Biggest Brands Will Lose 43% of EU Audience Data Following GDPR

As the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)is set into action today in the European Union, brands and publishers everywhere will feel the effects. Just yesterday, Google invited members from four major publishing trade groups– Digital Content Next, European Publishers Council, News Media Alliance and the News Media Association—to meet with executives about the tech giant’s approach to data as the GDPR goes into effect. And while the GDPR won’t have the impact on U.S. brands and extensions of international companies it will in the EU,  its implementation could result in U.S. customers demanding similar actions.

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Google to invest $300m to support publishers and combat fake news

Google is stepping up efforts to improve relations with news publishers with a $300m commitment that includes support for subscriptions and efforts to fight fake news. The launch of the Google News Initiative comes as Google and Facebook are facing criticism for their emergence as gatekeepers for information, their dominance of the digital advertising market and their role in the proliferation of false and misleading stories online in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and Brexit vote

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Amazon now has a $1 billion ad business

Amazon is making good on its promise to eat advertising. In its third-quarter earnings report today, the e-commerce giant said it saw “other” revenue, which is mostly composed of ad sales (and to a much smaller extent, its credit card business), grow 58 percent year over year to $1.12 billion. That’s a slight increase from the growth rate in the prior second quarter, when it grew 53 percent year over year

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Publishers warm to Google plan for Chrome ad-blocker

US and European publishers have given support to the idea of Google introducing an ad-blocker to its widely used Chrome internet browser despite fears it would hit their online advertising revenues. Details of the technology group’s plans have not been disclosed but Google has said it held “initial conversations” on the idea with publishers.

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YouTube controversy shakes up digital advertising as brands pull adverts

Over the past five years, Google and Facebook have cut a conquering swath through the market for digital advertising, snatching ever more business from legacy media companies, such as print newspapers and magazines. But a growing scandal involving the inadvertent placement of ads next to extremist content on Google’s YouTube video has raised questions about whether the balance of power is about to shift again.

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Forget Facebook and Google: The ad world thinks this tech giant is ‘terrifying’

The mad men and women of the ad industry have plenty of reasons to toss and turn at night. Money is increasingly trickling from television commercials to digital media — a market that Facebook and Google currently have in a duopolistic chokehold. Inter-agency competition is at a fever pitch. Unconventional upstarts are eating their lunch. If Don Draper were around today, there’s a good chance he’d work at Facebook. But it’s not internet advertising giants that keep the industry’s top chief up at night. Nor is it his three-month-old daughter. It’s…Amazon?

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Telegraph warns of ‘intense competition’ from Facebook and Google

The owner of The Daily Telegraph’s view of the trading environment in its newly published annual accounts was more bearish than a year ago. TMG described how print publishers now have a “less certain” role because of “competition from the proliferation of free digital content and the increasing role of large-scale digital platforms in distributing and aggregating content”, particularly on mobile

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Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy

For a long time, we’ve been creating too much content, so much so that I think that we’ve already reached Peak Content, the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable. There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain it for years and, with 2015 ending with a rush of acquisitions, consolidations and funding rounds with eye-watering valuations, 2016 will mark the beginning of a shake out.

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