About Ice

Ice

Ice is a Hebrew-language online news site based in Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District of Israel, that specialises in the worlds it also depends on: media, advertising, marketing and the internet. Founded in 1998, it is described in company profiles as the pioneer Israeli portal for media, advertising and marketing, and its daily output — news, interviews, editorial columns and industry gossip, together with data tools for the local advertising and media industries — has made it the trade paper of Israel's communications business. Alongside that specialist coverage, Ice publishes general and business news for a wider Hebrew-reading audience, and its reports on newspaper readership surveys are quoted across the Israeli press.

Trade publications are rarely famous outside their industries, but inside them they are essential infrastructure. Israel's advertising agencies, television channels, newspapers, radio stations, public-relations firms and digital publishers compete intensely for audiences and budgets, and they need a daily record of who has won which account, which executive has moved where, which campaign has launched and which regulator has intervened. Ice, at ice.co.il, is that record in Israel, and it has performed the role since the commercial internet in Israel was young.

Founded in 1998, a pioneer portal

Company profiles of Ice date its founding to 1998 and call it the pioneer Israeli portal for media, advertising and marketing. The date matters. In 1998 the Israeli internet was still a dial-up medium, commercial web publishing was new, and the idea that an entire industry could be covered daily online, rather than in a weekly print trade paper, was an experiment. Ice was built for that experiment: a portal, in the language of the period, combining published journalism with services and data for its professional readers.

The format has proved durable. The daily content described in profiles of the company — news, interviews, editorial columns and gossip, plus data tools for the local advertising and media industries — is recognisably the same mixture that trade media use everywhere: hard announcements that professionals must know, conversations with the people making decisions, opinion that frames the industry's arguments with itself, and the personnel news that, in a small market like Israel's, is often the most-read material of all.

Part of the Trendline group

Ice is part of the Trendline group. Trendline Information and Communication Services Ltd is an Israeli information and communications company based in Tel Aviv, founded in 1981, whose shares have been traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under the ticker TREN. Its business is providing information and communication services for business users in Israel, and its best-known public products are its websites. Globes, Israel's business newspaper, reported in 2013 that Trendline owned the websites Bizportal, Ice and Takdin, when it covered Trendline's acquisition of the internet activity of Tapuz People Ltd for 4.3 million shekels — a deal that included Tapuz's forums and blogs, the joint video site Flix and a majority stake in a children's portal, and was subject to approval by the Antitrust Authority.

Within that stable, each site has a distinct job. Bizportal is the group's financial portal, a real-time business news and data site for investors. Takdin serves legal information. Ice covers media, advertising, marketing and the internet itself — which means that, unusually, the group owns the publication that reports on the group's own industry, including on its competitors, its regulators and the audience data by which all of them, Ice included, are judged. Profiles of Ice also describe Trendline Media, the group's media subsidiary, as operating sites including Bizportal, a daily technology blog and a real-estate listing portal alongside Ice.

What Ice covers

Ice's core coverage is the Israeli communications industry in the widest sense. It reports on television and radio, on newspapers and magazines, on digital publishing and social platforms, on advertising agencies and media-buying, on public relations and marketing, and on the regulators and courts that shape them. Executive appointments, account wins and losses, campaign launches, rebranding, ratings disputes, licensing decisions and media ownership changes are its daily material. Because Israel's media market is small and concentrated, a change at one channel or newspaper is national business news, and Ice treats it that way.

The site's bylines in academic citations show the texture of that work. The Media Influence Matrix study of Israel, produced for journalism research, cited an Ice article of 29 August 2017 by Alexander Katz reporting that a crowdfunding campaign for an independent media project had raised more than a quarter of a million shekels — the kind of media-about-media story, part finance and part press freedom, that is Ice's home ground. Researchers writing about Israeli media funding, ownership and influence use Ice as a primary Hebrew source in this way, because much of the industry's history is recorded nowhere else in public.

Ice and the TGI readership surveys

Ice is also widely known in Israel as a publisher of the TGI readership surveys. TGI survey results measure the exposure of Israeli newspapers and other media, and they are the currency in which Israeli print media argue about their relative strength: which daily is gaining, which is losing, and how titles compare with one another. Ice's publication of TGI figures is the source cited in reference works when Israeli newspaper exposure is discussed, including in encyclopaedia material on Israeli titles that needs a readership number.

That role gives Ice an influence beyond commentary. In advertising markets, audience data is money: rates are set, campaigns are planned and the commercial health of newspapers is judged by survey exposure. A site that both reports the surveys and reports the industry that lives by them sits at a junction of journalism and market infrastructure, which is why Ice's Hebrew name is familiar to media professionals even among readers who never visit it for general news.

A trade paper in a small, argumentative market

Israel's media industry is unusually political. Ownership of newspapers and channels has been a subject of parliamentary debate, criminal investigation coverage and public argument for years, and the boundary between media news and political news is porous: a new channel launch, a newspaper's financial trouble or a regulator's decision can each become a front-page story in the general press. Ice covers that boundary from the industry side, reporting the business and regulatory facts of stories that the general press often reports as pure politics.

It also covers the industry's lighter side. Company profiles list gossip among its daily content, and in a market where senior media figures are public personalities, personnel moves, feuds and celebrations are part of the record. For historians of Israeli media, today's trade gossip is tomorrow's evidence of how alliances inside the industry actually worked.

General news and business coverage

Although its identity is specialist, Ice is listed among Israel's online news sites for its broader output as well, publishing media, advertising and business news alongside general news in Hebrew. That breadth is typical of Israeli portals of its generation, which grew from single-subject sites into general news destinations as online audiences expanded, while retaining the specialist desks that gave them their names. For Ice, the specialist desk remained the centre of gravity: when Israeli professionals say a story appeared in Ice, they usually mean an industry story, and they treat its appearance there as the industry being told officially.

The site operates in Hebrew from Tel Aviv. That language choice defines its public: it is written for the Israeli industry itself, not for foreign observers of it, and its archives are consequently one of the places where the Israeli media business explains itself to itself, in its own language and on its own terms.

Tel Aviv, centre of the industry

Ice's Tel Aviv base is the natural location for its beat. Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District, is the centre of Israel's advertising industry, its commercial television and digital publishing businesses, its start-up economy and much of its newspaper industry, and the city and its surrounding business districts house the agencies, channels and publishers Ice reports on. A media trade paper needs to be where the industry's offices, launches and press events are, and in Israel that means the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

The city's role also explains Ice's relationship with the technology sector. Israeli advertising and media are intertwined with the country's technology industry — advertising technology, audience measurement, content recommendation and streaming are all local technology businesses as well as media businesses — and Ice's remit, which explicitly includes the internet, places it across that junction too.

How Ice is used by researchers and the industry

Beyond its daily readers, Ice serves two standing audiences. The first is the industry itself: agencies checking competitors, executives checking their own coverage, and jobseekers and recruiters following the personnel column that every trade paper maintains. The second is researchers. Academic and policy studies of Israeli media — including international work on media ownership, funding and influence in Israel — cite Ice for facts available nowhere else in English-accessible form, from crowdfunding totals for independent projects to the publication of readership data.

Company databases that profile Ice describe a compact operation, in the range of a small digital publisher, headquartered in Tel Aviv. That scale is typical of trade publishing worldwide: a small newsroom with deep contacts can cover an industry more completely than a large general newsroom that visits it occasionally, because its reporters speak to the same sources every day and are read by them every morning.

Place in the Israeli news landscape

In directories of Israeli media, Ice appears in two capacities at once: as a general online news site in Hebrew, and as the specialist source for the media and advertising industries. Both listings are accurate. Founded in 1998 as a pioneer portal, owned by the stock-exchange-listed Trendline group alongside Bizportal and Takdin, publishing the TGI exposure figures on which Israeli newspapers argue about their standing, and cited by researchers as a record of the industry's funding and ownership, Ice is one of the small publications through which a national industry understands itself.

Its survival since 1998, through the collapse of the first internet boom, the migration of advertising to global platforms and repeated upheavals in Israeli media ownership, is itself a piece of the story it covers: specialist journalism, done daily and in the industry's own language, retained an audience that general portals could not take from it.