Joe Mandese, in Online Media Daily writes that ads developed for digital platforms are reversing the historic model of editorial being a conduit to distribute advertising, advertising is becoming a means for distributing content. In the article headlined “Advertising Jumps The Shark” he reports a company named Kontera has unveiled a “”content activation platform’, powered by a sophisticated semantic technology it developed that crawls millions of professionally produced and user-generated pages of content on the Web and associates, and filters them based on their contextual relevance to a brand’s advertising message.” Kontera’s president says “the ads need to follow rigorous business rules protecting the rights of copyright holders and individual users posting comments and content on social media platforms.”
“The Fold from the Washington Post” is a new nightly news cast designed specifically for Google TV and Android devices, Gavin O’Malley reports in Online Media Daily. He says the 15-minute show will serve as a modest platform for Post reporters to deliver timely news and analysis. Viewers can watch the entire show or jump to the news they choose. The Fold is one of several cross-platform forays by the Post. . . .This cooperation between Google and legacy journalism reflects Google’s considerable efforts to make peace with the newspaper industry, as recounted by Megan Garber in an article for The Atlantic: “Google News at 10 – How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry.” Not the least of the incentives for making peace is the traffic Google sends to news outlets worldwide, “more than 4 billion clicks each month” Garber reports.
Facebook on the other hand, may not bode well on the news front: A pundit cited in Britain’s Media Digest Sept. 19 believes a Facebook-owned news application is “inevitable” and “will funnel news to you from a variety of sources based on data it already knows about you and your friends. Readers won’t realize they’re consuming news from an echo chamber designed by Facebook’s feed algorithm. And just as Facebook reports a billion members worldwide an analyst reports in Business Insider that the company is dealing with seriously declining usage and Erik Sass, reports in Social Media Daily, a recent survey projects to millions of that billion being children while another study of Facebook users shows being “liked” can inflate feelings of self-worth and a corresponding lack of self-control. To be fair, Sass notes other studies have identified other affects on some Facebook users and that it likely has no affect on large numbers of them.