Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

From legacy media companies like Fox to cannabis-themed startups, many publishers are going all-in on video.

Recent investments in video have usually come at the expense of the written word, as media companies like MTV News and Mic have laid off writers to shift to video. With ad budgets shifting to video, publishers are frantically chasing the money, spawning consternation and second-guessing throughout the media industry.

Here are five charts that summarize what’s going on.

It’s hard to extract meaning from raw data only, so we enrich our data by adding story metadata such as authorship, publication sources, entities, topic classification; social data including influencers on a story’s distribution, audience size, social velocity, and performance against peer stories. With this information, you can unpack each story and see how it is spreading. You can quickly spot events of significance in any topic, and analyze by format to find what works.

Meanwhile, our algorithms can already predict the eventual reach of newly published stories, and extract trending entities (recently, this power was used to pounce on and debunk “disinformation” spreading in the run up to the French Presidential election). Our metrics can be used to spot “white space” opportunities with an audience, by analyzing which angles on stories are over-performing with an audience but are underreported.

We also plan to use algorithms to analyze whether a story is likely to be true, false, or biased based on source and other characteristics, and are working on making our recommendations much more powerful, such as: “Here’s what your audience will like today.”...

In the U.K. study in 2015, nearly two-thirds of children aged 0-17s read (or were read to) for pleasure on a weekly basis, with two in five doing so daily, and nearly all doing so at least sometimes. However, the proportion of kids 0-17 reading weekly had fallen by 1% point year-over-year since 2014 and was 7% points lower than in 2012. The decrease was seen among girls as well as boys and was most marked among kids aged 3-10, dropping the most for boys aged 8-10. 

For the first time in 2016, the annual U.S. survey also looked at the proportion of children reading (or being read to) for pleasure. On a daily basis, just over half of those aged 0-12 and only one in five teens were doing so, but an encouraging 82% of children read on a weekly basis and nearly half of all teens. In fact, on a weekly basis, reading was the third most popular activity for 0-12 year olds (with watching TV at number one). For teens, reading as a leisure activity was in 11th place, well behind such activities as social networking, watching YouTube, watching TV, playing games on smartphones/tablets and playing games online or on a console.

Despite the ubiquity of digital reading devices (over 80% of American children have access to a smartphone and/or computer in their household, and over half have access to a tablet device), only around one in five 0-17 year olds in the U.S. are currently using smartphones for e-reading, with a third of 0-12s and two in five teens e-reading on tablets. The U.K. saw similar levels of e-reading in 2015, with 14% of 0-17s using a smartphone and 31% using a tablet—despite much higher proportions (79%) having tablet access in the U.K. than in the U.S....