No prizes for recognising the "black hole" John Paton says is sucking most internet revenue into it.

The Digital First Media chief executive - who relinquishes that position at the end of this month - now has a role at Oslo-based Big Data company Cxense, where he opened a publisher and customer experience event this week.

And Google - which he says, has 70 per cent of the mobile advertising market - was only one target: Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, which both seek to distribute content on behalf of publishers - were both hot topics, with many questioning whether they were friends or foes of publishers.

Paton says he works in an industry that is too adverse to change: "Just ask anyone that sells solutions to the industry."

Even after nearly two decades of having internet around, publishers tend to pick up trends late, affecting their profits: "This leads to a crunch for profit, constantly trying to find new revenue streams. New skills are needed, new people are needed," he says.

Another challenge is that publishers "know next to nothing about their customers.

"And what little they know, they are giving away for free."

He says most publishers' customer knowledge is "relatively zero": "Legacy business knowledge has not given us the level of data we need to function. We have to rethink those arrangements, because we are just giving it away for easy money.

"Facebook is building a walled garden, and we are providing them with our data."

A Canadian summary was that "legacy media are skating to where the puck is, not to where it's going to be," just as Wayne Gretzky famously said. For publishers who want to stay relevant, time is of the essence. "If anything is keeping me up at night, it's time. Do we have enough time to get this done. But we keep moving, we keep growing."

He offered the industry five pieces of advice:

- Stop worrying;

- Understand that our huge audiences have massive monetisation potential;

- Plug the data leak and implement a data strategy now;

- Take back control of your data; and

- Understand you can't do this alone - pick a data partner.

Other speakers included Elsie Cheung, chief operating officer of South China Morning Post, who discussed the challenges of turning "big in Hong Kong" (in print) to becoming "big in the world" online. SCMP had been a southeast Asian regional paper until it broke the Edward Snowden story. Coinciding with a website revamp - and being an English language paper - the growth was explosive.

"We made our name in Hong Kong as a trusted source of information," said Cheung. "With the internet, we are determined to showcase a host of issues that appeal to a global audience."

Aware of the position Hong Kong and China has on the world stage, the publisher seized the opportunity to capitalise on the attention. "The world's interest in China will grow, and we have seen our English site grow from other sources than Hong Kong.

"It's due to the world's interest in what's truly going on in China." In a short amount of time, the subscriber base of South China Morning Post grew threefold, mostly from overseas subscribers. Cxense technology is used to increase engagement through site personalisation and to drive higher subscription revenue, with

A/B testing an important strategy. "Editors have KPIs to follow, if an article falls below a limit, they try out different photos, different wording and track the results in real time," she said.

Cxense co-founder John Lervik urged publishers to be better marketers, "and marketers need to be better publishers," he added, pointing to the fact that some brands were hiring more journalists than large publishing houses. "Call it what you will, content marketing or whatever, this is the reality."

While these companies need the same tools that the publishing industry is currently discovering, the publishing industry also needs to get onboard and integrate marketing strategies in order to increase their revenue.

Piano Media chief executive Kelly Leach said that while web publishing had initially broken the limits of paper publishing, publishers were thinking more about available screen real estate than ever.

"They find it difficult to find the correct content to tee up," he says. "Likewise, they find it difficult to enter the market as marketeers."

After some soul searching, Piano client Týždeň "found a way out of the conundrum", by becoming better marketers and by knowing what their audiences would like to buy from them... such as subscriptions, or documentaries.

The discovered that when advertising a documentary loaded behind their paywall, it generated unprecedented interest for subscriptions. So they went with what people wanted, and it worked well. "They actually decided to add a section to their site, with independent documentaries," Leach said.

Chief executive of Ramp Tom Wilde pursued the theme, claiming video was becoming the leading content online: "It's imperative now," he says. "But since they're not text like the rest of the web, they're a bit difficult to handle. Video does not lend itself easily to search engines and index services."

Wilde explained the Video Discovery Matrix, a blend of search, contextual, behavioural and trending recommendations. With appropriate technology, videos became more far more useful and accessible.

Ramp plans a new set of video functions using Cxense to analyse, personalise and ultimately, monetise video content. That means better intelligence when promoting video content, such as videos relevant to personal interests, even picking videos that might be years old but highly relevant to the user, to show alongside new content. An example from the Martha Stewart cooking school clearly identified where in the show the hummus recipe hid itself.