Digital disruptions revolutionizing news and advertising in 2014 and beyond

Will editors replace a newsworthy story, with content dictated by ad technology? It’s a menacing thought, but it may happen faster than you think. And if it does, the bastions of breaking news will typically determine a good story by its potential eCPM value (revenue generated from every 1000 views per page), and less by its perceived news value.

Everything is about to get a whole lot more scientific. Our traffic obsessed culture will be increasingly fueled by digital ad technology.

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Real time digital news and the impact of advertising technology

The right content will be dictated by the right ad, at the right time, in the right context. What this means is that your future release will become a story, if the ads it can potentially match, will grab enough eyeballs. The shift could make the already sullied line between news and advertising, even more blurred.

The Huffington Post is one of the first to clasp real time digital trends and is ripe for the next step. The giant news aggregator is built on a foundation of constantly tracking what drives the most traffic. A report from Columbia school of journalism stated, already today, the Huffington Post has more resources allocated to audience valuation than to content creation.

In many online news sites, writers are asked to keep an eye on dashboards, tracking stories and headlines of real-time performances. Data analysis is fast becoming an essential skill for editors and content creators. They constantly need to review what “clicks” and what doesn’t and adjust their stories accordingly. Traffic is the new currency and bonuses are being tied to tracked performance.

Brand journalism leaps into mainstream publishing –

At first brand journalism was all about brands creating content ripe for viral marketing. Then publishers such as Forbes launched their “Brand Voice” program – a channel for spreading branded thought-leadership content.

A few days ago the Guardian published a story on its new branded content division dubbed the ‘Guardian Lab’.

It was officially launched with a seven-figure Unilever deal. The rickety cosmetic term refers to commercial, branded content created to co-exist more naturally in the Guardian’s online news pages.

These new native advertising formats are shedding an interesting light on where digital media is heading. It highlights publishers’ desperate pledge for new revenue models.

In the race to trace eyeballs, track online visitor behavior and respond to trends, publishers relied on tools such as Google Analytics, Alexa, a toolbar based on ranking and reach and Quantcast, which shows statistics on social popularity.

But a new set of tools are emerging to help the media industry respond to real time activity. Companies such as Parsely, Chartbeat and Visual Revenue are offering content writers and editors tools to act on events as they roll out.

These tools are creating a new niche in the real time data tool box. Publishers can track how long users are reading a specific piece of content, where they go afterwards, and what articles typically convert new users to regular ‘monetizable’ visitors.

Could these new tools help to resuscitate ethical journalism practices?

Tony Haile, the CEO of Chartbeat, claims that when you measure visitors’ behavior in real time, you can simply grasp what factors contribute to their chances of becoming a return visitor. Interestingly they found that people who read an article for three minutes return twice as frequently as those who just spend one minute perusing a piece.

This ‘engaged time’ factor is a metric that publishers should be addressing now. Impressions data is too simplistic and a potential advertising trap. They need to measure in real time through keystrokes, mouse movements, scrolling, navigation, video data and smart phone usage. The outcome could reverse the publishing trend managed by brands and let quality content dictate advertising spend.