Mass media unite to fight online giants

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Social networks, search engines and other Internet services have become effective channels for disseminating information from the point of view of advertisers. But the earnings of publications and other media representatives also depend on the loyalty of advertisers.

And since Facebook and Google began to actively post news materials on Facebook Instant Articles and Google News, the situation has escalated even more. Advertisers felt that there was no point in placing advertisements on media sites if an advertising campaign could be made more efficient by ordering it from Facebook or Google.
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Instant Articles was launched in May 2015. After that, Facebook attracted several hundred publications worldwide to use their materials.

The Instant Articles platform is designed for users of mobile devices so that they can quickly open the materials downloaded by the media without leaving the social network.

After that, the media realized that they had a chance to receive monetary compensation for it as a consolation prize in connection with the loss of advertisers.

Unexpected turn

But in June, Facebook decided to push media materials in the News Feed to the background. The company gave top priority updates from friends and relatives.

According to representatives of Facebook, they thus took into account the "wishes" of users: the number of reposts decreased almost twice. Because of this decision, the referral traffic going to the sites of publications decreased. However, the same can be said about the income of advertisers. However, in the case of a fall in user interest in the news feed, the results would only get worse.



For publications, the situation is contradictory: on the one hand, now the social network is not trying to claim the role of the media; on the other hand, there are losses due to a drop in traffic, at least in the short term. Publications that consider their presence on social networks to be profitable will focus on other partners - Instagram, Snapchat and Google News. This will allow the media to attract new users.

Some advertisers will also have to think about changing the site. But, blessing, they have Facebook - you don’t need to go far: the same, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Live, Facebook Messenger.

In addition, Facebook Finance Director David Weiner said that starting from 2017, the amount of advertising that the social network will show to each user will not be a significant factor in forecasting the company's revenue. According to the Recode publication, Facebook, which earned $ 6.2 billion in advertising in the second quarter of 2016, is running out of advertising space (talking about the social network itself, and not all sites owned by Facebook).

Ideally, Facebook should increase the number of users and create more effective advertising that will bring in more money, the publication said.

Google principles

If someone doubted the good intentions of Google, the company dotted i about its advertising monetization strategy. She reflected her position in a special message :

Today, it would seem, you can buy everything. Why can't advertisers simply pay to ensure that information about their business appears in higher positions in search results? The answer is simple: we want to be trusted. Therefore, Google always strives to provide users with the most relevant results. They reflect the preferences of the entire audience, not ours and our partners.

Advertising on Google has a corresponding mark, so it is easy to distinguish it from other information. By paying more, advertisers can improve the position of their ads in relation to competitors' ads, but this cannot be done in search results. Moreover, advertising is shown on Google’s website only if it matches the user's request, which means it can be really useful for him.

Therefore, publications have a chance that their quality materials will occupy high positions in the issue. And this will ensure their attractiveness to advertisers.

Advertising monetization of publications and big data

Despite the differences, the German editions have teamed up to compete with Google and Facebook, which control the distribution of 85% of all advertising in the world. Axel Springer, Gruner + Jahr and Bertelsmann Group began using the single platform Emetriq, created by the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom.

“German publishers and trading houses find it difficult to create competition because they do not have enough data about their readers and customers. Thus, only by combining efforts, they will be able to get closer to such giants as Google and Facebook, ”said Daniel Neuhaus, CEO of Emetriq.

Each publisher has a certain amount of information about users in terms of targeting, segmentation and behavioral factors. But advertisers' requests are constantly growing: they need to reach the audience segment they need at the same time across multiple sites.

A separate media outlet and even a publishing house alone cannot solve this problem. Modern media need big data, but often they do not have so much finance and specialists with sufficient technical expertise in analyzing big data.



The project is at an early stage of development, but 1000 sites, including the largest tabloid Bild, have begun to exchange data files. Axel Springer, Gruner + Jahr, Bertelsmann Group and Der Speigel forgot their old enmity and began sharing valuable information about their readers with each other.

“Our biggest competitors are not conservative publishers. Together we must unite our forces against Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, ”says Carsten Schweke, general manager of Media Impact, a sales house owned by Axel Springer.

“The concept of Emetriq is to help people be innovative wherever data is needed, and to make it a reality,” said Neuhaus. According to him, the fact that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple collect data and keep it at home without sharing with anyone “will ultimately kill innovation”.

How it works

Raw information from publishers enters a single Emetriq platform. It sifts and clears data to create highly targeted, high-quality audience segments. On the basis of these segments, publishers create better quality promotional offers. Publishers can select a particular segment to run through their own data management systems (DMP).

For the use of data segments, each publisher pays a fixed amount of between € 4,000 ($ 5,000) and € 15,000 ($ 17,000). The price depends on the page impressions on the sites and the amount of data used from the general “bank” when displaying advertisements.

Such data may include social and demographic information about users, data about their behavior on the Internet, purchases made, as well as the semantic core and context of websites.

All segments created by Emetriq are reconciled with the consumer panels of the GfK research team. Deutsche Telekom may add its own data in exchange for the opportunity to be the only advertiser with access to them.

Daniel Neuhaus claims that they managed to achieve an accuracy rate of 87%.

Merging data as a new trend

In 2010, the seven largest publishing houses in the country, including Axel Springer, created the joint venture AdAudience. It is engaged in sales of advertising on the principle Programmatic direct.

Many commercial brands engaged in direct sales, too, come to the consolidation of data. For example, at the end of last year, the British partner network Skimlinks launched a “data cooperative” called Audiences by Skimlinks, in which more than 55,000 publishers and about 20,000 sites of retailer companies participate.

The association provides them with the opportunity to target and retarget customers, to receive information about their consumer interests and the time when they are ready to make purchases, as well as what devices and equipment they already have in their homes.

According to the creators of the project, led to an "almost incredible" increase in conversion.

Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks: "The more data we have, the more accurate we can be." According to her, the Audiences by Skimlink project is also unique in that the participants in this “cooperative” see “all the way from content to a commercial transaction,” while other data providers, as a rule, have only data from retailers or only customer data. intentions.



The American company Bombora monitors search queries, downloads of documents, webinars, registration at exhibitions, viewing articles and blogs, video consumption, likes and reposts in social networks and other evidence of the activity of entrepreneurs who are looking for certain goods and products.
In this project, Forbes, Aberdeen Group and about 2500 other sites that provide data on more than a billion monthly interactions with their visitors shared data. This information is used for marketing and sales, it is provided based on targeting to interested business companies.

Bombora claims that it was their company that became the “first aggregated source of behavioral data for B2B, which created“ the first of its kind “data cooperative” of premium class media companies. ”

The participants of the Pangea Alliance project also decided to combine their data for successful advertising targeting. Pangea Alliance was created last year by the world's leading media companies - The Guardian, CNN International, Financial Times, Reuters and The Economist.

“Data is crucial,” said Tim Gentry, head of project Pangea, director of revenue for Guardian News & Media, said. According to him, exchanging primary information about their users, media companies create "unique and attractive audience segments." For example, subscription information from one publisher may be combined with behavioral information received from another. As a result, a detailed user profile is created, for which advertisers are willing to pay.