Here you go! A thor­ough update on social media, dig­i­tal trends and tech in the media indus­try. Ready to help you save time and make bet­ter deci­sions.

Dig­i­tal Ugerevy (Dan­ish for Dig­i­tal Week­ly Review) is pub­lished by me, Lars K Jensen. I work with audi­ence devel­op­ment and jour­nal­ism in the Berlingske Media group.

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Part 1: Social media and platforms

😬 Is the US considering banning TikTok again?

From Plat­former:

Today, let’s talk about a fast-mov­ing new leg­isla­tive effort in the Unit­ed States to force ByteDance to divest itself of Tik­Tok, or ban it nation­al­ly. The com­pa­ny has faced — and dodged — threats like this before. But while the odds are almost always against Con­gress get­ting new tech reg­u­la­tions over the fin­ish line, there are rea­sons to believe things real­ly might be dif­fer­ent this time.

More:

• Furi­ous Con­gress plows for­ward with Tik­Tok bill after user revolt [Axios]
• Tik­Tok is urg­ing users to call Con­gress about a loom­ing ban [The Verge]

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👋 Meta pulls the plug on News tab in the US and Australia

From Bloomberg:

The Face­book News tab, which lets users see head­lines and sto­ries, will be “dep­re­cat­ed” in those two coun­tries in ear­ly April, Meta said in a blog post on Thurs­day. That means the com­pa­ny is with­draw­ing sup­port for the fea­ture, but news won’t dis­ap­pear from the site.

More:

• Aus­tralia threat­ens action against Meta after Face­book news pay­ments axed [Finan­cial Times]
• News Corp. CEO Blasts Meta's Claim That Only 3% Of The Face­book Feed Is News [Medi­a­Post]
• Aus­tralia threat­ens action against Meta after Face­book news pay­ments axed [Finan­cial Times]
• Why Australia's bid to make big tech pay for news failed: views from an indie pub­lish­er [Journalism.co.uk]

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✨ Instagram launches new DM features

From Social Media Today:

Insta­gram has announced some new DM fea­tures as it works to enhance the usage of mes­sag­ing as the key con­nec­tive ele­ment in the app.

Because over time, more and more per­son­al engage­ment is migrat­ing to pri­vate chats, as users stop post­ing to the main feed.

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🧪 Threads testing API

From Social Media Today:

Good news for social media man­agers, and a poten­tial­ly sig­nif­i­cant update for Threads engage­ment over­all, with Meta’s Twit­ter-like plat­form now live test­ing its API with select­ed part­ners, enabling, among oth­er things, post sched­ul­ing in the app.

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💡 Social media engagement != Content consumption

From Social Media Today:

This week, the team from earned media insights plat­form Memo have pub­lished a new report which looks at how social media engage­ment relates to con­tent read­er­ship, and whether more social media shares and com­ments leads to more peo­ple actu­al­ly click­ing through to read your posts.

The key find­ing?

“Across all the arti­cles and top­ics we ana­lyzed, we found no clear con­nec­tion between social engage­ment and actu­al read­ers of the news.”

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💥 Major platforms, major outage

From Medi­a­Post:

Face­book, Insta­gram, Mes­sen­ger and Threads went dark Tues­day morn­ing, leav­ing users unable to load and access the apps.

More:

• Meta Says Issues Resolved Affect­ing Face­book, Insta­gram Apps [Bloomberg]

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📃 X goes longform

From Social Media Today:

X is tak­ing the next steps to advance beyond its short-form con­tent roots, with the intro­duc­tion of X Arti­cles, which is essen­tial­ly a blog­ging plat­form built into the X sys­tem.

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🧐 Understand the world of AI spam on TikTok

From 404 Media:

We have recent­ly been get­ting bom­bard­ed with Insta­gram Reels of influ­encers explain­ing how they make five fig­ures a month by using AI to cre­ate tons of viral Tik­Tok pages using stolen celebri­ty clips jux­ta­posed next to Minecraft game­play footage. This strat­e­gy, the influ­encers say, allows them to pas­sive­ly make $10,000 a month by flood­ing social media plat­forms with stolen and low-effort clips while work­ing from pri­vate heli­copters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc. 

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Part 2: Digital trends

🔎 New Google search core algorithm update

From Social Media Today:

Get ready for fluc­tu­a­tions in your Google Search traf­fic, with Google today announc­ing a new “core update” to its algo­rithms, aimed at reduc­ing spam and low-qual­i­ty results.

More:

• Google Is Final­ly Try­ing to Kill AI Click­bait [Wired]
• Google Says It’s Purg­ing All the AI Trash Lit­ter­ing Its Search Results [Giz­mo­do]
• Google wants to redi­rect traf­fic from AI-gen­er­at­ed spam blogs to legit web­sites [Nie­man Lab]

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🎧 Apple Podcasts launches transcripts

From the horse's mouth:

Tran­scripts offer full-text dis­play for each episode, mak­ing pod­casts more acces­si­ble and immer­sive than ever before

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😲 How Spotify wiped a podcast

From Pod­news:

We con­tact­ed a spokesper­son at Spo­ti­fy. They don’t com­ment on spe­cif­ic inci­dents with cre­ators, but told us: “We’re work­ing close­ly with the cre­ator to quick­ly resolve this issue.” As far as we under­stand it, fol­low­ing our email to the com­pa­ny, Spo­ti­fy has been able to restore stats, has emailed her for­mer sub­scribers encour­ag­ing them to resub­scribe, and has reim­bursed the lost rev­enue. It’s a good step. How­ev­er, Spo­ti­fy won’t be able to mag­i­cal­ly get all her fol­low­ers back from the many oth­er pod­cast apps, like Apple Pod­casts.

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📲 New iOS sees Apple align with EU rules

From Mac­sto­ries:

iOS 17.4 is a sig­nif­i­cant release, bring­ing major plat­form changes to iOS in Europe as part of Apple’s response to the Euro­pean Union’s Dig­i­tal Mar­kets Act (DMA), as well as a hand­ful of new fea­tures, includ­ing tran­scripts in Apple’s Pod­casts app, new emo­ji, mul­ti­lin­gual updates to Siri, and more.

...and Google as well:

• Reuters: Google on Tues­day out­lined changes to search results and new tools for apps devel­op­ers to pro­mote their prod­ucts on third-par­ty apps and rival app stores as part of efforts to com­ply with land­mark EU tech rules seek­ing to curb Big Tech's pow­er.

More:

• Europe’s DMA rules for Big Tech explained [TechCrunch]
• The EU’s new com­pe­ti­tion rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are respond­ing [The Verge]
• How Apple Stands to Lose From Europe’s New Tech Law [The Wall Street Jour­nal]
• Apple Set to Be Quizzed by EU Over ‘Fort­nite’ Mak­er Shutout [Bloomberg]
• Google adds new devel­op­er fees as part of the Play Store’s DMA com­pli­ance plan [TechCrunch]

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🤷‍♂️ What does the next generation of media audiences want?

From Journalism.co.uk:

Most news organ­i­sa­tions still ignore the fact that there is a gap between the news expe­ri­ence the next gen­er­a­tion wants and what they are get­ting. It is not just about cob­bling togeth­er a few Tik­Toks — The Next Gen News report, co-pro­duced by FT Strate­gies and Knight Lab, found that there are some fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences between Gen Z and their old­er peers when it comes to search­ing and con­sum­ing news.

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🎧 The EU fines Apple €1.8bn

From Finan­cial Times:

Mar­grethe Vestager, the bloc’s com­pe­ti­tion chief, said the tech giant had bro­ken EU antitrust rules for a decade by “restrict­ing devel­op­ers from inform­ing con­sumers about alter­na­tive, cheap­er music ser­vices avail­able out­side of the Apple ecosys­tem”.

Apple's reply:

• The App Store, Spo­ti­fy, and Europe’s thriv­ing dig­i­tal music mar­ket

More:

• Plat­former: It is the first time the EU has fined Apple, and the third-largest fine hand­ed out by EU antitrust chief Mar­grethe Vestager

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😬 Cookie deprecation makes measurement harder

From Digi­day:

As third-par­ty cook­ies fade into obliv­ion, mar­keters are awak­en­ing to a harsh real­i­ty: The era of a sin­gle source of truth for mea­sure­ment is over. Now, they must nav­i­gate the murky waters of deter­min­ing their own truth.

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👋 DR to close Bonanza

From Medi­aWatch:

On 15 March, the pub­lic ser­vice sta­tion DR will close Bonan­za. Parts of the con­tent will instead be avail­able from 15 March on DR Gen­syn, which will also become part of DRTV.

(Arti­cle in Dan­ish)

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💥 The arms race in email authentication

From MarTech:

New Google and Yahoo rules gov­ern­ing send­ing email will lead to an arms race pit­ting email providers against spam­mers. Con­sci­en­tious email­ers, caught in the cross­fire, will be col­lat­er­al dam­age. 

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Part 3: Business

🤔 How NYTimes are using first party data in their ad business

YouTube video from Think with Google:

Hear from lead­ers at The New York Times about how adver­tis­ing and sub­scrip­tion-based mod­els help them serve read­ers by uphold­ing its mis­sion as a trust­ed news and infor­ma­tion source.

Learn how the team laid a foun­da­tion for its first-par­ty data plat­form by train­ing machine learn­ing mod­els with vol­un­tary, opt-in sur­veys and read­er­ship sig­nals. See how its ad part­ner­ships enable results, help­ing the com­pa­ny serve the right ads to the right audi­ence.

Con­tents ↑

😱 "Digital advertising's leap in the dark"

From MarTech:

Where exact­ly are we with Pri­va­cy Sand­box? Can we take the loom­ing dead­line to find alter­na­tives to third-par­ty cook­ies seri­ous­ly? And do we need to care any­way? We spoke with a num­ber of inter­est­ed par­ties, includ­ing the IAB Tech Lab, some of them on back­ground, to fig­ure out the lay of the land.

More:

• Ad tech’s mul­ti mil­lion-dol­lar quandary: Bal­anc­ing bud­gets amid Google’s Sand­box uncer­tain­ty [Digi­day]

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💲 JP/Politikens Hus looking at subscription bundles

From Medi­aWatch:

The idea is that it should lead the work with data "to the next lev­el", which among oth­ers will include the bundling of sub­scrip­tion prod­ucts from JP/Politikens Hus — i.e. pack­ages where sub­scribers get access to sev­er­al titles or ser­vices at once. In order for the bun­dles to be made on a qual­i­fied basis, it is nec­es­sary to col­lect data and ana­lyze them.

(Arti­cle in Dan­ish)

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🎤 NYTimes and Vox explain their podcast strategies

From Medi­a­Post:

The New York Times expect­ed maybe 2,000 down­loads when it launched "The Dai­ly Pod­cast" in 2017. But it quick­ly gar­nered "42 mil­lion down­loads," said Jim­my Saun­ders, the paper's exec­u­tive direc­tor of audio & events, dur­ing the keynote ses­sion of the recent Pub­lish­ing Insid­er Sum­mit in Boni­ta Springs, Flori­da.

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🚴‍♂️ Feltet.dk buys cycling magazine

Fra Medi­aWatch:

The online mag­a­zine, which aims to reach 10,000 sub­scribers before the end of the year, is chang­ing its name in con­nec­tion with the acqui­si­tion.

(Arti­cle in Dan­ish)

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Del 4: Technology

🤖 DR's in-house transcription software in beta

From Medi­aWatch:

[The Dan­ish Broad­cast Corporation's] sys­tem is built on Open AI's speech-to-text soft­ware Whis­per, and makes it pos­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cal­ly tran­scribe audio files. Good Tape and JP/Politikens Hus' inter­nal tran­scrip­tion tool Speech­to­text are also based on Whis­per.

(Arti­cle in Dan­ish)

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🤖 How the BBC will test generative AI

From the horse's mouth:

We’ve now cho­sen the first projects, which will help us explore dif­fer­ent areas where we think that Gen AI could bring sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits for audi­ences and for staff. 

At this stage, the vast major­i­ty of the pilots are inter­nal-only and won’t be used to cre­ate con­tent for audi­ences until we have had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn more.  

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✨ Reach using AI for versioning of stories

From Press Gazette:

Reach is rolling out an AI tool that enables its jour­nal­ists to quick­ly rewrite sto­ries which have already appeared on oth­er sites with­in its net­work.

Ind­hold ↑

🌐 Companies are experimenting with AI powered podcast translation

From Digi­day:

Execs at Spo­ti­fy, which announced in Sep­tem­ber it was launch­ing a pilot pro­gram with a few pod­cast­ers to test AI-gen­er­at­ed voice trans­la­tions, didn’t men­tion that pro­gram at all in the company’s Q4 earn­ings call on Feb. 6. A Spo­ti­fy spokesper­son told Digi­day there was noth­ing new to share on that front yet.

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🤔 Microsoft: NYTimes is holding back innovation

From the Finan­cial Times:

In a motion filed to a Man­hat­tan court, Microsoft, which has com­mit­ted $13bn to Ope­nAI, likened the New York media organ­i­sa­tion to Hol­ly­wood stu­dios that sought to stop the intro­duc­tion of the VCR in the 1980s, and hold back a “ground­break­ing new tech­nol­o­gy”.

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⚠️ Microsoft engineer warns against AI tool

The head­line real­ly says it all...

From CNBC:

Microsoft engi­neer warns company’s AI tool cre­ates vio­lent, sex­u­al images, ignores copy­rights

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