This monthly newsletter is focused on sharing cutting edge stories, trends, topics, and social media posts with unique perspectives and new ideas that have the potential to translate to opportunities for news and magazine publishers. Stories and posts we share might cover topics as wide-ranging as Web3, podcasts, startups and technology, online advertising, and more. Click the links below to access current and past editions. I hope you enjoy and please let me know what you’re seeing out there that you see as up and coming for the news industry. Drop me a line at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

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Current Issue:

June 2023 – This month, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one particular essay about the “creator economy.” To those of us working in “old media,” the idea of a single person, armed with a brain, a laptop, and the ability to distribute to the whole internet has long been positioned as “the future.” But in this insightful piece, Renée DiResta examines how the conditions of our current era – technological and reader attention-based – have led so many individual creators to become what DiResta calls “propagandists.” The piece is worth reading for anyone who believes in the value of fact-based news, and also the business model that supports it. Keep reading.

Past Issues:

May 2023 

April 2023

March 2023

February 2023

January 2023

November 2022

October 2022

September 2022

August 2022

July 2022

June 2022

May 2022

April 2022

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The post Expanding the View appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Image credit: Oleksii Didok / iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

It is not a stretch to say that programmatic advertising and the broader suite of advertising technology (or ad tech) has harmed publishers in multiple ways. Whether due to the system’s monopolization by the largest tech platforms, the ability for bad actors to manipulate the system for profit,  or unscrupulous vendors playing on advertisers’ fears, it seems wherever you look, you can find evidence of the adverse impact of ad tech companies’ actions on publishers. A new report out in January gives us hope, however, that things may be looking up.

In 2020, the UK’s Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), working with PwC, published a landmark study tracking ad tech spend, the findings of which were very disturbing to publishers. Among the findings was an “unknown delta” of 15 percent of advertising spend that could not be attributed to either the buyers or sellers in the ad tech value exchange. The fact that publishers were only receiving 51 percent of advertiser spend was also cause for alarm. As we wrote at the time, “This study should act as a clarion call to publishers, advertisers and the ad tech community that the system as it stands does not work as it should.”

At least to some extent, that call has been heard and we hope to see the improvements continue.

In addition, last month the two organizations reported “positive and welcome improvements” in the second round of the study, conducted in 2022.

They found, among other increased benefits:

• “Improvements in data access successfully halved the time required to conduct the study to nine months (vs. 18 months for the 2020 study).
• Greater standardisation of data quality improved the ad impression match rate to 58% (vs. 12% in 2020) and the unattributable ad spend (AKA the unknown delta) was reduced to 3% (vs. 15% in 2020).
• The proportion of advertiser spend reaching publishers has risen by 8%.”

However, there are still many places where the deck remains stacked against publishers. As AdExchanger reported, “PwC itself has room to grow as an auditor” to better understand and audit more transactions. And publishers still take less than two-thirds of advertising dollars spent, with companies that are not involved in content creation taking a large share of the advertising placed against it.

While the report’s findings are welcome and positive, all parties have a responsibility to continue to advocate – voting with their voices and their dollars – for a stronger system for ad-supported news and content.

The post A Spot of Good Ad Tech News for Publishers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Guest: Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

“If we don’t understand that the people who really support the newspaper are the advertisers, and they need to be able to use the newspaper company to help them sell things, to help them grow their business, if we fumble that, we don’t have a newspaper.”

– Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

In an environment with ever-increasing advertising options, what do local advertisers want today? As everything becomes more digital, what changes are happening across media, and what are the opportunities for local news publishers to stand out? What do marketers uniquely value about local news media and how can publishers capitalize on that? 

News/Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern dives into these questions and more in this episode of News Take with Gordon Borrell, founder of advertising tracking firm, Borrell Associates. In this candid conversation, Borrell shares his insights on the evolving world of local advertising and what advertisers are looking for specifically from local news publishers, as well as how publishers can be more valuable by serving as advisors to advertisers on how to tell their story.

Listen or download the audio file to listen offline:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the News Take podcast by clicking “Follow” and selecting your preferred podcasting platform, or click on your preferred platform: Spotify, Apple, Google.

Watch with video:

Speaker bios

Gordon Borrell founded Borrell Associates in 2001 and has become the local media industry’s leading analyst. He is ranked in the top 2 percent among Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants worldwide and is quoted in Ad Age, MediaPost, Editor & Publisher, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and other publications. Prior to starting Borrell Associates, Gordon was vice president for new media for Landmark Communications, where he started his career 22 years earlier as a newspaper reporter. He is past chairman of the Local Media Association and of the Local Media Foundation. Gordon has five children and lives with his wife, a writer and book author, in Hampton Roads, Va.

Related viewing

Episode 39: Why Newspaper Advertisers Keep Buying

Watch the next episode: Update on News Deserts and Local News Trends

Watch the previous episode: Print, Logistics and Delivery in a Transitional Age

View all episodes

Send us your suggestions

Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

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The post News Take Episode 109: The State of Advertising and Local News appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The News Media Alliance applauds the introduction of the “Competition and Transparency Digital Advertising Act,” by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).  While our priority is the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, we support the goal of Senator Lee’s bill to break up the ad market, ensure more transparency, create fiduciary duties to publishers, and make more data available to publishers. We look forward to working with the lead sponsors to ensure competition and transparency in digital advertising.

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The post Statement: News Media Alliance Applauds Introduction of Competition and Transparency Digital Advertising Act appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

anyaberkut / iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

Building the technology that underpins the online advertising ecosystem is a lucrative business. The two largest online advertising companies, Alphabet and Meta (parent companies of Google and Facebook, respectively) are also some of the most valuable companies that have ever existed. But many other companies have found success in the ad tech market, earning money by inserting themselves into advertising transactions that once took place between only advertisers and publishers. However, three recent developments suggest that ad tech – which already has many known flaws – may be negatively impacting publishers even more than previously understood.

The black box of ad technology, particularly “brand safety” tech, has long been suspected to cause harm by needlessly scaring advertisers away from supporting news with their ad buys. We now have even more insight into the harm caused to advertisers and publishers by these unscrupulous middlemen, supporting our previous call for advertisers to walk away from this system.

The first notable finding centers on the fees siphoned away from publishers. Research conducted by Adalytics found that the fees taken by the “supply chain” range from 22-45 percent, with an average of 35 percent of ad dollars taken from publishers. In some extreme cases, demand-side and supply-side platforms (DSPs and SSPs) take 98 percent of an advertiser’s spend, leaving a mere two percent for publishers. The study also highlights how in the complex, auction-based system, some SSPs deliberately take a loss on some bids, “juicing their overall win rate.” Publishers are trapped in a system controlled by companies with few motives beyond winning, so that they can continue to take their cut on sales.

Even ad tech companies that claim to be looking out for advertisers and publishers do not seem to be acting honestly. “Brand safety” companies prey on advertisers’ concerns about where their ads will run, providing little benefit to brands while cutting off publishers from revenue that could be reinvested into newsgathering and distribution by encouraging keyword blocking. A joint statement from the News Media Alliance and Digital Content Next in 2020 explained:

Fact-based, reliable journalism supports the online ecosystem by providing readers with invaluable information and advertisers with high-quality content and access to these readers. Keyword blocking threatens this symbiotic relationship at the worst possible time.

This threat made it more difficult for news organizations to report on Covid-19 and the January 6 riots, and will make it more difficult in the face of hostilities in Ukraine.

Beyond harming news publishers, many brand safety tools don’t even do what they promise. On March 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gannett inadvertently reported inaccurate information about the location of ad placements to its advertisers. In a fully programmatic and machine-led marketplace, no individual advertiser can see every live ad, and reporting is vital for their tracking. However, Gannett’s error – which was widely agreed to not be malicious or fraudulent – highlights another flaw in the system. “Brand safety” companies sell tools and earn money from advertisers and publishers on the promise of avoiding just this type of mistake through careful monitoring and reporting. However, the brand safety trackers failed to flag this issue for months. As Matt Rogerson, head of public policy at Guardian Media Group tweeted:

Question from a dummy: if Gannett was doing this in error, what’s to stop far end of web sites from feeding the same data into the ecosystem? Similarly, if the ecosystem not catching these errors re Gannett, how can we believe they are catching them for bad actors?

— Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) March 10, 2022

Implicit in his question was why these companies should earn millions of dollars.

The brand safety companies – while not doing what they claim to – have found new ways to drain value from publishers. A March 10 report in Morning Brew details an additional form of abuse – ad tech companies scraping publisher data and selling contextual advertising segments based on it without permission. Contextual advertising – where the content of the story matters more than the reader’s data profile – is seen as one potential way for publishers to earn back some control in the marketplace with the disappearance of audience-based cookies. This scraping is, according to the trade groups quoted by Morning Brew, “not only a violation of publisher terms and conditions, but also the potential infringement of basic intellectual property rights.” Publishers seemingly can’t win, even with their own assets.

The harm that ad tech companies cause to publishers is now clearer than ever. They take away publishers’ ability to earn enough on advertisements to support the expensive, important work of gathering and sharing real news, waste their dollars with fraud and sell useless “safety” tools that don’t make things safer. And in an age when disinformation is rampant online and information warfare is fueling actual war in Ukraine, choosing to support real news outlets directly and advertising alongside high-quality news can literally save lives.

The post Ad Tech: It’s Worse Than We Thought appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

On February 11, the European Publishers Council filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Google with regards to its anticompetitive practices in the ad tech sector. In their complaint, EPC is requesting the Commission to impose remedies that would restore effective competition in the ad tech value chain in order to protect publishers, advertisers, and consumers. Following aggressive acquisitions in the 2000s, Google has achieved a dominant position in the ad tech value chain, often representing both the buyer and seller in the same transaction in addition to operating the auction house and selling its own ad inventory. The complaint argues, among other claims, that Google is using its dominant position to self-preference its own services at the expense of others in the digital ad marketplace. The complaint follows similar investigations in France, the UK, Australia, and the United States. The Commission has another ongoing investigation into Google’s ad tech services and the new complaint is expected to be integrated with the investigation. Read more about the complaint here.

The post European Publishers Council Files a Complaint against Google with the European Commission appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Guests: Aram Zucker-Scharff, The Washington Post

“For the first time, we actually have the potential to create a real shift that benefits our users, our business, and our society, and that’s a win, win, win.” – Aram Zucker-Scharff on the shift to contextual-based targeting

Ad tech, Privacy and Performance, oh my! News publishers working to adapt to a privacy-first digital landscape before the inevitable end of the third-party cookie can easily become overwhelmed and may not even know where to start.

What does the shift towards privacy mean for news publishers and how they approach ad targeting? Is decreased reliance on third-party tracking a good thing for the industry? What are Core Web Vitals and why should news publishers care? How does my news site’s performance tie in to reader trust? What are things publishers can do right now to improve site performance? What is W3C and how can publishers take advantage to get their voices heard?

These questions and more will be discussed on this episode of News Take. News Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern had an energizing conversation with Aram Zucker-Scharff, Engineering Lead for Privacy & Security Compliance at The Washington Post, that got in-the-weeds about the kitchen sink of ad tech topics, including site monetization; improving privacy and the user experience; optimizing site performance using Core Web Vitals; and more.

This episode was so full of interesting facts and actionable insights, we didn’t want it to end. The nuggets of wisdom will come faster than you can write them down, so it’s a good thing this conversation was recorded and you can re-watch it to your heart’s content!

Listen now or download the audio file to listen offline:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the News Take podcast by clicking “Follow” and selecting your preferred podcasting platform, or click on your preferred platform: Spotify, Apple, Google.

Watch with video:

Download closed captioning transcript

Speaker bio

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Engineering Lead for Privacy & Security Compliance at The Washington Post, where he works with publishers to maximize site performance and revenue. He has also worked on The Post’s Ad Tech R&D and Big Data teams. Aram has developed open-source tools for publishers and consulted on content strategy and digital newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry.

Related reading

“Why The Ad Industry Should Care About Core Web Vitals – And The Impact For Publishers Who Ignore The Dreaded ‘Layout Shift’” (AdExchanger) – by Amanda Hicks, director of product for The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation & Development (RED) team.

Watch the next episode: Leveraging Products to Connect with Your Audience

Watch the previous episode: Local News: Understanding What Readers Want and How to Deliver it to Them

View all episodes

Send us your suggestions

Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

News Take Production Team:

Host and Executive Producer: Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

Production Support, Editing & Distribution:

Georgi-Ann Clarke, Social Media & Content Manager, News/Media Alliance
Rachel Fox, Manager, Membership & Events, News/Media Alliance
Lindsey Loving, Director, Communications, News/Media Alliance

Audio & Video Engineer: Current Media Group

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The post News Take Episode 102: Tech Trends: What Publishers Need to Know appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Farknot_Architect / iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

In early June, the French competition authority, Autorité de la concurrence, announced that Google had reached an agreement with the authority to settle an antitrust investigation regarding the tech giant’s anticompetitive behavior in the market for online advertising services. In addition to a €220 million fine, the settlement includes commitments by Google to change the way their platforms operate to allow for a more competitive industry. While the practical effects of the changes Google has committed to making remain to be seen, the settlement is yet another important step forward in addressing Google’s anticompetitive practices internationally and in rebalancing the online marketplace to create a more even playing field for news publishers.

Following complaints filed by multiple news publishers in 2019, the investigation centered around two of Google’s main advertising services: Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) and Doubleclick Ad Exchange (AdX). The French competition authority found that Google abused its dominant market position by engaging in practices in the operation of these two services that harmed publishers and made it more difficult for other advertising platforms to compete with Google. In particular, the investigation showed that when private entities tried to buy and sell online advertising space, the DFP publisher ad server favored Google’s own AdX while, conversely, AdX favored the DFP ad server.

In both instances, the investigation found that Google had applied less favorable terms and technical conditions to third-party platforms than to its own services. As an example of this self-preferencing, Google used the prices on competing supply side platforms (SSPs) to inform AdX, allowing it to better optimize AdX, among other benefits, and providing Google’s platforms a competitive leverage at the expense of a competitive marketplace. Google also imposed contractual limitations on third-party platforms to further push buyers and sellers to stay within the Google DFP and AdX ecosystems by making interoperability between Google and third-party platforms more difficult and less efficient. By making it harder and more expensive to use third-party SSPs, Google has been able to steer more and more business to their platforms and away from competitors, making it harder for publishers to use other platforms.

In addition to the fine, Google agreed to change their practices to increase interoperability with third-party platforms and to not restrict the ability of publishers using Ad Manager to negotiate prices and terms directly with third-party platforms, hopefully increasing the ease and ability of publishers and marketers to utilize third-party ad platforms that compete with Google. These changes may lead to a more balanced and healthy competition in the online display ad marketplace and limit Google’s market dominance in the field. Google also committed to no longer using other platforms’ pricing information to optimize their services and to give Ad Manager users at least three months’ notice of any changes that publishers need to adopt. The fees associated with using third-party ad platforms will also be removed according to the agreement, and Google has promised to publish a guide on how to configure AdX Direct Configuration for customers using a third-party platform.

The French settlement comes at a time when Google is facing increased antitrust scrutiny focused on its ad tech services globally, including in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. These cases similarly focus on the ways that Google’s advertising technology platforms have restricted competition in the digital ad sector. The commitments made by Google in the French case give reason to hope for a more competitive digital marketplace in France, in addition to potentially serving as a blueprint for regulators in other parts of the world.

Recently, in the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) released proposed commitments made by Google with regards to their Privacy Sandbox initiative following the CMA’s investigation into the issue. The Privacy Sandbox is aimed at developing alternative tools for interest-based digital advertising once third-party cookies are phased out. The CMA’s investigation into the Privacy Sandbox before the tools are finalized is an encouraging development, hopefully addressing problematic issues and features before they arise. For publishers, the increased focus by national competition authorities on Google’s digital advertising practices is long overdue and will hopefully help create an online marketplace that works better for everyone and not just the few dominant platforms.

The post Google’s Settlement with the French Authorities Offers a Glimpse of Hope for News Publishers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

This lawsuit has major implications for news publishers, particularly local news publishers that have been hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic impact. Google has leveraged its dominance to commandeer the majority of all digital ad revenue, profiting from sharing news publishers’ content, while failing to consistently compensate news publishers for use of that content.

According to the Alliance’s Declaration, Texas is the right place to decide this case, as it represents the more convenient location for calling potential witnesses, and offers the most expedient option, given California’s requirements to adhere to Google’s adhesive forum selection clauses, and Texas’ ability to hear cases more promptly. The wait for a case to be heard in Texas is just 18 months, versus 44.5 months, or nearly four years, in California.

Alliance President & CEO, David Chavern, stated, “Google’s flatly anticompetitive dominance of the digital advertising ecosystem has stripped news publishers of important advertising revenue, which is critical for them to be able to continue to provide the high-quality journalism Americans depend on. Moving the lawsuit from Texas to California will unnecessarily delay the lawsuit – Google knows this and will want to put it off; however, news publishers don’t have that kind of time. We need action now.”

News publisher ad revenues have plummeted dramatically over the last two decades; between 2005 and 2018, news organizations saw their ad revenue fall by 70 percent. During that same period, Google’s ad revenue increased from approximately $6 billion to $116 billion, and Google’s market capitalization increased from approximately $100 billion to $1 trillion.

A copy of the News Media Alliance Declaration can be found here.

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The post Statement: Ad Tech Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Should Stay in Texas appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

golibo / iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

This post originally appeared on Medium. Click here to view the full article.

Disinformation and trust in news were key drivers of the tragic riots that took place on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. But as the crisis unfolded, advertisers paused many of their online ads, including those running alongside news content, a practice that ramped up during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is understandable that brands would pause ads in order not to appear insensitive, but advertisers’ continued fear of bad news events is having a negative impact on publishers beyond social and digital media and can be linked to the spread of violent, dangerous disinformation and lies.

Read the full post on Medium.

The post Flaws in Ad Tech Contribute to False Perceptions of Brand Safety, Ad Blocking, and Disinformation appeared first on News/Media Alliance.