Last year was, if nothing else, about you. Your texts were read, your pictures and videos were watched and shared and your comments were liked. But who accesses your information?
How many people other than your family members, friends and colleagues had access to content generated by you? Technology has made it easy to have our privacy exposed to a larger audience that we don’t even know. Our privacy can be monetised by technology companies as more information about us can make for better-informed ad targeting.
Edward Snowden, the US whistle-blower who was voted Guardian’s person of the year, revealed that security and privacy are vulnerable and there are no frontiers to ensure privacy for citizens. The scandal about the existence of a spy programme in the US revealed how some of the leading tech companies served as instruments of government to implement indiscriminate monitoring systems.
Sophisticated algorithms
One of the trends in journalism for 2014 will be in the form of a wave of sophisticated algorithms and processes that will forever change how news is produced and consumed. These new systems have vast repositories of data generated by users each time they connect to the web, either through Google searches for a restaurant or to wish happy birthday to friends on Facebook.
Last year, advertising on mobile devices shot up from $1.2 billion in 2012 to $3 billion. This year, 65 per cent of advertising agencies and marketing teams plan to invest in mobile ads — spending should increase 64 per cent to about $4.3 billion.
Multimedia reporting experiences for readers will be explored by online publications. Multimedia was at the heart of a reportage by the New York Times on a deadly avalanche. ‘Snow Fall’ is a mix of video, pictures and animation that involved a large development team. Many others tried to replicate it. The sophisticated mix of multimedia will continue in 2014 and introduce newer technology such as Google glass and algorithms robots to help report news.
The announcement by NYT on starting native advertisements will prove equally decisive. We will learn if it can be as effective as brand marketing. Advertisers and publishers have created entire divisions to produce ads that mimic editorial content, but still many things need to be assimilated with this kind of advertisement.
The most important will be whether readers will digest it or will be simply ignored as banner and e-mail ads are. At this moment there is no specific information that can help or guide towards best use of native ads.
