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End the year on a postivite note with Asia Partners report 2019 that elicits the success metrics and needs of the the tech business ecosystem in Southeast Asia.

Digital Media

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Recent reports indicate that brand advertising is in trouble. Short-term, disposable viewership is an unfortunate byproduct of the digital age. Sustainable brand-building advertising campaigns designed to create and reinforce brand loyalty will be a thing of the past.

Digital Media

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Vice, BuzzFeed, Vox and others forced to adjust models as rules of business change Winter has arrived for a new generation of digital media companies with missed revenue targets, an uncertain advertising environment and Facebook’s recent change of heart on news chilling a once hot sector. Vice Media, one of the most closely watched companies to have built a large, young audience, missed its 2017 revenue targets by $100m because of weaknesses at its Viceland cable channel and digital video operation. BuzzFeed, which specialises in news and entertainment — and has pushed heavily into video — also missed its targets for the year. Mashable, once among the most talked about online news operations, was recently sold for a knockdown price. The challenge facing these companies and other digital players like Vox Media, which owns digital brands such as Curbed and Recode, is how to diversify and prosper at a time when traditional media — namely television — is under extreme stress thanks to the explosion of streaming services including Netflix and Amazon Prime. An uncertain ad market has contributed to the fears, with Google and Facebook becoming an effective duopoly: the two companies accounted for 63 per cent of all US digital advertising in 2017, according to eMarketer, the research firm. Concerns have been amplified by recent changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm: it will no longer prioritise news sources and will survey its users to rank publications by their “trustworthiness”. The full impact of these changes has not yet been absorbed by the likes of BuzzFeed and Vox, which have used the social network to distribute their content. But analysts are not optimistic that the shift will be good news for many news providers. The site specialising in news and entertainment has built a big audience and won major financial backing from groups including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, valuing the company at $1.7bn. But after missing financial targets, the publisher announced late last year it would cut jobs and reorganise its business. Vox The company, whose brands include Curbed and Recode, is having to scale back the amount of content it publishes on Facebook, after the social network changed its algorithm to favour social interactions over information produced by publishers. CEO Jim Bankoff is optimistic that it can continue to drive traffic on the platform. “The news feed changes will have the most negative impact on publishers that rely primarily on Facebook for referral traffic and those companies that specialise in producing and distributing sponsored videos for Facebook,” says Christopher Vollmer, global entertainment and media advisory leader at PwC, the professional services firm. Larger publishers and “fan-driven brands”, whose active audiences drive more of their own engagement and support a greater diversity of revenue sources, “will be much less impacted by the change”, he adds. All of the new digital players are trying to find new ways to generate income. Vice reduced its reliance on digital advertising several years ago when it began its push into TV — a strategy that attracted investment from Walt Disney and TPG, the private equity group, at a valuation of $5.7bn in 2017. It now produces a nightly show for HBO, the Time Warner-owned premium cable channel, as well as a magazine series, and also has programming deals with several international broadcasters. But linear television is no panacea, as the company found to its cost last year when its Viceland channel struggled to attract big audiences. A spokesman said the company generated record revenue growth in 2017 and “produced hundreds of hours of programming for audiences around the world”. BuzzFeed was later to video but has established a studio operation in Los Angeles to develop formats for sale and production, while Vox recently struck a deal to produce a show for Netflix. Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox, acknowledged in a recent memo to employees that the Facebook algorithm changes were “unpredictable” but said they could ultimately be good for the company. They “will favour both trusted and local journalism”, he wrote, saying “even more people will be exposed to our work”. Vox will change how it works with Facebook, he added, saying, “we will cut back our native video programming” on the platform. Mashable Once one of the hottest and most talked about new media site, the publisher founded by Pete Cashmore was valued at $250m in late 2016. But after the company failed to achieve growth levels to match the lofty valuations, it was sold in December for a reported $50m to tech publisher Ziff Davis. Vice A company that started as a cool magazine in Montreal has become a behemoth valued at $5.7bn, after attracting investment from Walt Disney, WPP and others. But after expanding aggressively, Vice missed revenue targets by $100m in 2017 after ventures such as its Viceland channel struggled to attract big audiences. BuzzFeed, which has cut about 100 jobs as part of a restructuring, says it is “evolving to a multi-revenue model” that is less dependent on native digital advertising that has been the bedrock of its business for several years. There have also been informal conversations between Ben Smith, editor of BuzzFeed News, and Peter Lattman, managing director of the Emerson Collective, a non-profit group founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, about a possible investment or spin-off of BuzzFeed News. Jonah Peretti, chief executive of BuzzFeed, tells the Financial Times there are no plans to sell the company’s news division but does not rule out taking in investment. “News adds a lot of value in a bunch of different ways,” he says. He also points to the struggles that Facebook has had with fake news. “When these $500bn platforms are struggling to figure out news and we have the ability to be one of the few providers of real news that isn’t subscription-based and reaches a broad audience — and is digitally native — that is strategically attractive,” he says. “Long term, there is a lot of value there.” BuzzFeed and its peers have built big audiences largely on the back of traffic sent by Google and Facebook. But publishers seeking to build businesses by distributing their content on third-party platforms have not made much headway, according to a new report from Digital Content Next, a group that represents more than 70 major media groups including Vox Media, NBC and the FT. A survey of 20 DCN members found that revenue from Facebook, Google, Apple, Snapchat and other platforms increased 37 per cent to $10.1m in the first half of last year from the same period in 2016. But as a proportion of the publishers’ total digital revenue, there was little growth: it was 16 per cent in 2017 compared with 14 per cent the year before. “The revenue earned from distributed platforms does not yet match the investment,” says Jason Kint, the group’s chief executive. Google and Facebook together account for just 5 per cent of total publisher digital revenues, even as the two platforms are tightening their grip on the online advertising market. While digital media darlings are trying new business models, some stalwarts of traditional media have taken a different path. The New York Times recently said it was more than halfway to its goal of doubling digital sales to $800m by 2020, thanks to surging online subscriptions. The newspaper has more than 2.6m digital subscribers and overall subscription revenue passed $1bn for the first time last year — accounting for more than 60 per cent of total sales. Investors sent its stock up to levels it has not reached in more than a decade. The Times, like the FT, the Wall Street Journal and others, have shifted their commercial strategies from relying on advertisers to subscriptions, as they face the reality of declining print sales and the steep challenge of competing with Google and Facebook in the digital ad market. For old and new players alike, the evolving media landscape has not stopped posing problems.

Digital Media

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Attention has become the most valuable currency in the media world, and new platforms are taking the place of the old media giants.

Digital Media

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Every business today is in constant competition for today’s most valuable resource — attention. And you are competing against 24–7 global…

Digital Media

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BI PRIME: The media industry is officially out of love with Facebook. In a memo, Vox Media says it will focus on partners that help make the publisher money

Digital Media

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Mark Zuckerberg moved fast and broke shit, lots of shit. He broke journalism, by radically deflating the value of the digital advertising on which the livelihood of media now depends; he broke the reading habits of his users, the lab rats in his grand experiment, by constantly manipulating them and feeding them an endless stream of dreck to jack up their “engagement” with his site; and in a way, he broke American democracy, by sitting on his hands as a foreign adversary exploited his platform and by creating the world’s most efficient vehicle for spreading political lies and agitprop. Now, with the announcement that he’s largely stripping the News Feed of news, he’s breaking his own site, too. This radical overhaul of Facebook is a concession of defeat. At some point in Facebook’s rise—its march past the 2-billion-user mark—the realization dawned: Facebook is now the most powerful publisher in the business, the mother of all media gatekeepers. Initially, that realization dawned on everybody except apparently Facebook itself, perhaps a willed state of ignorance. The company described its product as a mere “tool,” and protested that it played no role in organizing the news that it broadcasts, as if it weren’t imposing its values on the News Feed, as if is weren’t providing a sense of hierarchy to the mass of posts it splays. That description, which trumpeted Facebook’s passivity and neutrality, could never really sustain close scrutiny. And after the election of Donald Trump, Facebook has received no end of that.

Digital Media

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French conglomerate Vivendi hopes to usher in the next era in digital video via a Netflix-like app built specifically for mobile

Digital Video

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Manas says platforms are blurring the line between media and retail while retailers are behaving like media.

Digital Media

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Creative Agencies are Failing to Deliver People-Based Marketing The traditional agency model has encouraged the separation of Creative and Media - different processes, different cultures, different P&Ls. And over the years, they’ve never really shown much love for each other. Creative has often looked at Media as the boring afterthought of advertising, and Media has usually seen Creative as the spoiled child who always needs to get their own way. Over the past decade, Media agencies and their business models have been blown up by digital marketing complexity, auction pricing, technology and powerful new arrivals such as Google and Facebook. Meanwhile, Creative agencies have hardly changed at all. That was Don Draper’s suicide.

Digital Media

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This is a subject I have been thinking about for a long time. It’s the reason I’ve been such a success. And the truth is, there is no…

Digital Media

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As more video providers finding audiences directly through apps and the web -- and away from pay-TV-based packages -- we're seeing the emergence of more..

Digital Media

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This is a subject I have been thinking about for a long time. It’s the reason I’ve been such a success. And the truth is, there is no…

Content Marketing

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There's no need to fear how artificial intelligence, programmatic and other technologies are disrupting the media landscape. Instead, we should welcome challenges to the status quo and old habits, Sue Unerman explains.

Digital Media

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Marketers, public relations companies and advertising agencies are increasingly using social media to carefully place messages in front of journalists and media professionals.

Digital Media

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In the old media model, publishers and broadcasters did the hard work of gathering, creating, publishing and distributing content. They paid the staff to collect and/or create the content, built and managed the broadcast facilities, ran the printing presses, distributed the content. They literally did everything. They monetized their efforts by selling ad space alongside the content they created and distributed. They did the work and therefore reaped the rewards. And as they owned the means to collect and disseminate content, they were the gatekeepers of information in the old media age. If you wanted to communicate a message to the public, your only real choice was to pay them to distribute it to the audience they had built via the tools that they had created. The promise of the internet and digital media was that it would tear down the old media barriers and democratize and facilitate the free flow of information. “Everyone is now a publisher”, we were told. But instead we have traded the old gatekeepers for new gatekeepers, with a key difference: the new gatekeepers don’t create any content. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and others merely provide a platform, which the public willingly fills with content for them. The platform then monetizes by showing ads next to that content. We are doing the heavy lifting and they are reaping the rewards of our efforts. We've traded the old media gatekeepers for new ones that don't create any content … we do. We are doing all of the work. They are making all of the money. It’s your news feed. It’s your audience. It’s your effort. So why are you not getting paid? What if there was a platform that enabled anyone to make money from their own social media feed? A place where anyone can quickly and easily publish, create pages, build an audience and earn revenue. Where individuals, businesses and organizations can manage their end-to-end content marketing strategy and use promotions and incentives to build an audience of engaged and interested people, and freely communicate with the audience they have built. A true publishing, marketing, promotion and communication ecosystem where everyone is a publisher and everyone has full control of their own content. Now there is. www.trunqd.com

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