Algorithms buy television ads

Television commands $74.5 billion in annual advertising spending, which dwarfs the $42.8 billion that goes to digital ads. Decades into this whole Internet thing, we’re still waiting for ad dollars to follow the eyeballs online. But those analog and digital ad budgets are beginning to blur thanks to “programmatic” buying.

Read more at Fortune

Video in demand

Some big providers, such as Google (which owns YouTube) and Netflix, one of the world’s largest video-steaming services, are exploring other ways to deliver films more reliably.Google has been perfecting a technique of pre-loading YouTube video clips for particular users before they even hit the play button.

Read more at the Economist

Fewer People Than Ever Are Watching TV

About 2.6 million households are now “broadband only,” meaning they don’t subscribe to cable or pick up a broadcast signal, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, released December 3. That figure comprises about 2.8% of total U.S. households and is more than double the 1.1% of households that were broadband only last year. At the same time, overall viewing of traditional TV is continuing its slow decline. The average person watched about 141 hours of live television per month in the third quarter of 2014, compared to 147 hours in the third quarter of 2013.

Read more at TIME

FCC Airwave Wireless Spectrum Auction

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has auctioned off AWS-3 frequencies, and total bids have reached more than $30 billion on Nov. 21, surpassing the reserve price of $10.1 billion.

Read more at Tech Times

There are now 3 billion internet users, mostly in rich countries

The UN's International Telecommunication's Union (ITU) has revealed that over 3 billion people are now connected to the internet, an increase of 6.6 percent over last year. Of the 4.3 billion people still not connected to the internet, 90 percent live in developing countries, with two-thirds of users in first-world countries.

Read more at Engadget

Internet of Things To Reach 25 Billion Units by 2020

The number of objects connected to the Internet and in use will grow 30 percent from this year to next, for a total of 4.9 billion, according to a new report from market research firm Gartner, and will hit 25 billion by 2020. Along with the growth in the number of devices, Gartner predicts an increase in total spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) to climb from $69.5 billion next year to $263 billion in 2020.

Read more at Campus Technology

the TV business is set for a profound upheaval

Unlike newspapers and the music industry, which saw their businesses sink with the rise of the internet, change has come gradually (for television). So far the TV industry has been a story of powerful and rich characters intent on keeping things just as they are. Network-owners and pay-television distributors made a pact not to sell each other out, and worked to preserve a business that has been extremely lucrative for all of them.

Advertisers and analysts have started to use the word “video” instead of “television”, because they consider online video an increasingly important part of their ad spending. The doomsaying may be premature. Viewing habits have changed, especially among the young, who watch more online video and time-shifted television, and often prefer to stare at a tablet than at a TV. But Americans continue to watch a remarkable amount of TV the old-fashioned way: around four-and-a-half hours a day, on average.

Many younger people will never shell out for traditional pay-television but advertisers have few alternatives to reach big audiences besides television, so for now have stuck with the medium in spite of flagging ratings. That should give TV bosses a bit of comfort for the upcoming season but they would do well not to lose sight of the wider narrative arc.

Read more in the Economist

Nielsen Will Soon Rate Everything on the Web, From Videos to Articles

Nielsen announced that it’s expanding its ratings system to all kinds of digital content to give both its creators and advertisers a more meaningful way to measure popularity in the online era.The most striking development in Adobe’s new system is that it’s designed for comparing disparate kinds of content. The new ratings, Nielsen says, can rank an online video next to a podcast next to an article.

Read more at Wired

China tries to restrict foreign entertainment online

China’s TV regulator said that, from April, any foreign series or film would need approval before being shown online. Chinese media say that regulators are also considering limiting the number of foreign series shown online to a specific proportion of total output. The new rules appear aimed at closing one of the biggest loopholes in China’s control of its media: on terrestrial TV, for example, foreign dramas are banned in prime time. Many are forbidden altogether.

Read more at The Economist

Surveillance is the advertising industry’s new business model

By monitoring the websites people visit, these companies can infer their location, income, family size, education, age, employment and much more. One data firm has compiled a billion profiles of potential customers, each with an average of 50 attributes. Consumers are lumped into “segments” such as “men in trouble”—presumed to have relationship problems because they are shopping for chocolates and flowers—or “burdened by debt: small-town singles”. When people visit websites, advertisers bid to show them precisely targeted ads. The auctions take milliseconds and the ad is displayed when the website loads.

Targeted advertising has advantages for consumers. It pays for many popular websites which people can enjoy free of charge. Relevant ads are probably more useful to consumers than irrelevant ones. But any business based on covert surveillance is vulnerable to a backlash.

Someone who is categorised by a data broker as a “motorcycle enthusiast” might find his rates for medical or accident insurance rise. “Men in trouble” might find it harder to get a job. Until objections were raised, OkCupid, a dating website, used to sell data about people’s drug and alcohol consumption. It is not going to be to anybody’s advantage to have such information about them widely available.

Read more at The Economist

TV is increasingly for the old

According to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research. ..The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago. Read more in the Washington Post

Study: Facebook news referrals are 'gaining' on Google

Traffic referrals to news sites from Facebook have "gained significant ground at the expense of Google" since the social networking platform changed its algorithm towards the end of last year, according to a study.

The report, entitled How efficient is the news? also showed that although sites with higher traffic have more reporters and, on average, publish more posts, this does not necessarily lead to more page views per story.

Read more here

In China, more people now access the internet from a mobile device than a PC

the latest report published by state-affiliated research organization China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that the percentage of Chinese users accessing the Internet via mobile grew to 83.4 percent as of June 2014, for the first time surpassing the percentage of users who access the internet via PCs (80.9 percent). New numbers released today also show that the overall number of new internet users is still climbing, even if the rate of growth may not be as fast as before.

Read more at The Next Week

Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data

Many tools that are based on big data can be easily gamed. For example, big data programs for grading student essays often rely on measures like sentence length and word sophistication, which are found to correlate well with the scores given by human graders. But once students figure out how such a program works, they start writing long sentences and using obscure words, rather than learning how to actually formulate and write clear, coherent text. Even Google’s celebrated search engine, rightly seen as a big data success story, is not immune to “Google bombing” and “spamdexing,” wily techniques for artificially elevating website search placement.

Read more at the New York Times

The 100 Most-Edited Wikipedia Articles

The top historical figures, per that report, are George W. Bush, Michael Jackson, Jesus, Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler.

Read more at FiveThirtyEight

The New York Times ponders the bold changes needed for the digital age

Every paper is rethinking its business strategy as readers keep abandoning print for digital, and in particular mobile, devices.

Other newspapers regard the Times as a farsighted digital pioneer. It now claims 760,000 digital subscribers, and in recent months it has completed a sleek online makeover and launched new mobile apps. So if the Times is anxious, they should be too. 

Read more at The Economist

Google Changes Logo - very slightly

Without fanfare, Google has changed its logo for only the third time in a decade – by just two pixels... From the company which famously a/b tested which shade of blue to use in adverts – and made $200m in the process – you can be sure the decision wasn't made lightly.

Read more at The Guardian

What takes our time online

@wsj by way of Romenseko

New York Times Internal Report Painted Dire Digital Picture

The report also calls for a profound rethinking of the newsroom’s independence from the rest of the company, in order to involve editorial leaders more deeply in technological decisions.

“The very first step … should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice — ‘The Wall’ and ‘Church and State’ — which project an enduring need for division. Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the report says.

Read more at Buzz Feed

The New York Times’ digital challenges, in 5 charts

Readership trends don’t favor the Times. Despite its dependence on print advertising, the paper is seeing its readers increasingly getting their news from the Internet. Half of all consumers went online for most of their news in 2013, while the percentage of those getting their news primarily from newspapers slid to under one-third. Despite that, the Times is stuck in a print-centric way of gathering and distributing the news.

Read more at Digiday