Apple allowing in-app ad-blockers establish worrying precedent October 11, 2015 Apple caused a storm a month ago when it released its iOS 9 software update, and not just because it caused many users’ mobiles to crash. The new operating system permits ad blocking technology, allowing users to screen adverts out of content, and a number of apps which block adverts in Safari have rocketed up [...]
This is the BBC Trust’s response to the government’s green paper on Royal Charter review October 8, 2015 Four out of five people believe the BBC should remain independent from politics according to research by the BBC Trust, which it has submitted to the government as part of its response to the broadcasters' charter renewal. More than 40,000 responses from the public have informed the Trust's formal submission to the government green paper, for [...]
Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Medium API: Is this the end of news websites as we know them? October 8, 2015 News publishers could be forgiven for thinking it’s all very end-of-days at the moment. On one side, ad-blockers may be about to strangle a primitive monetisation model and, on the other, Silicon Valley giants seem intent on controlling the distribution of content, arguably calling the very existence of individual news websites into question. Apple upped [...]
Great British Bake Off 2015 final attracts bigger audience than any England Rugby World Cup game with 13.4m viewers October 8, 2015 It turns out Britons are more in thrall to baking than brawn and prefer scrumptiousness to scrums, after last night's Great British Bake Off final attracted more viewers than any of England's games at the Rugby World Cup. England's disastrous World Cup campaign, exclusively broadcast by ITV, pulled in a peak audience of 11.6m viewers during the team's loss to [...]
BBC backs PLC-style board and abolishing BBC Trust for external regulation October 7, 2015 The BBC will back a radical overhaul of the way it is run that would see the BBC Trust abolished and ultimate accountability handed to an external regulator, leaving Auntie to be run by a traditional executive board. The public broadcaster will publish its arguments for the shake-up today, in a detailed formal response to a [...]
Google AMP: “Instant Articles”-style mobile news plans unveiled – an open source standard for publishers’ content to be immediately in search October 7, 2015 Google has unveiled ambitious plans for the mobile web which will show readers news articles from the world's top publishers in an instant. The search giant said it wants to "make the web great again" with an open source project called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) that will bring together publishers and technology companies to collaborate on [...]
Axel Springer in deal with Business Insider: Why it’s a better choice than the Financial Times October 5, 2015 Axel Springer, the German publisher which was so close to buying the Financial Times before Nikkei stepped in this July that the FT itself reported Axel Springer had closed the deal, today announced it was instead increasing its stake in online news site Business Insider to 97 per cent in a $343m (£226.4m) deal. But some [...]
Owning the digital space October 4, 2015 William Railton talks mobile and the future of outdoor ads, with BitPoster’s Aidan Neill FROM billboards to bus stops, the outdoor media market has been more reluctant than other areas of the marketing industry to embrace digitisation. The buying and selling of advertising space had been largely a manual process, with a lot of wasted [...]
Bob Geldof’s old production firm Ten Alps remains in the red September 28, 2015 Media company Ten Alps reported preliminary pre-tax losses of £1.32m, on the back of falling revenues. Revenues for the 12 months to 30 June dropped in line with expectations, from £29.45m to £20.47m, while net debt rose to £7.1m from £5.87 the year before. The company produces mainly factual TV shows, including reports for Panorama; [...]
This time it’s personal: Lida’s Matthew Heath discusses direct marketing and virtual cars September 27, 2015 In their landmark book The One to One Future, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers told marketers to "operate in realities, not abstractions of realities". But in 1993, when their book was published, neither could have foreseen how quickly their idea of personalised advertising would be realised. "That idea was ahead of its time," says [...]