Here’s a round-up of the top digital media news this week:
Journalism.co.uk profiles the Boston Globe’s Instagram wall, which displays every Instagram photo posted in the local area. Journalists uses the wall, called Snap, as a source for stories. The wall came about through a partnership with the Globe and MIT Media Lab. The images are geocoded and pop up on a map of Boston. It was launched this spring.
The BBC Trust is being asked to reconsider how it goes about recruiting the new director general of the BBC, MediaGuardian reports. A proposal up on change.org is asking for a more transparent process, stating that it “will be critical in securing public trust after a series of mismanaged scandals at the broadcaster.”
Is the Huffington Post for sale? No, well, not exactly. “It’s not on the cards. AOL is the owner. But I cannot stand here and say, some day, ‘AOL will not sell it if the price is high enough or there is a better owner’. But, right now, AOL is a good owner for Huffington Post and we’ll keep it,” AOL Huffington Post Media Group international SVP Jimmy Maymann told paidContent’s Robert Andrews.
The future of online advertising is “programmatic buying,” which allows advertisers to follow individual customers online, The New York Times reports. These ads are “fast-paced, algorithmic bidding systems that target individual consumers rather than the aggregate audience publishers serve up.”
Image: Snap, the Instagram wall at the Boston Globe, via Journalism.co.uk
Media giant News Corp is reported to be buying a 40 percent stake in the YES Network, a regional group of stations partly owned by the New York Yankees baseball team.
The deal means an increase in the cost of cable, and “prove[s] once again how the price of live sports will keep going up in the age of cord-cutting,” paidContent reported today. The network is the Yankee’s game provider for about 15 million homes in the northeastern part of the United States.
YES stands for Yankees Entertainment and Sports. It was founded in 2002 by former cable executives Leo Hindery and Amos Hostetter and is estimated to be worth about US$3 billion.
“COO Chase Carey talks a lot about sports as tremendously valuable in a fragmented media world where live viewing is on the wane. While he dismisses rumors that News Corp. wants to go up against giant ESPN, Fox Sports is big and he'd like it to keep it growing,” the Chicago Tribune explained.
As it once again publishes the number of government requests it receives, “one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google announced today.
This is the sixth time the online giant has published its Transparency Report. It started in early 2010, and does so twice a year. The data released today has been updated with the requests it received form January to June 2012.
Requests from government entities to remove content was mostly stagnant from 2009 to 2011, but “it’s spiked in this reporting period.” In this first half of this year, there were 1,791 requests from government officials globally to remove 17,746 pieces of content.
In addition, “government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts,” Google explained in a blog post.
“Governments’ growing interest in Google users can be explained in part by the fact that more people are online, but the numbers suggest the pace of surveillance is growing faster than the rate of connectivity. Also take note that while many of these requests relate to legitimate court orders or police investigations, others are illegitimate and Google does not comply with all the requests. In the last report, for instance, the company refused to give the government of Canada the identity of a YouTube subscriber who peed on his passport and flushed it down the toilet,” Gigaom noted.
Images: Google's Official Blog
Everyone knows online users’ attention spans are short, but a new study shows most won’t wait much more than two seconds for an online video to start.
After two seconds of watching the buffer sign, viewers get frustrated and begin to leave. Each additional second of waiting results in a 5.8 percent increase in the rate of leaving, according to the study, authored by Ramesh K. Sitaraman of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and S. Shunmuga Krishnan, of Akamai Technologies.
But that’s not all – a user who experiences wait time on a video is also more likely to play less of the video and also less likely to come back to the site.
“Further, we show that a moderate amount of interruptions can decrease the average play time of a viewer by a significant amount. A viewer who experiences a rebuffer delay equal to 1% of the video duration plays 5% less of the video in comparison to a similar viewer who experienced no rebuffering. Finally, we show that a viewer who experienced failure is 2.32% less likely to revisit the same site within a week than a similar viewer who did not experience a failure,” the study explains.
The study collected and analysed a data set of more than 23 million video playbacks from 6.7 million unique viewers who watched a total of 216 million minutes of 102,000 videos over 10 days.
Twitter will add photo filters to compete with the Facebook-owned Instagram, The New York Times reported.
In upcoming months, the microblogging site will update its mobile applications to allow users to add filters to photos being shared on Twitter, all without using Instagram.
“As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock,” Nick Bilton explained on the NY Times Bits blog.
TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff pointed out that “Twitter needs to embed more media on its site and rely on third parties less.”
Google, meanwhile, is having less fun with online images. It is being sued by a French man for invasion of privacy after he was photographed by Google’s Street View urinating in his own yard, PC World reported.
Indi travel publisher TRVL built its own software to publish its iPad-only magazine, and is now giving away the software to help others create their own publications, paidContent reported.
The software, called PRSS, launched last week. It allows users to drag and drop Web objects to design pages, and stores magazines on Amazon’s cloud hosts, thus saving on distribution.
Creators of the tool are Amsterdam-based entrepreneur Michel Elings and photographer and writer Jochem Wijnands.
“Distribution costs for Woodwing, InDesign and all the others are so expensive. People were downloading terabytes of data from our magazines, this wasn’t cheap to us. We also had to pay Apple a 30 percent cut and Adobe takes a 30 percent – you have only 40 percent left!” Elings told paidContent.
The tool is currently for producing a publication optimised for the iPad only, but the iPhone and other iOS devices will follow soon, PRSS explained in an online announcement.
A freelance journalist is hoping news outlets will be interested in his new service to create visual interactives, Journalism.co.uk reported Friday.
Benji Lanyado, the creator of the Reddit Edit, created a template he can “build on top of” to make custom visual interactive articles.
“The next level is to make images interactive,” he said, giving the Boston Globe’s “big picture” as an example.
The interactive articles can be built from scratch in one to four days and dropped natively into a news outlet’s site or embedded like a YouTube video. Video, audio and everything else can be customised, and they work on both mobile devices and tablets too, benjilabs.com explained.
Newspaper circulation in the United States is staying the same, as readers shift from print to digital and even begin paying for online content, the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers show.
Circulation was about the same in the six months ending Sept. 30 as is was in the same period in 2011. However, paid digital increased to 15.3 percent of the total, compared to 9.8 percent in the period last year.
More than 300 papers now charge for their digital content, including 70 of Gannett’s 80 community titles and McClatchy’s 30 launching paywalls as well, Poynter noted. Many publishers, including The New York Times, are also increasing print subscription rates, taking losses in print numbers in order to get equal or greater revenue.
Branded editions, which are products owned by newspapers, “such as commuter, community, alternative-language or Sunday-Select type newspapers, make up 5.6 percent of newspapers’ total average circulation, up from 4.2 percent in September 2011,” according to ABC.
Digital circulation includes tablet or smartphone apps, PDF replicas, metered or restricted-access websites or e-reader editions, ABC explained.
Image: Justanimcgirl
The Huffington Post on Thursday launched an iPad app that can be viewed on your television screen – a trick that may lead to tablets competing with TVs as the focal point of living rooms, GigaOm reported.
The HuffPost Live app is a mix of entertainment and social media, and is the app for the online TV network of the same name. The network streams video and is aimed at readers who can join conversations via webcam. When live broadcasting is not on, highlights are aired, The Next Web explained.
“On its own, the HuffPo Live app is not extraordinary. Where it could be a real game changer, however, is the fact that the app can be slung onto a TV set using Apple TV. This means that Huffington Post has a chance to control not just a living room’s second screens but also the primary one as well,” according to GigaOm. “In practice, this could occur if groups of friends watch the presidential elections on HuffPo Live and share comments in real time via their iPad — comments that would appear on their TV. If this comes to pass, HuffPo Live will have created what amounts to a walled garden extraordinaire in living rooms across the land.”
The app is available on Apple’s App store for free download.
The Telegraph has launched a metered paywall for users accessing its website outside the United Kingdom, Journalism.co.uk reported today.
Users can access 20 articles for free each month before they must buy a subscription for £1.99 per month.
More than two years of planning have gone into the metered paywall system at Telegraph Media Group, which says two-thirds of its online audience comes from outside the United Kingdom, according to MediaGuardian. The site had 2.7 million average daily users in October, up 34 percent year-on-year.
Within the UK, Telegraph.co.uk is the third-most popular national newspaper website, following guardian.coluk and Mail Online, Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show. There are “currently no plans to introduce a meter model for UK readers,” the Telegraph stated, according to Journalism.co.uk.
Users outside the UK will also be able to buy a £9.99 monthly subscription, which also provides access to both the daily and Sunday iPad editions, The Drum explained.
Image: Telegraph subscriptions page
