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News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

What we found is that Twitter is viewed much like Facebook was in the summer of 2012: While many advertisers use it as a marketing channel, only a minority actually place ads there.

Among the respondents, 70% currently use Twitter as a marketing channel and 80% say they plan to use Twitter in the next 12 months. But only 46% say they've ever bought an ad on Twitter, whether a promoted tweet, trend, account or an "Amplify" TV deal.

In the coming year, 59.2% said they expect their Twitter advertising budget to "modestly increase" or "significantly increase."