Toward a Privacy-conscious and Reader-supported Media

In the next Hacks/Hackers Dublin we will talk about how the publishing industry appears to be coming back around to the idea of 'minimum viable' user tracking. We will also explore the reasons and challenges of building a newspaper that doesn't rely on advertising. And finally, we will discuss privacy-respectful personalisation and the vision and lessons learned when building products for publishers to address the balance between access to digital content and privacy concerns.

Who's speaking?

Elaine Burke, Editor, Silicon Republic
Lois Kapila, Editor and Co-founder, Dublin Inquirer
Ernesto Diaz-Aviles, CEO and Co-Founder, recsyslabs

There will be three short talks by our speakers, followed by Q&A and discussion.

Talk 1: The shift toward a privacy-conscious media
Elaine Burke

For years online media has been driven toward a model of extensive – and some would say invasive – tracking of users, not just on one source website but across the web. This move has largely been driven by the companies that have benefited from brokering third-party user data. While online media platforms may have been sold the idea of leveraging user data for advertising revenue, the real powerhouses to emerge under this model are Big Tech giants such as Facebook and Google, who now command such a significant share of advertising budgets that media entities struggle to accrue revenue for themselves.

As users across the web have begun to grow suspicious of how their data is being used (and abused), online media too has become skeptical of the sustainability of a model where Big Tech hoovers up both the data and the revenue, with little benefit for the users and publishers that enable it.

For 20 years, Silicon Republic has operated a wholly online ad-supported news source without adopting aggressive ad tracking or intensive user tracking. In this talk, I will explain how the industry appears to be coming back around to the idea of contextual advertising and a sort of 'minimum viable' user tracking, where the data publishers genuinely need to improve their platform (eg pageviews and page-path journeys) are collected without the inclusion third-party providers, and how this shift to first-party/zero-party data practices could prove to be a more sustainable media business model.

Talk 2: On Ignoring Advertising
Lois Kapila

We ran a quick survey recently asking if we were idiots not to sell ads, and to be building a newspaper funded instead by reader subscriptions. A third of people said yes, we are. I suspect that's fewer than if we'd asked two years ago, and even fewer than if we'd asked five years ago, but it's still a fair number. Are they right? I can't honestly say for sure, but I'm going to talk about the many reasons we have decided to try to build a newspaper that doesn't rely on advertising, the choices along the way – and, importantly, how it's going.

Talk 3: Personalisation, Privacy, and Me
Ernesto Diaz-Aviles

Personalisation today comes at a huge price, including giving out unnecessary personal information, which is at risk of being exposed in case of data breaches and other unauthorized access. People are becoming more aware of the need to safeguard their personal data from being collected in the name of personalisation, and of the dangers and implications of exposure.

Data breaches and information leaks from companies have made privacy a major concern in recent years. Even when user identities are anonymized, their activities can identify them revealing protected categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.

In this talk, we will discuss the current state of users accessing digital content in relationship with their privacy concerns, how this opens new opportunities for publishers to engage with their readers through privacy-respectful personalisation, and our vision and lessons learned building products for publishers to address these challenges.