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For decades, media has been measured by reach: How many people read the paper, listen to a radio broadcast or watch a show? In the smartphone-dominated world — where any media company can access almost anyone at anytime — the fight is shifting to dominating a person's attention.
All of this creates a measurement conundrum, especially around video (more on that below, too). With Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others jumping into the business of original content, there is no way to accurately measure who is watching what, where and for how long. Tech standards for how they measure video consumption are very different from television, and they're often not vetted and verified. Snapchat, for example, measures a video view as any time a video is opened, while Nielsen counts video views on linear (and now digital) TV as active engagement for at least a minute.
Bottom line: "What people want to combine is digital video and TV metrics," says Jane Clarke, Managing Director of The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. "And the current data sets aren't always clean."
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Facebook usage among people aged 12 to 17 will decline for the first time this year, eMarketer estimates. Meanwhile, eMarketer's latest forecast for the first time has Snapchat beating both Instagram and Facebook in terms of total users aged 12 to 17 and 18 to 24.
Why it matters: This marks the first time eMarketer has predicted a decline in Facebook usage for any age group, and usage among people 24 and younger will grow more slowly than previously forecasted.
Writing on the wall: Forbes headline from February — Facebook Users Posted A Third Less Content In 2016 Than In 2015.
Publishers take notice: BuzzFeed announced Tuesday it will launch new Snapchat Discover Publisher Stories for its Tasty and Nifty brands in early September. Both brands started as Facebook pages.
A better standard is needed to hold tech companies accountable that are moving into the media and entertainment space.
The media industry's standards group, the MRC (Media Rating Council), is gathering comments for a proposed "Audience Measurement Standard" that will be finalized and introduced in Q3, MRC CEO George Ivie tells Axios. The standard will provide more powerful metrics, such as progress through the video ad coupled with in-target audience performance.
Audit pressure rising: Earlier this year, Google and Facebook both agreed to be audited by the MRC after reports of inflated video metrics received pushback from ad buyers. Snapchat received a lot of pressure to audit ahead of its IPO, but has yet to do so.
Facebook, YouTube and Apple: Sources tell the The New York Times that Facebook plans to spend $3 million per episode on a drama and YouTube will spend up to $2 million an episode on a comedy, and more than $3 million on a drama. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Apple will pour $1 billion into original content.
Meanwhile, some legacy media companies are spending less: Viacom CEO Robert M. Bakish said on last quarter's earnings call: "MTV will have 60% more original hours versus 2017 and it will actually spend less. That includes more live programming."
Millennials are moving away from plain texting to communicating through visuals, according to Nielsen's latest millennial media report.
Plain text messaging:
Visual messaging:
They're also more likely to communicate in groups:
1:1 messaging:
Group messaging:
Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures are negotiating a deal with Apple and Comcast to offer audiences digital versions of movies two weeks after their theater releases, Bloomberg reports. The theater chain and studio businesses have been unable to reach a deal that would let studios distribute more expensive ($30+) digital movies to viewers at home shortly after their release in theaters.
Why it matters: The debate over the how long theaters have to exclusively distribute movies is heating up. Studios were hoping to work with the theater chains on a revenue deal, but now seem to be charging ahead without their blessing, despite the fact that theaters still hold power distributing movies and driving revenue. Noticeably missing from the reported negotiations is Disney, which announced it would build its own entertainment streaming package in 2019.
Bottom line: The movie business is becoming more reliant on digital distribution than ever (shocking). Cinema revenues are rising, but are being outpaced by digital video rentals and the DVD business is dying, as expected. "Theaters have to focus on providing an experience that goes well beyond what's available at home — hence all the focus on luxury seating, 4DX, live event programming, VR, and better food and beverage options," says Chris Vollmer, Global Advisory Leader, Entertainment and Media at PwC.
New data from Northeastern University shows a correlation between a journalist's social network and the content they produce. The data scientists that conducted the study found a reasonably clear relationship between the ideological leaning of the accounts a journalist follows on Twitter and the news content he or she produces.
Note: The methodology for determining ideological slant of journalists comes from the researchers at Northeastern, and is based on the articles journalists write. They first extracted phrases indicative of a left or right leaning ideology, and then they score journalists based on the number of times they express these terms in their articles. They discuss each of these pieces in more detail here.
ICYMI: The L.A. Times cut its masthead amid a digital-first transformation yesterday. Former Yahoo executive Ross Levinsohn has been named publisher and veteran Chicago Sun-Times publisher/editor Jim Kirk will become the interim Editor-in-chief. The L.A. Times is owned by Tronc, which has been trying to transform legacy newsrooms to digital to keep up with the speed of innovation by East Coast heavyweights like NYT and Washington Post.
For your radar: Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the hashtag. The first hashtag ever was tweeted as a recommendation for Twitter to create groups by former Google designer Chris Messina and it was #barcamp. Twitter initially rejected the idea of using hashtags, saying they were for "nerds." #lol