox Media and NowThis, to more niche media concerns such as Complex and Digiday have content marketing studios that produce media for brands.

BuzzFeed and Vox are said to make nearly all their money producing content for brands and charging to place it in their streams for sponsors. Vox goes so far as to let sponsors directly access Vox’s proprietary content management system.

Complex Media was paid to create this website on behalf of a soft drink brand.

Complex Media CEO and co-founder Rich Antoniello told me his company makes more than half its revenue — millions of dollars each month — through “branded content and integrations” for sponsors. They’ll create websites and videos for sponsors such as soft drink and sneaker companies that can run on Complex.com or elsewhere.

Digiday, BuzzFeed, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, Forbes and many others have content marketing teams or shares in creative agencies whose entire job it is to make media that both serves the marketers’ purpose and also fits the publishers’ brands.

NowThis has been able to charge many thousands of dollars to make its high-quality video production facilities and staff available for consumer brands paying for help in creating media they hope consumers will enjoy and share.

It’s An Answer to Technology

There are a number of technological benefits to a publisher from running content marketing, as well.

One is that because the marketing messages are placed in the editorial stream, the sponsor’s message can avoid ad blocking software that’s increasingly installed on mobile phones.

BuzzFeed helps sponsors create ‘list-icles” that appear in the same stream as BuzzFeed’s editorial matter.

Also, because the content is in the editorial stream and handled though similar templates and feeds as editorial matter, it can appear seamlessly on whatever device is being used, without having to reconfigure or use multiple ad servers for, say, an iOS device rather than Android.

The content can even be put into feeds sent to third party platforms and feed aggregators, and more easily shared through social media and optimized for search, sending links and traffic back.

The experience for the user can be much better, especially on mobile phones, than incessant popups, ads, self-playing videos, and other annoyances.

Finally, a publisher can collect better data on the media — how long people spend with it, what they do after looking at it, and so on — than with display ads from a third-party server that links externally.

And, whatever type of media a publisher makes, the sponsor content can be made to match: Vine videos,  an inserted “swipe” in the Snapchat Discover flow, a long article, research white papers and full-blown interactive graphics are some examples of things that have been done.

(One quick note: Some third-party content marketing solutions are “served” onto a page, and so require ad serving technology, making them susceptible to ad blocking, and unlikely to appear in the editorial feeds.)

Done Right, It Can be Cost Effective

A publisher in the media game for the long-term will need any paid media it runs to strike the right tone and tenor, while also making it clear that the message is on behalf of a brand, not purely editorial.

That’s a tricky mix to get right. Not only do some brands’ marketing managers have trouble accepting media that doesn’t overtly tout the brand’s benefits, it can also be costly for a publisher to get content made, and made right.

Even when the brand marketer agrees to make something fun and useful — and not just promotional — getting it done requires creative people to make it, and back-and-forth among the parties involved. With all those people involved, it’s tough to scale the operation.

“Creating content is actually difficult. And it takes a certain state of  mind,” Jimmy Maymann, president of brands at AOL said at a recent Advertising Week event in New York.

“How do you accelerate that?” he added. “Publishing [even] five pieces of content every day is a big thing for some brands.”

A publisher will have to price accordingly, and allow for long enough timelines to get the job done and still make a profit. The advertising, of course, has to support not just the cost of creating it, but also contribute to supporting the editorial operations.

Understand What to Offer The Sponsor

Today, many brands try to attract people to their own blogs, YouTube channels, social media and other outlets. The Casper Mattress Company, for example, has created the Van Winkle’s blog.

The blog is about “sleep culture,” Casper COO Luke Sherwin said at Advertising Week, and is a long-term investment in attracting and engaging people rather than a short-term way to sell more mattresses.

That means a publisher may have to show they can provide extra value beyond what the marketer can do on their own. They may even offer media or consultative services for the media the brand is creating.

Publishers Need To Be Careful About Diluting Their Media

Many media properties include links to content provided by a third-party vendor, such as this one.

Many top-flight news organizations like CNN and The Los Angeles Times try to solve the scale issue by putting links on their pages from third-party vendors to others’ media.

You might see headlines and large thumbnail photos of anything from health and financial tips, to promises of scantily clad celeb-utantes in embarrassing poses. (Look for buttons or taglines like “Powered by…” as in the image here, to see such items.)

But while the publishers can make reasonable incremental revenue for every clickthrough to that media, there’s a risk of diluting the brand — and that’s not just because pictures of bikini clad babes and the latest Kardashian doings might conflict with the tone of the article or video on the page above.

“People leave your site,” an executive of one content marketing technology company said to me, asking that I not use his name. “Publishers are literally destroying their businesses for pennies per click.”

It’s Most Effective When …

Content marketing is most effective for a publisher when it’s done carefully and well.

There are ethics and standards to follow, as I’ve previously noted in a column about The Atlantic’s sponsored content “meltdown.”

Publishers need to clearly label advertising as such, and be careful what assertions are made in any media created. There are also important questions raised if people on the editorial team are helping with content marketing, as Conde Nast discovered earlier this year.

It’s also important to work with marketers to help them understand where the content fits in their marketing strategy, and urge them not to expect the same kinds of metrics as for display ads, such as immediate clickthroughs leading to a quick purchase.

“For us, we’re trying to play on the way top of the marketing funnel, and we never get lower down,” Sherwin said. That means, they’re trying to get people interested, but not to immediately buy a mattress or even, necessarily, fill out a form or sign up for anything.

Good publishers know what quality content is, how to amuse and inform people with valuable media, and not go over the line into pure product promotion.

They can help craft so-called “thought-leadership” media such as sponsored research papers or videos that show multifaceted sides of the kinds of thinking inherent in a company.

Not every company will want that, and not all of them will understand the nuance. Another thing publishers should be willing to do is say “no,” and forego some immediate money for the sake of preserving their own publishing operation long-term.

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a content creation hack-a-thon, and Teeming Media, a strategic consultancy focused on making great and effective media, and teaching others how to do so. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for MediaShift.

The post What Publishers Should Know About Content Marketing appeared first on MediaShift.

If GigaOm went down, people asked, should others fear? What are the lessons for media in general?

Here are a few questions I’ve learned to ask.

Should You Take Funding?

Jon Oringer. Photo by Builtbyanimals and used here with Creative Commons license.

Nearly all money comes with expectations, financial or otherwise.

Jon Oringer, the successful founder and CEO of Shutterstock Images, said he grew the company organically and resisted taking money for years.

“The best way to start a company is by bootstrapping it yourself,” he wrote in a Re/code column. “I would recommend trying everything you can to remain independent.”

Anyone who receives substantial sums from investors should expect to hear from those investors about what’s being done with that money.

Sometimes the guidance will be driven by strictures that come from the type of money offered (see below) and the desire for financial return.

Other times, demands are made, or at least hints dropped, due to cultural or political leanings about what should or shouldn’t be done.

Even charitable foundations have expectations for how you fulfill their mission after taking their money and may try to steer things in one direction or another.

Do You Have to Be Profitable?

Photo by Ken Teegardin on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

By profitable, I mean “cash-flow” positive, or that the money you bring in pays the bills. If you’re a small company without other financial means, then, yes, you do have to be profitable. That need will have a huge effect on how you run the business.

Eric Hippeau. Photo from Lehrer Hippeau.

On the other hand, if you’re able to use savings or do something else for the money that funds the business — whether it’s a few hundred dollars monthly in server fees or many thousands for coding, salespeople, and office space — you’ll take a different approach.

Lerer Ventures’ Eric Hippeau told me that BuzzFeed, of which they are key backers, wants to show tremendous growth but is structured so as not to need to make a profit, at least in the near term. That means whatever money they do make — and it is said to be in the many millions — can be put into seeing to that growth.

Can You Create Multiple Revenue Streams?

All but the biggest media businesses need more than one way of making money: subscription and advertising; advertising, events, and e-commerce; research, education and webinars; and so on.

Every niche media company  I can think of — from Penton Media’s Aviation Week to Digiday and, yes, PBS MediaShift — has multiple ways of bringing in revenue.

NowThis (also known as “NowThis News”) built a state-of-the art studio to produce short news videos it shares on social platforms. It’s also using the studio to make videos for commercial clients who pay handsomely for the privilege.

BuzzFeed not only runs paid “listicles” as native, in-stream advertising for its commercial partners, but also also charges clients to use the BuzzFeed creative team to produce those ads.

A number of newspapers have created marketing arms that will do anything from draft marketing content to run Facebook and Twitter accounts for local businesses.

The booming news company Vice produces a show for HBO, partners with major traditional media companies, and, most recently, is reported to be tying up with Facebook.

What Supports Your (Editorial and) Business Model?

When I ran a media business property, one of the blogs got a big spike in traffic for a story about supermodel Kate Moss appearing nude.

But the traffic was mostly useless from a business perspective. It came almost entirely from a porn site, whose users viewed only that page and weren’t interested in our offerings, such as media training and jobs.

For a general interest news site, the calculation is different.

Fast-growing Vox.com, whose parent company — like BuzzFeed and Vice — has received multiple rounds of multimillion dollar funding, is usually thought of as a substantial and serious news property.

On a recent day, Vox’s most popular page was about bombshell pop star Iggy Azalea’s troubles in social media, a staffer there told me. That may not be the most serious of news, but Vox — as a general interest news site — is happy to cover Azalea and others of her ilk and get the resulting page views.

What Kind of Funding Do You Have?

Different kinds of money come with different kinds of benefits and pressures.

Venture capital funds are set up to make money for the investors. Period. There are variations on the theme, but ultimately, if you don’t produce financial results within a time frame the fund managers expect, pressure will increase and/or funding will be cut. You’ll have to make choices that are strongly driven by finances.

Many venture capital firms require fast growth and a “liquidity event,” such as an IPO or a strategic acquisition, that will bring in many multiples more than the total yearly revenue.

In other words, just making a profit and generating cash usually won’t be enough to satisfy investors.

Who you take funding from can also be key. Some investment firms are not just funders, but also partners and supporters, known for having great networks of contacts and experts they’ll tap to guide entrepreneurs who need special expertise.

Debt funding is structured a lot of different ways but basically means receiving money for which interest payments become due.

Financial professionals often refer to debt as “leverage,” the theory being that a big infusion of cash can boost a company to faster financial returns by increasing its operational capabilities to churn out more revenue-making stuff.

The danger is that the company has to create enough cash flow to not only pay for its operations but also to service the debt. That debt load can undermine a company even if it is cash-flow positive.

Rafat Ali. File photo courtesy of Ali.

Debt financing is reported to be what brought GigaOm down, despite operations that were otherwise profitable, if somewhat mismanaged.

“Gigaom’s failure is a failure of vertical media models as much as Color’s failure was a failure of app models,” said Rafat Ali, a successful media entrepreneur and friend. The media company he founded had been part of the GigaOm empire.

In other words, in GigaOm’s case, it’s not the media model that was at fault. It was the financing.

There are other types of funding, including private equity, bonds, angel investing, and more. And each of those breaks down into sub-categories. If you’re going to go after money, it’s a good idea to understand what you’re getting into, and carefully explore your business and business model.

Related

For more on the topic of digital media companies taking VC funding, check out this episode of our weekly Mediatwits podcast:

An award-winning journalist and MBA, Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) is founder of The MediaThon, a hack-a-thon for media makers, and Teeming Media, a digital media strategy and research consultancy focused on publishers and media tech. He previously developed and executed sales and marketing strategies for PBS MediaShift.

Disclaimer: The above is based on research and observations and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with appropriate professional advisers.

The post How Media Companies are Structured and Funded and Why it Matters appeared first on MediaShift.