This year marked the second annual IABUK Digital Upfronts. As well as Facebook, Google/YouTube, Aol, Yahoo!, Twitter, BuzzFeed, Vice and others, several traditional media companies – Sky, The Guardian and Global Radio – participated, reflecting the rising importance of digital media and digital media buyers to their businesses

Many of the pitches were informed by the key shifts in online content: it is increasingly cross platform, driven by mobile devices and focused on video programming, and these formed the main themes of the event

A key piece of context is the rise of social media and the shift to programmatic buying, which continue to driven down pricing for all but the most valuable inventory – audience scale, high value audiences and premium content have never been more essential

Non-subscribers can download this report in full - alongside all our other coverage of the BBC during the Charter Review process - from the 'BBC Charter Review' page of our site.

BBC proposals for local media set out on 7 September offer solutions to an alleged market failure, without much evidence, contained in February’s Future of News report.

There is no dispute that local commercial print and online media operations have suffered heavy revenue losses since their peak a decade ago – the industry is, however, still profitable, innovation and online growth are helping to stabilise the top-line, and new enterprises are emerging.

Local media publishers prefer a turbo-charged BBC policy of linking to their sites to the proposal for a local media digital hub fed by publishers and 100 BBC journalists.

We are seeing a proliferation of news distribution services on social media and technology platforms, as companies like Apple and Facebook look to capture the value of longform professional content.

Facebook’s Instant articles will likely be the most significant distribution mechanism for publishers, allowing Facebook to further position itself as a provider of quality, rather than just user-generated, content.

This is best seen as a trade: news providers’ engaging content for Facebook’s audience reach and data. While concerns about reliance on Facebook and content commoditisation are understandable, these are the inevitable results of user behaviour.

UK advertising is having a bumper year – some of the strongest growth for two decades – but print is receiving none of this upside. The year started soft then plummeted in the weeks immediately before and since the General Election, with increasingly serious implications for the sector

A reasonably steady UK economy and explosive TV and digital spend evidence a structural decline for print media display, though specific factors also point to some cyclical effects

We forecast a slowing of the rate of decline in H2 2015 and 2016, but we believe sooner or later the industry will have to work closely with agencies and brands to establish new terms of engagement for print media

The latest numbers for Q1 2015 show strong device and internet user growth, with more of the population online than ever before, including more than 90% of under-55s. Growth amongst older groups, however, has slowed to a crawl

Participation in online activities is up across the board, but digital media data shows spend on ebooks and digital music struggling, with the latter being heavily impacted by the rise of unlimited streaming models such as Spotify

The story of mobile's surge continues, with almost a half of e-commerce transactions and a third of search and display ad spend now going to mobile. Most of these mobile devices are Android, but iPhone seems to have gained long term share with its larger phones. Google services, however, have cross-platform reach

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas revealed the ‘next big thing’ for consumers to be products embodying the Internet of Things (IoT), controlled from the smartphone or the vehicle Wearables like fitness bracelets are already selling well in the UK, amongst the largest per capita markets for consumer electronics, and next up is the launch of Apple’s smartwatch Building out the smart home is the focus of the current wave of devices imbedded with sensors on show at CES 2015, with apps developed on platforms supplied by Samsung, Google and Apple

Facebook is winning the battle for eyeballs and advertising in the internet display arena, with revenues projected to reach $5.3 billion in 2012

By comparison, we expect Google to achieve revenue of $2.5 billion, after traffic acquisition costs, though it remains the king of internet advertising, due to its dominance of search

Increasing advertiser demand for scale and performance will make many publishers increasingly reliant on one or both of the internet giants for audience and revenue growth

Zoopla and The Digital Property Group, DMGT’s property portfolio which includes Findaproperty, Primelocation and Globrix, announced a merger on 14 October 2011. Under the terms of the proposed merger, DMGT would receive a 55% interest in the merged entity

A merged Zoopla and DPG will compete more effectively with market leader Rightmove, in a property market scaled down by one-third in terms of the number of transactions

We think the merger will give advertisers a better choice and constrain Rightmove’s pricing power, which has seen hefty fee increases on members, most recently in 2010, in 2011 and most recently again in November 2011

This presentation analyses the social games market in the UK. UK consumer spending on games software, like other recession-battered markets, has been flat for the last two years. At the same time, however, there has been rapid growth in PC-based social gaming, fuelled by the free to play nature of most games and viral marketing capabilities of social networks particularly Facebook. By 2015, we estimate that social gaming across PC, mobile and tablet devices could be worth up to £400 million, though much of this is likely to be driven by adding ‘social’ layers to existing games franchises.

National newspaper circulation continued its inexorable decline in September, with daily circulation down 7% year-on-year, although we estimate retail sales value decline was marginal

Sunday popular and mid-market newspaper circulation fell 4% month-on-month, as News of the World buyers continue to drop out of the market; we estimate around a third of ex-readers have not migrated to another title

Publishers are responding to circulation decline in a variety of ways, from churning out bulks to maintain scale, to increasing cover prices, axing international editions and developing their subscriber base