Veit Siegenheim proved there are 4 companies that dominate today’s internet. The big 4 that have established the global ecosystem are: Google, Apple, Amazon, facebook.

What does this mean for publishers? The big 4 controls major parts of digital economy, with significant impact on publishers. And it’s not over – all of them are extending their role in this ecosystem, Facebook for instance might extend its possibilities to ad network etc.

Some numbers:

• Google and Facebook alone control almost a quarter of worldwide reach (unique visitors) in the Top 100.
• 80% of all delivered smartphones and tablets are run with Apple’s iOs or Google’s Android – Amazon is becoming very active.
• 54% of the global advertising market (SEM, display and mobile, interactive TV) is controlled by the big 4

Global advertising market is oligopoly in hands of the big 4.

5 challenges for publishers:

1. content is king, has to be unique, integrated and well distributed. Importance of high quality content increasing, distribution will become commodity.
2. advertising, ad networks. competettive pressure on marketing of digital and traditional media will increase through innovation and market consolidation
3. strong media brands will become more and more important for successful competition and new business models
4. synergies and cooperation between publishers and common strategies to counter global pressure
5. Infrastructure. Big 4 offer great possibilities to benefit from the infrastructure that they have built

It is too late for cooperation of publishers and common acts against the big4 – many publishers began to negotiate with them individually.

Conclusion:

1. Big 4 will continue to dominate , especially in their core business
2. market position of publishers will improve in commodity areas
3. Direct competition with the big 4 in their core area (e.g. advertising) will be difficult to succeed
4. Critical mass of publishers is probably too small – more co-operations are needed
5. Only strong media brands give orientation and can be a basis for diversification

Noah Samuels from Google was convincing the audience that the role of his company is to help publishers win their fight on the narrowing market.

Google is one of the world’s biggest technology companies but they’re also one of the world’s biggest media companies (YouTube, search, GMail).

As a media company they are facing same challenges as publishers:

• social,
• video (60 hours of content uploaded every 60 seconds on YouTube, 4 billion video views a day),
• mobile (giant rise in mobile search),
• data.

Google’s recommendations for publishers:

1. focus on users (if you have happy and satisfied users, it’s opportunity for them to follow you)
2. open will win (web should stay open, instead of being a locked garden)
3. never fail to fail: open social, wave, buzz. Took lessons from it to build Google Plus.

The entire publishing ecosystem has changed drastically:

• Publishing has fundamentally changed. New consumer behaviour and expectations. New formats and players. New business models and sales channels.
• Advertising has changed: before – limited media capacity, scarce ad inventory, creative board to media, analogue devices Now: constrained choice, passive consumption,high barriers to opt-out
• The game has changed. A publisher’s focus on content and relationship with audience must evolve or risk losing relevance. Today audience is in control, on any device anywhere and anytime.

Google believes in one platform, and suggests that so should publishers. This platform has three goals:

• maximize revenues,
• capture new opportunities,
• improve efficiency

During this conversation Tweraser stressed out many times that Google should be be seen by publishers as a partner. As he said, partnerships are Google’s DNA and most of its projects are based on them. A great proof of that should be the Google News project that partners with more than 50.000 news organisations and shares the revenue with them.

The first controversial question came up very quickly – is Google making money on the backs of publishers or not?. The answer was easy to be predicted, Tweraser however gave three good reasons why publishers shouldn’t be thinking this way:

1. Google cares about the quality of content available on the internet.
2. 6 bln US dollars are paid to publishers by Google.
3. Every content be it free ot paid has to be found somehow. Google helps newspapers in that matter.

Tweraser encouraged publishers to answer this question on their own. He suggested imagining world without Google, whether it would be better for publishers or not. The answers would probably vary, but Tweraser sees common goals for Google and publishers.

He recalled there are over a billion search queries asked in Google. 100,000 searches go to newspaper publishers. They want to be as transparent to the market as possible. If any publisher feels that Google’s attempts are against his interests, Google offers a code that allows content to be hidden from the search.

Being asked whether Google is a monopoly or not, Tweraser answered that there are more than 160 search engines all over the world and that Google feels the strong competition from Yahoo!, Bing and many others. So many competitors prove that Google is not a monopolist – dominant on some markets, yes, but not a monopolist.

Content is very important for Google. The reason they introduced Panda, a new search algorithm earlier this year, was the fact they wanted to protect original content and hide from the search the so called “content farms” which duplicate articles, aggregate them and earn profits from the content that does not belong to them.

Tweraser said that content is a kind of social currency, people want to debate over it. Social media cannot exist without content. It can produce content, but it needs content as well to spark discussions. Again it proves how important are content producers, therefore news organisations as well.

Looking into the future, Tweraser said that mobile, social and video are three directions are going to be huge and main traffic drivers for publishers.

Asked where would Google be if all publishers would put a paywall, Tweraser still sees enough opportunity for joint ventures with publishers as both free or paid content has to be found somehow.

1. Fast Flip – a new way of browsing news. Content consumption on the web – different presentation of the content that could be more engaging to hte readers. It takes screenshots from the publishers content and allows to flip through it. Check the Google Fast Flip in action.
2. Google News experiment: Editor’s Picks. Built around the Google’s algorithm. Adding the human aspect, which cannot be provided by the algorithm. It’s about using the human editor to choose within the Google News important news that not necessarily have to be most popular.
3. Living stories: a new way to display news. Learn about this concept by watching this video:

Tools that could help publishers tell stories in a different way:

1. Google Maps – a tool widely known but stil worth developing
2. YouTube Direct – connects news organisations with video producers. It is about interaction, all directly on own website:
   
3. Google Translate – as Google calls it, it is “one of the coolest things Google has ever made”. It can be used for interaction between readers from different parts of the world. And it already has been done.

Philipp Schindler

First words of Philipp Schindler during the conference were “We come in peace” – a statement that was widely commented on Twitter, for example: “Yeah right, take me to your readers”

Philipp Schindler points out 5 main trends that happen in the web nowadays:
1. Search.
Schindler noticed, that during the past 7 years, the user has moved from the browser-centric use of the web, to the search-centric usage. Consumers have found out there is a very simple way to navigate within the billions of information on the web, and the sollution to it is search. Luckily, Schindler admits Google did not invent the search. But numbers are tough: 4 billion searches are conducted every day. Over 50% people using the mobile web, do it because they want to search. The trend is to evolve the search to be based on the recommendation of the others.

2. Richer Media. We are witnessing a fundamental shift towards richer media. 2 million videos streams are watched on YouTube every single day. 2 million YouTube downloads a day is a symptom of a less word centric web. Gaming industry is leading.

3. Mobile Revolution. 4 billion applications were downloaded from App Store. In 2015 – more mobile web based traffic is expected than traditional web traffic. Mobile web is growing 8x than traditional web grew, and everyone (publishers as well) are underestimating this trend.

There are 2 important features of mobile trend:
- connectivity
- hub computing – access to most powerful devices one can imagine.

Mobile is the triangle between device, connectivity, and a supercomputer. What should it mean to publishers? don’t bet against mobile anytime.

4. Data. Everyone should learn to love the richness of the data. Always in a privacy respecting way. How to monetize it? There is no silver bullet, no single monetization model. According to Schindler, the winning models will be al advertising based.

5. Translation. It’s high time to imagine a web browser that translates everything into the langauge of one’s choice. Philipp Schindler imagines a world where mobile phones translates between people on the fly. It will let medias reach a larger audience. And it’s not far from where we’re at this very moment.

Philipp Schindler believes there can be a mutually benefficial partnership with newspapers. Google ’sends’ 1 billion people a month to news sites just from Google news and pays media 1.7 billion US$ a month via ad clicks. It is a huge number that shows how Google and newspaper could work together, to grow that reach. Newspapers are not a competitor to Google. The no.1 competitor to them is every group of talented people who are innovative. Not facebook, not Apple, but the next startup. Google would never give away nor sell any private information unless they are obliged to do so under the law.