This week’s Media Briefing recaps the major events from summer 2023 and how those trends are bound to impact the back half of the year.
It was a hot summer of activity within the digital media space as publishers experimented with new technology, rode the social media rollercoaster and looked for ways to offset the hits to ad revenue. As autumn approaches, all that excitement is bound to bubble over into the back half of the year.
It seemed like a good time to catalog the major events from summer 2023 – from the introduction of generative AI in newsrooms to Twitter being rebranded to X – and draw some throughlines about what it all added up to.
Below is a recap of how the digital media industry spent the summer:
AI comes for the newsroom
Publishers’ newsrooms began experimenting with generative AI technology even more this summer, from attempting to write better headlines to creating interactive content. But a line has yet to be drawn in the sand for how much integration is too much when it comes to this tech.
During BuzzFeed’s Q2 earnings call, the publisher’s leadership team spent a substantial amount of time talking about how it doubled the volume of its AI-powered quizzes, which led to a threefold increase in audience engagement in the form of views and more time spent on page. Those metrics are now helping BuzzFeed to sell advertisers like Sprite, Serta and Walmart on sponsoring these experiments with the new technology, according to president Marcela Martin.
Meanwhile, other publishers have been testing AI from an efficiency standpoint, hoping to help streamline reporters’ tasks in order to allow them to spend more time chasing leads and writing stories.
But concerns are brewing among newsroom union members regarding where the line will be drawn with AI technology. Their concern is that if AI tools become too efficient will lead to layoffs. Media execs also have concerns around intellectual property and whether or not feeding articles or reported information into chatbots will lead to the large language models taking that content and using it to inform the output to general user bases.
Practicing sustainable programmatic advertising
At the beginning of the summer, publishers began thinking more about the impact of programmatic advertising on their carbon footprints, thanks to a flurry of advertisers realizing that there are financial incentives to prioritizing sustainability within the digital ad ecosystem.
Though it’s still a somewhat opaque thing to measurement, the programmatic bid stream does contribute a sizable portion of a publisher’s overall carbon emissions. And during the early summer months, strategies like traffic shaping were cited among steps for publishers to take in order to reduce the amount of computational power required to operate the programmatic market, thus reducing the amount of carbon emitted in the process.
Made-for-advertising sites are the latest villain
It was a bad summer to be a made-for-advertising publisher.
Also known as MFAs, this subset of publishers were criticized wildly by the ad market for siphoning off a substantial portion of dollars spent on programmatic ads but not delivering substantive KPIs that indicate those dollars yield positive impacts on an advertiser’s business.
Between September 2022 and January 2023, MFAs accounted for 21% of the audited 35 billion impressions, equalling 15% of the $123 million spent by 21 advertisers on programmatic ads, according to a report by the Association for National Advertisers that was published in June.
That stat sparked widespread outrage, concern and debate amongst marketers, leading to a wave of SSPs, holding companies and ad tech firms removing MFAs from their programmatic business operations.
The social shake-up
Plenty occurred within social media circles this summer, with Twitter rebranding to X and Meta launching its X competitor app, Threads.
But publishers took a particular hit when it came to both traffic and revenue. Referral traffic from X declined steeply, as did traffic from Facebook. Meanwhile, Pink News reported a decrease in revenue earned from ads run on its social accounts, which could be a result of platforms like Snapchat turning their attention towards creators in an effort to lure them back with thick checks, leaving less on the table for publishers.
Amid all that, publishers began experimenting with Threads. Despite Meta execs insisting the platform wasn’t going to be used for news, news publishers like CBS News still flocked to the social platform. And for Wes Bonner, head of social at BDG, this was the first time that a Twitter competitor actually convinced his team to create a dedicated strategy for a text-based social platform.
Subscription revenue floats the ship
Advertising dollars started to come back a bit by the end of summer, but in the early summer months, publishers saw revenue growth largely within their digital subscription businesses.
This was mainly due to a strategy shift to deprioritize pure volume and instead try to increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) using bundles, rate increases and annual subscriptions over monthly.
To further refresh your memory about the top trends from this summer, check out the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast where myself and Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson discuss the standout events from the summer, beyond the scope of digital publishing.
What we’ve heard
“As much as we don’t want to grade our homework, we also don’t want to be in a tiny little microcosm with someone else doing it. If we can’t get agencies and buyers to all have some sort of shared currency of measurement, it’s not going to help them. That’s why everybody fell in love with empty calories [like viewability] because they’re easy to sit on the couch and mindlessly eat.”
— Deborah Brett, global chief business officer of Condé Nast, discussing the industry shift towards measuring ad campaign effectiveness through attention metrics.
The media and entertainment industry experienced a 1,065% increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from Q1 to Q2 2023, according to a new report by Zayo, a fiber network and internet service provider.
Anna Claiborne, svp of packet and product software engineering at Zayo, pointed to the shift to remote work during the pandemic that has led to more potential vulnerabilities for attacks. Other reasons for why media and entertainment companies are targeted include bad actors’ desire to get their hands on intellectual property or to make a political statement by attacking news organizations, she said.
DDoS attacks – the most common form of cyberattacks – occur when a computer server is flooded with traffic and blocks people from getting through to a site, Claiborne said. The size of a DDoS attack can affect how long it takes to stop it. The media and entertainment industry experienced the largest attacks, with an average attack size of 3.5 Gbps, according to the Zayo report.
The biggest impact to publishers from cyberattacks is financial loss, stolen data and reputational damage, Claiborne said. Shutting down a site can mean losing as much as millions of dollars a day, she added.
Some recent large-scale cyberattacks on publishers include an attack on The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose newspaper operations were disrupted in May. In December, a ransomware attack on The Guardian accessed personal employee data and forced The Guardian to close its offices for more than a month. And a hacking scheme that hit Fast Company last September kept the website down for over a week.
“It’s becoming more and more prevalent, for sure,” said a publisher’s chief technology officer, who exchanged anonymity for candor. Anecdotally, the CTO said they are seeing an increase in attacks, especially “smaller [intrusions or attacks] that are not made public.”
For more on how publishers can protect themselves from cyberattacks – from multi-factor authentication to penetration tests – read our story here. — Sara Guaglione
Numbers to know
11: The number of employees impacted by Texas Tribune’s first-ever layoffs in the company’s 14-year history. Two podcasts, Brief and TribCast, were also put on hiatus as a result.