Back in Hong Kong this month, WAN-Ifra's Digital Media Asia delivered context, concepts and conclusions for publishers, starting with a run-down of global trends from and ending with a call to action on innovation.
And in between, best practice examples from regional and global players.
The context is of course the 5.2 per cent drop in print advertising worldwide - even though circulation is only down 0.4 per cent - and the 45 per cent increase in digital circulation revenue to $2.5 billion.
Director of global advisory Ben Shaw points to the fact that it is the first time combined print and digital circulation revenue ($87 billion) has been greater than that from advertising.
What to do? Shaw - who comes from a US publishing family - emphasises the "audience first" message we are to hear repeated multiple times during the conference, and points out that top media companies are becoming tech companies.
Later he's back to talk about ad blocking software - at browser level and sometimes 'on' by default - of which there are 200 million users worldwide.... plus the occasional telco (as in the Caribbean) also blocking ads.
Apart from the lack of distraction, there's the benefit to users that sites load more quickly, with young people early adopters. Shaw acknowledges there's a problem, "because we haven't figured out the digital ad experience.
"If we continue to do this, companies like Google, Apple and Facebook will be able to step right in," he says.
Since 'asking nicely' hasn't worked, he advocates asking firmly - as Germany's Bild does, giving users the option to switch blockers off or subscribe - and urges publishers to take a lead. Paying to have your site white-listed is "not a good idea" - another speaker describes it as evocative of the protection his grandmother used to pay - and says tech escalation to 'force' ads will create other problems. "Our most precious asset is trust and goodwill," he adds.
Shaw's tips:
-start tracking it (using Cxense or Pagefair code and Google Analytics);
-experiment with users;
-focus on branded content, which is typically unblockable;
-pay more attention to mobile and its user experience.
"We shouldn't be passive - we need to redefine how advertising can work," he says... and asked to state his biggest fear: "It would be dangerous for society if news brands get diminished."
Ad blockers are a significant problem for The Guardian, too, its director of global content partnerships, Suzy Hay says, with concerns it will sweep mobiles following a support inclusion in Apple's iOS9. That people are realising "it's not a great user experience" is one of the reasons the UK publisher has become an enthusiastic partner of platforms such as Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP, relationships she "spends her life thinking about".
Hay says she goes to Facebook for all her news content, only visiting the platforms she works for direct. "We need to be where our users are," she says.
The Guardian has daily print circulation of just under 170,000 in the UK, so focusses on its global digital audience of 135 million unique users. But mobile "poses a massive challenge", and she says she doesn't believe anyone has "quite sussed that from the publishing perspective". The publisher's mobile growth (at 26 per cent) is twice that of desktop, even though delivery and consumption of content, the size of screens, and the limitations around speed and heaviness of advertising are significant challenges (that word again, and she used it a lot during her plenary presentation; we can't tell you about the workshop the previous day, as the publisher declined to let us be present).
Both (apparently) focussed on the balance of risks and opportunities attached, including Google's Digital News Initiative, of which The Guardian was a launch partner. "How do we maintain editorial independence over our content and control over what and how content is presented, and the environment in which it is presented, when we don't control the platform," she asked. Maintaining editorial independence is "an absolute imperative... and a deal breaker in any discussion".
Associated with that is loyalty: ensuring a user reading their content on an outside platform knows it is the Guardian they are interacting with "and that's the experience they are having".
Hay doesn't pretend to answer the questions and insists on more than one occasion that "it's a little early to say". Different platforms provide different levels of control, but most are nonetheless, "quite compelling" for publishers.
Google, of course, wants to be your friend, and Jeremy Butteriss was an opening day speaker in addition to participation in the company's own popular workshop session. His message included the suggestion that while news and weather were "still tops", micro niches were an area of considerable growth. Try:
-ChuChuTV, an Indian YouTube channel which presents nursery rhymes with sometimes uncharacteristically positive endings - Humpty Dumpty for example, gets back up and gets on with his life;
-Kids' Toys, another YouTube channel, this time from the Philippines, which unboxes toys;
-eatyourkimchi on Youtube and Twitter has founders Simon and Martina Stawski compare Korean and western culture, and has accumulated a quarter of a billion views on four channels.
Success comes with a direct relationship, "and this is where search comes in," the regional managing director for partner solutions says.
According to AIM Group's Peter Zollman, "Google knows more about you than the NSA (America's National Security Agency) ever did"... but that's an aside. Zollman's speciality is classified, and he points to the many areas in which classified and listings sites are thriving. Protection for print as a concept is "totally dead", but print is great for branding. "Don't forget print, but move beyond it," he says.
Singapore Press Holdings - which teamed with Schibsted - the Times of India and HT Media were among "traditional" media companies making money from classified sites in the new competitive environment, but "watch out for the big boys," he warns.
He urges publishers to become device independent, think beyond borders, work with others (even competitors) and get people to place their own ads. "Margins in classified are huge," he says, "but critical mass is critical."
Branding has also been a key issue for Bloomberg, with regional digital head Anjali Kapoor - discussing the business publisher's revamped website - emphasising that part of the role of article pages: "The front door has changed, and that's where you have the opportunity to mark your brand," she says.
And your style: Bloomberg may be a financial publisher, but still gets the role of great headlines, arresting visuals and business stories "tied with emotion".
The publisher is also looking at ways of expanding video and making it cost-effective: "TV news is about the 'what'; we provide context and the long tail, 'why'," she says. Using social media, making content shareable so that people "take ownership and share again and again, and again" is also about knowing your audience. And their great content is why pure-plays such as Google want to work with news organisations, she reminds.
Chasing monetisation was a topic for Impresa's Pedro Monteiro and Michael Greco, whose company Vindicia, provides back-end functionality for taking the cash. Monteiro's focus is digital paid content and he discussed a range of options used by the digital products of the Portuguese publisher's flagship Expresso newspaper which have included a daily iPad edition since last year. Print readers get a code to access the digital editions, and advertisers buy access to either the daily or weekly editions, the latter also including print.
Digital subscriptions have risen to 23 per cent of circulation revenue in four years.
"It's all about conversion," he says, "and I still don't know how to convert millennials into website users."
That's not an issue for France-based News Republic, which doesn't have a website. Instead, the aggregator publishes 50,000 articles a day from 1500 partners on an award-winning app... content it underwrites with a belief in "engaged citizenship". Managing director Jerome Le Feuvre says 65 per cent of users now personalise the service they receive. Partnerships with HTC and Acer see the app pre-installed on smartphones.
In a world full of people ripping off content owners, he says News Republic "tries to be the good guys".
A webTV-focussed product, pocketimes.my is working for MCIL Multimedia, and shares its ownership with Hong Kong-based Chinese-language daily Ming Pao and its Malaysian sister paper Sin Chew Daily.
Chief executive Keu Tien Siong says the mobile site posts eight to ten video clips a day, plus a daily live talk show which draws extra audience through its ability to sidestep censorship.
Following a launch a year ago, it has grown to 3.4 million uniques, drawing 760,000 views in two days on a child abduction story, but finds such success hard to monetise with the higher cost of bandwidth.
The company is also investing in e-commerce as, Keu says, "advertisers want to convert to transactions".
"We thought that as most e-commerce companies have bought media companies and earn revenue from advertising, why shouldn't a media company go into e-commerce," he says. Plans are now to extend the LogOn.my fashion, gadgets and lifestyle site to the whole of the ASEAN market.
Video is also an increasingly important part of the picture for news agency Thomson Reuters, and global editor of video and pictures John Pullman pointed to the annual growth of online video and live streaming, which was at 59 per cent in France before the events of the previous week.
The giant company is in the business of supplying video, but Pullman was happy to share some tips - "start with your best shot or sequence, consider shareability, and keep it short, about a minute is sweet" - and topics. Most popular were breaking news, space exploration, "anything with Royals or celebrities", and don't be afraid of long live events. Though there usually needs to be plenty of action, William and Kate's first baby was an exception: "Nothing happened for days, resulting in the most watched door in history," he says.
Robb Montgomery, who teaches in person and online at Smart Film School, was also back after a workshop on the first day with stats about the impact of video as well as examples from AJ+, live streaming app Periscope and the New York Times.
The overall message was that you don't need a film crew, just an iPhone - the Android alternative doesn't cut it, literally - a few apps, and some imagination. Even old-style silent movies with images and name-cards are back (called kinograms) and are "all over Facebook and Twitter".
On the tech front, there was also keen interest in 360° video and virtual reality, with Vincent Tsui of Next Media Digital demonstrating the value of the latter with a video of a disabled boy playing a piano using a VR interface.
More commercially, sites combining both technologies offer stunt girls (or just girls on SugarBaby) with the opportunity to pick favourites and focus your viewing experience. The 360° option has been used to show off a Mercedes Benz concept car and Tsui says full animation will be the next stage of VR but no, it's unlikely to be available for live broadcasts quite yet.
With the problems of ad blockers in mind, delegates were keen enough to hear from Liam Lucas of Rubicon Project, an ad tech company which powers an advertising marketplace for buyers and sellers.
Mobile will account for two thirds of the digital advertising spend by next year and "most will be bought by programmatic," he says. Targeting is also endless and incredible, "far beyond the display world" and should be merely an add-on.
Lucas discussed sites such as inMobi, campaigns, brand treatments including exclusive page-takeovers which had yielded "huge results", and publisher cooperatives. Among them are New Zealand's Kpex advertising exchange and La Place in France, which brought historic competitors together. "It's a huge opportunity in a $14 billion industry," he says.
AT Internet was the sponsor of a session in which Dilson Varela Ribeiro of Paris Match publisher Lagardère Active, WSJ's Yumiko Ono and Eugene Leow of the Straits Times talked audience and data strategy. AT provides the interface between CMS and other tools used at Lagardère and is presumably a partner of the other two.
Ribeiro talked "KPIs at every stage" (including in the president's office) with an eight-week training course which enables journalists to "do analytics by themselves", write better and produce more effective headlines. A year later, elle.fr had put on more than a million visits a month, thanks to "journalist optimisation".
Ono - who once lived in New York, and wrote an article about the calls she got from people confusing her with John Lennon's partner - emphasised social storytelling, graphics and stories that can be shared. "There's a funnel of people discovering, engaging and hopefully subscribing, and I'm at the entry point," she says.
Finally, the conference delivered a couple more examples and a call to action.
Joey Chung talked about two-year-old Taiwan-based video site The News Lens and its diligence in responding to user feedback. Former Washington Post vice president Marcus Brauchli was among early investors in a site which now has Taiwan, Hong Kong and international editions with language options. The big news: "We went profitable for the first time last month, a huge milestone," he says.
Newstag's Henrik Eklund explained the site's focus on delivering personalised news for millennials and aim to be "the most relevant sustainable news source". Newstag takes content from providers and tags everything to create a 'my news channel' experience.
And Impresa's Monteiro was back to talk about the Snapchat channel he created with a "Snap-native" female colleague, Iryna, who had the personality to do a selfie with the country's prime minister, "something I could never have done".
A soft launch turned into a permanent presence after pictures of the young Turkish refugee dead on a Greek beach circulated. "We learned fast - that you can do an in-depth story in ten-second slots, that young people don't want filters, bullshit or paternalism - that if you want to do something, you can," he says.
"We have almost 9000 people on Snapchat," Monteiro says, "and for now, that's good enough."
The call to action came from WAN-Ifra chief executive Vincent Peyrègne, first explaining innovation and putting it into perspective with the 'creative destruction' - a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter - of which we are now in the fifth wave.
He pointed to the need for "market readers, seekers and tech drivers" and told what the conference organiser was doing about it with the formation of the Global Alliance for Media Innovation, which works with eight clusters globally.
The next Digital Media Asia event will be in Singapore next November, but is preceded by WAN-Ifra's Publish Asia in Manila in late March.
Pictured: WAN-Ifra's Ben Shaw
On our homepage: Dilson Varela Ribeiro of Paris Match publisher Lagardère Active