When did you first start integrating PolicyMic with Facebook and Twitter, and why?

Well, the company was founded in 2011 and as soon as it started they already had Facebook and Twitter. I initially worked doing SEO, basically whatever is trending on Google. So my experience with PolicyMic initially was driving organic traffic to the site from Google. Even at that point, 2011, there was still a separation between Google and facebook. We wrote articles and posted them on the blog and we posted them on Facebook and we posted them on Twitter. Now, I think that is totally integrated. Even when you think about which topics to write about, you have to already think how is it going to be tweeted, how is it going to shared on Facebook, what are the key works that work – basically how you present, or how you curate, that content on Facebook and Twitter. So going back to my old path there. Probably last year, 2012, probably in November, I switched to doing just Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and twitter are main social networks. Facebook is much larger. We have typically 50-60 percent of traffic comes from Google. We have 7 million visits a month. So we are growing. We are still not the Huffington Post, which is like 15 million or something. So we get a little bit more than two thirds from Google and then social traffic is the rest, like 30 plus percent is Facebook, and Twitter is much smaller than that. So of our social pie, Facebook is probably two thirds, and then one third is Twitter. When there is a news event or people are tweeting a lot, or one of our articles goes viral on Twitter, we get much more traffic form Twitter that week or month, but still Facebook is the main thing for now. And we do have Pinterest and Tumblr and Goggle+, but the traffic we drive from there is not that significant at all. For us it is more like a presence at this point.

Do you see an increase of the people that are referred from social media?

Yes, definitely. For the last year social traffic has grown. It has been slowly but steady.

What about traffic from Google?

It is growing too. As we get older we get a better ranking on Google, our stories get ranked better, so we will keep getting more traffic, hopefully, from Google.

What about direct?

That started out really, really small, and now it is getting larger.

So it is really just direct, Google and Facebook that drive traffic to your news site?

Yes, and then Twitter and Facebook are different. Like I said before, we used to post a blog and then post a story and then post it on Facebook. Now we are actually creating content specifically for Facebook. We are just like any other company or organization that has adjusted their social media efforts over time. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work tomorrow. It is very unstable like that. But I want to close with Twitter and Facebook saying that the content people share on Facebook is more targeted to emotions. Or if you are the first to break a news story, it is just going to go crazy. One example is the Boston bombing. Someone tweeted a photo on Twitter right away and posted it on Facebook and it got shared like crazy. And then Facebook gives you the alternative that if you post a photo you can actually edit the blur, so you can just break a story on Facebook and then you can just link it to your post and it keeps going viral. So that is one way of getting Facebook traffic.

So you don’t post an article on your news site and then share it with a headline and a link on Facebook?

That is what we used to do. And think that is fine. But now we are trying the exploit the breaking news aspect of Facebook. So if, let’s say, they pass gay marriage, right. If you are one of the first pages to break it, it is going to go viral. But if you in a week from now post a story saying, ‘this is the legislation, this is what it means, and this is how it is going to work, and you post that on Facebook, it is not going to go anywhere because people have already heard about it all week. You also won’t get a lot of traffic posting a story that is not breaking but is kind of like a divisive story – women’s rights, gay marriage, abortion, religion – it’s a no no! You do get engagement from comments. (On Facebook you have different ways of measuring your impact, and it is going to depend on your strategy and whatever you are looking for. You can have likes, you can have shares, you can have comments.) But from these political, divisive issues you don’t get a lot of likes. You get a lot of comments and they are very toxic. By toxic I mean, you have to monitor it, making sure it is not something crazy, outrageous that you have to hide or delete. It is really not worth, going that way – for us right now, for our sort of objective company. For other ultra liberal or ultra conservative news companies that have really passionate followings, they of course are going to get all that traffic. But for us right now, that is not what we are doing.

So where do you see any kind of business opportunities emerge on these platforms for a news company?

Hm, I don’t work in the sales department. But we use Twitter to get more engagement and create more awareness of our brand. Our brand is becoming more well-know because of Twitter where we get tweeted and retweeted by professional polits or TV personalities, and huge traffic from that. So in that sense, it helps our brand. And then you have the chance to connect and network with other media. Yesterday, we had a mention in the New York Times, in one of the columns. So we got to interact on Twitter with the writer, Charles Blow, so in that sense that was a way to create awareness about our news brand. Absolutely!

What about loyalty? Do you think people that interact on Facebook and Twitter tend to be engaged with your site, or be more loyal readers?

Well, I found out that Facebook is probably a better place to create loyalty than Twitter – just because Twitter is very fast and the feeds come by the second. But you do get, I guess… The way we started our brand is sort of like crowd sourced knowledge or opinion for and by millennials, so in the same way our social presence is very crowd sourced in the sense that I’m in charge of PolicyMic’s Twitter feed, but let’s say some story get published, then more than just me tweeting this story on behalf of PolicyMic, I would rather have the same writer who wrote the story, tweet it from his or her personal social media account so you can see the face of the writer, and then his or her following gets that crowd sourced feeling. So there is loyalty in the sense that there is going to Twitter users that are interested in women’s right so every time our women’s right, writers post something or tweet something there is going to be that engagement; they are going to retweet it or they are going to reply, and there is going to a conversation based on that article and whatever hashtag about what people are for, or against. Like for example, they think Monsanto is awful or they love Monsanto, or whatever it is. You have people constantly engaging in the news.

And do you see that benefitting the financial viability of your website?

Well, again Twitter is a smaller piece of our social traffic pie, but that is an interesting question. We have some writers prefer to … at the bottom of their article they say follow me on Twitter or get in on the conversation on Twitter. Some people feel that it is going to take away comments from the actual comment section on our site, and other people on the contrary people believe that is going to compound the whole thing. I think more the latter. I do believe that the more interaction outside our site is good as long as you constantly have your social presence connected to your site, constantly trying to refer people back to your site, and vice versa – to your Twitter feed and your Facebook page.

So what do you do on your site to connect your Facebook page and Twitter feed to it?

Well, right now we our redesigning our page. So we are going to have much more social buttons all over the place. We don’t have as many right now. Also we encourage our writers to a) under their Twitter bio say, ‘I write for Policy Mic’, so you can click at it and get directly back to our site, and b) on our site we have writers saying at the button of their article, ‘follow me on Twitter’ or ‘these are the topics that I’m interested in on Twitter’, so basically trying to bounce that traffic back and fourth. That is the goal.

Do you see that happening right now?

Yes, social traffic is definitely increasing from Twitter. But it is also a matter of working along side the writers, sort of like coaching them on Twitter as well. Not a lot of people are on Twitter and if they are they don’t tweet as often. So we constantly give our writers tips on how to get better at Twitter. To me, it is supposed to leverage your audiences. And the way I see our Twitter and Facebook feeds right know, is almost like another section of our site. So we have politics, we have feminism, we have international and then I see Facebook and Twitter as just some sections that we create content for and get traffic back from.

So the type content that sits well with people on social media sites is more like breaking news, you said?

Yes, for Twitter it is breaking news, and also social groups the users belong to and identify with. So if you grew up an immigrant, or you are a European, or gay, or fighting for women’s rights, anything, African-Americans, Latinos. If it is things that people feel strongly about they are going to take action. That is what social media is about, triggering action. It is not about people looking at their feed thinking whatever. But it is about getting them to reply or retweet.

So you send out something on social media sites to creation action?

Absolutely. That should be the goal.

Does every journalist from PolicyMic dedicate a specific amount of time to Facebook and Twitter?

We post 100 articles per day right now, so every time an article comes out … well, we publish one hundred and … you know, on Twitter you can tweet everything, it doesn’t matter. But on Facebook, we have to space it out. Otherwise people would see it as spam. So you don’t get to post everything that you want on Facebook.

Why is that different?

I think it is because there are much more tweets, there are like million of tweets. On Facebook people post whatever on their personal pages, but for a brand you could risk being annoying or polarizing. It is a reason for people to just unfollow.

But that doesn’t happen on Twitter?

I don’t think so. On Facebook you may have like 500 or 700 friends, on Twitter people have 20,000 so the turn around is much faster. The thing with social media is, you know, we all use social media more of less, so when you send out news you have to put yourself in the user’s shoes, thinking what annoys you, what would you like, what would you tweet and retweet. So I guess, you have less Facebook friends and you may think that the first article about IRS or Obama is great, but the when the second one comes, you think what is next, I’m over it. So for that reason we don’t get to post as many articles on Facebook. So instead we post a story and then we also post an infographic or some image from a company or a peer research, so we don’t get perceived as too pushy or self-promoting or self-serving – that annoys people, and they will just unfollow you. So for that reason you cant really push everything on Facebook. And that is what I fight with editors and writers about every day. They are like, ‘post my article, post my article’. Also, Facebook is very performance based, so if you want to keep it free your posts have to perform. So you post something and it gets all these likes, then the next post is going to have a large audience. But if you post something that doesn’t get a lot of reaction, your next post is going to get just a couple of likes, just forget it. It is just going to reduce your audience. I know you can pay for it by getting people to promote your posts, but we are not on that phase yet. At some point we will start doing it. But for us right now it is just about making our content perform well, so we can get as much traffic as possible. The same as we did, and keep doing, with Google.

So was it the individual journalist or you that share the news on social media?

Both. But in my ideal world, the journalists are very engaged on social media and have a large following, so they can always post their own articles. Again, it comes back to leverage, you know. It is much better if we have a community where people engage, than having only one or two person engage. It is an exponential-effect. That is what social media and viral reality is about. It is basically exponential, you know, two times four, and then six and then eight. So that would be ideal.

How many hours a day do you think the average journalists from PolicyMic spend on Facebook and Twitter right now?

Hm, I will say, uh … uh, probably three to four hours a day on average. Again, we are sort of changing into an integrated, simultaneous culture, where you have a tap open on your site, a tap open on Twitter, a tap open on Facebook, etc. because you are constantly getting ideas from Facebook as well as breaking news from Twitter that is feeding into your news feed. So it is not anymore about writing one article and then posting it, it is more like … do you know, those tweet-curated sites? One of them is called TweetSheet. It is basically a blog that, instead of writing about some news story, mine Twitter for the power users and the actual sources tweeting about it in real time, and then they lay out all the tweets. That is how they tell the whole story. I think that is where media is going. So that is where PolicyMic should be going, I think. So it really has to be simultaneous. With Twitter being so instantaneous and so fast, if you disconnect for a couple of hours to write a story, you have things happening and changing in the meantime with your story. So it is just going be faster and more real-time. It kind of sucks because you have pros and cons. You may have to comprise with accuracy and so on. You saw it with the Boston bombing where CNN and the big ones were on fire.

Do you have any benchmarks for success with your strategies on Facebook and Twitter?

Well, our strategy is to drive as much traffic as possible. We have ads of course, but we also have investors, venture capitals, so they are going to be looking at the numbers and the reach – social and Google. So for us, it is about driving as much high-quality traffic in our demographic, which is millennialls. In the past, we were doing stuff with pop culture and driving all this traffic from celebrities. And it was great. We had a lot of traffic. But it is not necessarily one hundred percent in tune with our mission and with our demographic.

So you are looking mostly at volume metrics?

Yes definitely. But also … I guess another business opportunity would be to partner with other similar news news sites and personalities, or even larger sites like the New York Times. Just to keep that engagement with them and hopefully get them to mention our brand on their much larger sites so we can bring even more traffic and also even more people to write for our site, which will in turn help our brand. We have posts from Paul Franc, the former congress man from Massachusetts, Paul Ryan, the senator that is probably going to be the presidential candidate, Clare Macasgo, etc. It has been great because, for instance Senator Clare Macasgo wrote about sexual assaults in the military, so we gained not only specific traffic concerned with that particular issue, and internal engagement on Twitter and Facebook, but also … we were one of the first sites to report on that news story, and it became a big issue in the mainstream media, so that was a gain for us in terms of traffic and brand wise – having our name associated with a United State senator. It gives us a lot of credibility.

So in that way social media helps you attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess. Because if you want to sell a product to millennialls, and you see that the United State senator is writing on our page, it probably has more credibility than more amateurish college blogs – not that there is something wrong with these blogs and all companies have different targets, like … but I guess in that sense, I mean, I haven’t seen the actual metrics on how social media has helped bring in more brands, but if browse on our site you are going to see big brands advertise on a regular basis. So I think it has made a positive business opportunity.

Do you think social engagement metrics will help attract advertisers?

Yes, I guess from an advertiser’s point of view you want to see the numbers on their traffic, but also their Facebook and Twitter feeds. You want so see how many fans, followers and likes they have, and if people interact on every single post. I’m not in advertising but we do advertising ideas in a way, so I would say the more social engagement you have, the better for attracting advertisers and also business opportunity partnerships. Right now, we have a potential partnership in the works with one of the big media companies, so in way they have been able to find us because of tweets or Facebook posts they saw somewhere, a share and then they tracked back to the site. So absolutely!

To answer your question about if it is worthwhile to engage in these social networks, I would say as long as it is free and easy to use, absolutely. Beside free and easy to use, the advantage is that you can pretty much mole that into your mission statement or your brand identity. And Twitter is just like … I can’t tell people enough how amazing Twitter is. I started on Twitter in 08, and people didn’t get it and it annoyed me a little bit. But I would say stick with it, get into it because not only do you get these business opportunities, it’s basically like you have a real time focus group in your pocket, in your Twitter app. Anything you want to know about anything basically you can see there. You see what kind of opinions people have in real time. It is probably not terribly scientific as a pole, but still it is very useful.

So Twitter is more about feeling what is out there, getting to know your audience, whereas Facebook from a business perspective is a generator of traffic?

Yes, well, Twitter is also about breaking news like the Boston marathon. So you keep tweeting about it and if you do it the right way, you get a lot of mentions and retweets and favorites, which is going to rank your tweets up. So people who are searching for some news story will see your tweets first. So it is all about keeping your ranking up there, just like on Google. Twitter is the same. And yes, you basically want to keep an engaged and hopefully large audience.

But since Twitter is not as much a generator of traffic, it is still worthwhile for a news company to integrate with from a business perspective?

Yes, for us it is not that large, but there are other news sites that get all there traffic from Twitter because they have a different strategy and different missions and different approaches. I don’t know if you know Buzzfeed – it is a viral blog. Almost 100 percent of there traffic is from Facebook as opposed to Google. So it depends on how you approach it. But even if you don’t generate traffic from Twitter, you create a lot of brand awareness, or…

Yes, but you kind of need the traffic to create brand awareness as well. If you don’t get a lot of traffic, they won’t be aware. But if people retweet your content, your brand will get around on Twitter, right?

Yes, absolutely! But you better realize that there are a lot of people that get their news from their Twitter feeds, who don’t necessarily go to your site. So I guess in that sense you definitely need to be out there. Ideally, you have a lot of engagement and brand presence. But people are going to be searching. They are going to search “New York Times Facebook” because they want to go to that particular company Facebook page or Twitter page. I don’t know exactly how many, but I don’t see a lot of people doing that, so I would say that it is probably decreasing that you go to a browser and then directly to nytimes.com as opposed to going to a news aggregator, like FlipBoard or Twitter or Facebook. Some times they even break the news first on Twitter, like the AP [Associated Press] for instance they break it there seconds before they break it on the actual site, so getting in the mix of Twitter totally makes sense.

Do you see any disadvantages of integrating with Facebook and Twitter? Any risks that you may be taking?

Uh, well, I would say, you risk being inaccurate in the name of being fast and being first, which is not going to change. We are a for-profit company, we are running a business, so we need the traffic, we need to make the calls everyday, we are going to try to break the news first. There is going to be some risks, like, you have to say this information may not be confirmed yet, or if the New York Times said or the CNN said it, you say it. So I guess the disadvantage for your brand is that if you are trying to be a respected news organization. But I guess that is the risk that you have to learn how to manage, because people are going to be tweeting, and as much as the users are going to complain, they are going to be the first to search for breaking news on Twitter. They want to be the first to get the information to tell their friends or coworkers. You don’t want to be the last guy knowing that Michael Jackson died. You want to be the first one, so people can say “holly shit”. So yes, that would be a downside.

Do you think there is a risk in linking out your news items on social media or to other news aggregators? Perhaps, readers won’t come back to your site.

Yes, that is something you also have to work on. I worked on mobile advertising before and we had these conversions. People actually pay per-click in that business. So you actually want that traffic coming back to your site, and not only do you want them to come back to your site, you want them to perform an action, whether it is buying something or, in our case, share the news story. So you definitely want that, and that is tricky. But I don’t think it is different from traditional advertising, where you have to track how many people come to your products, and how do you do that? I guess that is also another risk internally. It depends on how you measure your success.

How do you do that?

Like I said before, ideally it is about driving traffic to our site. Secondary, it is about increasing our social media footprint. So even if a hundred percent of people from that tweet or that post don’t come to our site, if their friends see on their profiles that someone liked a PolicyMic article that is still a win for us, because maybe that person will be like, “oh that looks interesting.” The bottom line is driving traffic into a site. And if you are selling products, you better have people auditing that product. That is the bottom line.

So are you actually taking a bigger risk not being on these platforms?

Absolutely! As long as it stays free and easy to use. They have huge audiences that you can reach. I mean, how could you not want to reach that? Any downside that it could have, the benefits totally outweigh. Going back to your question if it is worthwhile for a news company to spend human capital or money on Facebook and Twitter, it is going to depend on your strategy, but you definitely should have a social media presence. Right now, on Pinterest and Tumblr we do have a smaller audience and we post, and every here and there a post go viral and we get traffic from that, but we don’t have people dedicated completely to these platforms. Maybe if we hire someone else, someone who can dedicate more time to Pinterest or Tumblr that would be great. But you have to allocate your resources depending on what your priorities are. So if you have one guy doing social media and if you see that you get much more traffic and conversions from Facebook than on Twitter, by all means invest more time and effort on Facebook, but do not neglect the other ones. And as you get more resources you can basically allocate them better. But I guess the bottom line is, how could you not be on social media, whether you are a NGO or a vitamin shop. You know, Jamba Juice they have all these promos and stuff that creates huge engagement. And they are not charging you for that on Facebook or Twitter. They could charge you for that. Facebook encourages you to use promoted posts, and yes if you have the budget and you want to promote posts by all means. The reason why Yahoo bought Tumblr is because they are now doing promoted posts, so they are going to start charging people who want to reach specific demographics. You know, it makes sense.

The Guardian example holds two important lessons: Not only can social media and engagement strategies improve audience loyalty, but it’s also important to measure and research how your strategy is performing. One tool to measure audience engagement with your content via social media is real-time analytics.  Unlike print or broadcast where audience measurement is slow, sometimes glacially so, the nature of the web allows content creators to monitor the activity of their social media audiences as it happens.  Real-time analytics packages provide key insights into site performance, allowing editors and journalists to understand how audiences are responding to content much more easily.

One real-time analytics service is ChartBeat, which provides news outlets with a real-time dashboard – a simple set of charts and graphs – to see what is happening on their site and what content visitors are sharing with their networks. ChartBeat is a snapshot of what is happening right now, in contrast to other analytics tools which reveal how your audience is growing over time.

NPR, the public radio broadcaster in the US, uses Chartbeat to deliver actionable insights into how their audiences are reacting to their coverage. According to Nathan Bernier at NPR’s KUTNews.org, this real-time data gives an understanding of how their audience reacts to the news on a story-by-story basis, rather than having to wait for ratings books every three months. It also allows them to understand immediately how web traffic is affected by any of their news campaigns. Part of the appeal of Chartbeat is its ease of use, according to Steve Mulder, Director of User Experience & Analytics for National Public Radio Digital Services. He said:

[It] has a simple, fun interface that shows you how many users are on your site right now, where they came from, what content they are looking at, and – this is where the magic happens – what they are sharing with others.

Real-time data can allow you to respond more quickly to audience behaviour, but as Tony Haile from ChartBeat told a conference audience recently, “real time data isn’t worth a damn unless you can respond in real time.”

Bernier said that responding to real-time data has helped NPR to “build a more adaptive and flexible organization, and have a sense we’re programming the news with our community at the same time.”

SignalNoi.se is another useful analytics tool. Like ChartBeat, it tracks in real-time how stories are performing on your site and how your content is being shared via social media, but it also tracks content on your competitors’ sites. By tracking social engagement with the news through SignalNoi.se’s dashboard, journalists and editors can gain a real-time insight into what stories are resonating with their audiences.

SignalNoi.se recently received an investment from the Knight Enterprise Fund as part of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge that focused on networks. Mohamed Nanabhay is the co-founder of SignalNoi.se and brings to bear his experience as the head of Al Jazeera English online. During the Arab Spring, he noticed a disconnect between the stories that major websites, including Al Jazeera and The Guardian, were leading with and the stories that were being shared on Twitter and Facebook.

“Newsrooms are stressed for resources. No one has enough journalists to do the stories they want to do. We provide you with metrics that say, this is how you do your stories, this is where you throw your resources in,” Nanabhay said at a recent Knight News Challenge event, adding he wanted to help bring “social clarity to these newsrooms”. Editors and journalists “can look at it and say hey, this is a story we should be writing, this is a story we should be promoting, this is a story we should be repositioning,” he explained.

Of course, with the rise of real-time analytics, traditional web analytics providers are moving to add such features to their own services. For instance, Google Analytics has also recently incorporated real-time reporting into its existing service, allowing you to track how many people are on your site, their geographic locations, which sites they have come from, and what pages they are viewing.

There is an obvious advantage in getting access to real-time data for your own site: the ability to see what stories are being shared, commented and tweeted the most right now, giving you a good idea of where you should be putting your resources and how you should position your stories to take advantage of audience interests.  ChartBeat and SignalNoi.se are examples of easy-to-use data tools that do not require training and are accessible for all editorial staff. Hits, shares, comments and likes are all updated, live, on your dashboard, providing the newsroom with dynamic graphs to easily spot trends and spikes in interest. They give every journalist or editor – with or without expertise in data analysis – the opportunity to easily optimize their editorial decisions, and to improve reach, user engagement, and value for online advertisers.

Digital technology is radically remaking media, and while many people focus on the changes brought to the newspapers, publishing and music industries, digital technology is bringing about one of the most fundamental transformations in the history of television. First, digital technology radically expanded multi-channel television via cable and satellite. Now live streaming and video on demand via mobile, tablets, internet and smart TV platforms looks set to radically reshape viewing habits by giving consumers unprecedented choice of when, where and how they will view TV. If you want to see a glimpse of the future of TV, you only have to look at how the BBC delivered what they called the “first proper digital Olympics” and how consumers responded.

The BBC’s London 2012 Olympics coverage was not only properly digital, but properly multi-platform and properly comprehensive. The BBC described this as a four-screen strategy, reaching viewers via PC, mobile, tablet and internet-connected TV. The public broadcaster delivered nearly day-long coverage on five of its nine linear channels and every minute of every event, 2,500 hours of coverage, via live, HD streams via desktop computers, smartphones, tablets and internet protocol TV (IPTV) platforms. This was a thousand more hours of coverage than they provided for Beijing in 2008, and the 24 HD streams were six times more than they delivered four years ago. It was a monumental task that required months of testing before the games.

The BBC delivered a smartphone app built specifically for the games, and the broadcaster launched a new video player via its Sports website that allowed people to view and time shift 24 streams of video. Users could easily move back and forth through the live video stream to see previous events via clear navigation that broke the stream into events, highlighting the ones in which British athletes took part. It was more like visually navigating through the chapters of a DVD than the normal online video presentation that only provides the ability to rewind without a clear sense of key moments.

IPTV platforms have matured dramatically in the UK since the 2008 Beijing Olymics, the BBC used these platforms to ensure the widest distribution of its Olympics coverage. The BBC used its IPTV platform, iPlayer, to stream live coverage of its three network channels. Additionally, BBC delivered the same 24 live and catch-up video streams to internet connected TVs, such as Sony Smart TV, PlayStation 3, Virgin Media TiVo, through an (IPTV) service called “Red Button” that gave audiences more flexibility and interactivity as the Games happened. On free-to-air digital TV service, Freeview, the Red Button feature is used to access digital text services and also extra programme channels. After the Olympics, the BBC will be focusing on IPTV services on the Red Button service.

How consumers responded

The scale of delivery is something that very few broadcasters apart from the BBC could achieve. However, this monumental project provides us valuable insights into how consumers will consume video-on-demand services on new platforms.

British viewers definitely embraced the BBC’s multi-platform offering. Taking into account both website traffic and digital video streaming, “the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s”, Cait O’Riordan, Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012, said.

In total, the BBC received 106m video requests across its digital platforms. This was more than three times the 32m online videos requested during the 2008 Games, and the most BBC has ever received. The majority of these online video requests, 62m, were for live-streams, while only 8m were for on-demand live streams and 35m were for short-form clips.

One challenge in designing the service was to allow viewers to not only time-shift within a video stream but also to quickly and easily move between streams of the various sports on offer. O’Riordan said.

Our aim was to put audiences in control of their Olympics experience, transforming the way they could navigate through the huge breadth of coverage using the extra features of the interactive video player.

The BBC found that users did indeed take advantage of this option. The corporation’s data clearly shows people moving across channels and platforms to check out a whole host of different events. Whether they were carrying high-profile or esoteric, little-supported events, all 24 of the streams were being used. According to the head of product, O’Riordan, every one of the streams saw at least 100,000 users – a considerable audience for narrowcast events – at some point during the two weeks of games.

O’Riordan also points out how in a four-screen world, consumption patterns shift noticeably through the day as they travel to work, are at work, are at home in front of the TV and then take a tablet to bed. She said:

• PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments.
• Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action
• Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed.

Mobile and tablet accounted for 41 percent of IP video stream viewing during the games, the BBC said, and in the US, NBC said that the figure was 45 percent, showing the dramatic potential for mobile video viewing once the networks are in place to support this kind of activity.

It is also important to note that with all of this digital consumption, the Olympics was a huge draw for traditional TV viewers wanting to cheer on the home team. The BBC announced that a staggering 90% of the entire British population watched at least 15 minutes of its Olympics coverage either on linear TV or via the Red Button service.

The future: Coming to a screen near you

Being able to reach audiences with your programming no matter where they are or which device they are using holds huge opportunities for broadcasters. The BBC’s four-screen strategy for London 2012 shows a glimpse of the digital future, but it is a future that is coming to your market as IPTV platforms proliferate and mobile networks become faster and more robust. Broadcast markets around the world are making the switch from analogue to digital, whether that is free-to-air terrestrial services, digital satellite, IPTV or new mobile and tablet apps.

By 2015, the number of IPTV subscribers globally is expected to grow from 53 million in 2011 to 105.1 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7%,  according to a new report “IPTV Global Forecast: 2011 to 2015 Report” by MRG Multimedia Research Group. The service revenue for the world IPTV market will grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach $45.3bn. The rise in revenue will be driven by dramatic IPTV growth emerging markets, such as Brazil and Russia, albeit from a low base. A 2011 report predicts that IPTV subscribers in Brazil will from 21,000 in 2011 to 1.5m by 2016, according to Pyramid Research.

This future may seem a long way off, but the BBC began to position itself for a digital video future more than a decade ago. In 2001, work began on its ground-breaking TV on-demand iPlayer platform which now spans online, smart TVs, and mobile devices. Whilst the BBC has the advantage of enormous resources and infrastructure, there are important steps that all broadcasters can take to prepare for the digital future.

What comes across loud and clear is that consumers will embrace choice when given the opportunity. Broadcasters and other content creators should remember this as they position themselves to take advantage of digital opportunities. The other lesson is that with multiple screens comes a range of new viewing patterns as video content can follow a viewer throughout the day. Prime time may mean something quite different depending on the device and delivery method. Successful broadcasters of the future will be ready to serve consumers when, where and how they want.

Broadcasters losing share as competition grows

Our research showed that over the past few decades, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) in the US – which includes cable television (CATV) as well as direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) and now internet protocol television (IPTV) – have been steadily eroding broadcast network audience share. The four major US broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, have been steadily losing viewers since the 1980s, while pay TV – primarily ad-supported cable networks included in basic, non-premium cable packages such as USA, ESPN, CNN and MTV – have been gaining them. The major challenge for television companies is that total television viewing has remained relatively flat since the early 1990s, meaning that the more players are fighting for the same eyeballs, creating an increasingly competitive market.

In terms of total viewership, broadcast networks seem to have lost the battle. The total basic cable audience share already surpassed that of network TV in 2002, and since then it has continued to rise, both in terms of primetime and total day viewing. SNL Kagan, an American research company, expects the basic cable audience share to reach 70% of overall TV viewing in the US by 2016-2017.

Despite the fact that broadcast networks will command less than a third of the market in terms of overall viewing, SNL Kagan says that individually the networks will continue to provide widely viewed content to large audiences. However, both the internet, as well as IPTV, and multichannel TV services have clearly caused the American audience to splinter. “Gone are the days when the nation gathered around television sets in the evening to watch, say ‘The Cosby Show’ or ‘All in the Family’ and then chat about it the next day at work,” explains Horace Newcomb, professor of telecommunications at the University of Georgia. Gone are the days of a mass audience with a handful of choices. In the next few decades, technology will create an era of personalised information where everyone with view what they want when they want. This will only increase the pressure on broadcast networks to maintain their audience share at the size and consistent level that they had in the past.

Broadcasters still able to charge ad premiums

Not only are pay TV services, including cable and satellite, beating network TV in terms of audience share, but predictably, pay TV is also winning in terms of total revenue. Not only did overall pay TV revenues first surpass those of broadcast networks in 2008, but the gap will continue to grow, according to SNL Kagan. By 2016, network TV is projected to generate around $25 billion, while cable TV will reach almost $40 billion.

Pay TV might be winning in terms of overall revenue, but network broadcasters ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox can still take some solace that they still come out on top in terms of advertising revenue in the US. Even though cable TV has surpassed network broadcast TV in terms of audience share, broadcasters still attract roughly two-thirds of total TV ad spend. Broadcasters are able to charge much higher ad rates than cable outlets. The difference in ad rates is down to the difference in audience size for individual channels. Audiences are more fragmented across the dizzying number of channels available via cable or satellite, and no individual cable channel can match a broadcast network in terms of eyeballs. As a result, broadcast TV creates higher value value for advertisers and therefore charges higher rates. Broadcasters charge on average $10.25 per thousand viewers, while cable TV is able to take only half, $5.99, according to eMarketer.

Diversity of revenue benefits pay TV

However, our research found that pay TV businesses generally have the strongest financial and operating results because their revenue streams, in most cases, are split between advertising and subscription revenue. Broadcasters might be winning the advertising game, but they aren’t able to charge their viewers the relatively pricey subscription fees, often around $100 a month, that the MVPDs of pay television can. This diversity of revenue both taps into cable TV’s steady subscriber growth and increasing audiences over the past decades, while lessening the cyclicality inherent in the purely ad-based model of network stations. Put simply, advertising usually declines during a recession, but subscriptions provide pay TV providers a buffer from the ups and downs of the economy. That’s why NBC’s former chief executive, Jeff Zucker says, “ The cable model is just superior to the broadcast model.”

Comcast, the largest distributor of cable programming in the US and the owner of NBC Universal, for example, generates the majority of its revenue from its subscribers. In 2011, subscription fees made up an entire 86% of its cable division’s total revenue. However, it is not just large cable networks like Comcast that win in the pay TV model. Individual cable networks, such as the 24-hours news station CNN, also benefit from the pay TV model by charging MVPDs and other carriers so-called affiliate fees – shares of the subscriber payments. In 2011, a channel as widely watched as CNN could charge $0.57 per subscriber, accounting for approximately 50% of the channel’s total revenue. This contrasts with the revenue mix of the leading broadcast network, CBS, which generates 63% of its total revenue from advertising but only 12% in affiliate fees.

Pay TV revenues driving boom in original programming

Subscription and affiliate fees are clearly driving the growth of the cable industry. The rising revenue is able to fund program development and attract new viewers. Total payments from affiliate fees on the US TV market were approximately $32 billion in 2011, which was about 50% more than the total advertising spending on cable TV the same year. Premium cable businesses, like HBO and Showtime, are even managing to build their businesses without advertising revenues whatsoever. It only takes one brief look at the current Emmy nominations to recognize how cable channels, especially premium cable, are beating network TV in terms of talents and program recognition. In the past five years, the number of original programs aired on cable networks have increased significantly, growing 52.2% from 2007 to 2011.

The networks trying to adapt to these changes in the US television market. In the past, broadcasters were content simply to extend their research by allowing free carriage on cable and satellite. However, as subscription fees have grown in size and importance as a source of income in the US television industry, networks, such as CBS, have started to charge affiliate feeds too.

However, the highly competitive US market continues to evolve, and low barriers to entry bring high risks to the businesses involved. The new game changer, the internet, might bring pressure on the pay TV model. Content owners prefer to be aggregated in a bundle of channels through distributors like Comcast because that provides them valuable affiliate fees, but the internet has opened up the opportunity for the ala carte distribution of video programming. With consumers demanding more choice and customisation and the proliferation of free or low-price online video platforms, this might bring pressure on the more expensive pay TV model. Can MVPDs continue their current premium pricing to sustain premium content and the pay TV industry in the US with the rise of insurgent internet video platforms?

That might be the question in the mature, competitive US market, but emerging markets may develop in other ways. In the Middle East, pay TV via satellite is quite mature and very competitive. Although pay TV is on the rise in countries like Russia, it is a possibility that these markets will go immediately towards TV on the internet or at least delivered by internet technology. However, video programming delivered over the internet, IPTV, and paid content need not be mutually exclusive. As the American provider of on-demand internet streaming media, Netflix, has shown, though, online viewers are also willing to pay. Chinese online video providers, such as Tudou, are already buying and developing their own original programming to stand out in its very competitive market. Moreover, Tudou is starting to sell its programming to satellite TV providers.

Many of the dynamics that we found in our research of the US television market are playing out in markets around the world. With traditional television players as well as new players including newspapers, online video providers such as YouTube, Tudou and Amazon all developing an increasing amount of video programming, competition will increase for audiences. We suggest that video programming businesses in emerging countries, whether off or online-based, take a look at the underlying dynamics of the various American TV models and, while catering to local conditions, consider their opportunities for either charging viewers or carriers a fee for access to their content. Our research has shown that the purely ad based models can work for single channel operators when there is a wide enough audience that is valuable to advertisers, but for multichannel players, diversity in revenue looks like the most viable and attractive business model.

Whilst computers still dominate digital news use, mobile use now stands at around 25% across countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, while peaking in Denmark at 32%, according to a new survey of digital news use from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Tablets, which are much less widespread than web-enabled mobile phones, still account for a relatively small percentage of news consumption. Even in the country with the highest rate of tablet usage, Denmark, tablets only account for 13% of digital news access. While still a relatively small rate of digital news consumption, tablet use is set to grow quickly.

In the US, the Online Publishers Association predicts that tablet ownership in the US will reach 47% by next year. Much of that growth is driven by Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It took five years after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone for a majority of US consumers to own a smartphone, but tablet ownership is rocketing towards a majority a little more than two years since the sector-defining iPad was introduced, the OPA said.

The Reuters Institute study also found that smartphone and tablet news consumption represent not only a shift in platform but a much broader shift to new systems of engagement, one that may strengthen the position of newspapers. In the UK for example, smartphones have become the main source of online news for 27% of 25-34 year-olds and 22% of 16-24 year-olds, whereas 58% of British tablet users access news from their device every week, Reuters reports. And interestingly, these consumers prefer news from traditional newspapers like The Guardian and The Times to some of the non-traditional news sources that have strong positions online. Five of the top news brands on tablets in the UK come from newspaper groups compared to just two on computers.

Findings from the US confirm that mobile devices, particularly tablets, are becoming viable alternatives to traditional newspaper reading. A recent study from the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri shows that 56% of users of large media tablets like the Apple iPad spend one hour or more each day consuming news on their devices, often at home after 5:00 p.m. That was historically the place and prime time for reading evening newspapers or watching evening news broadcasts.

Especially interesting for news organizations is that mobile devices also are showing promising signs in terms of revenue generation, as Nic Newman, an editor of the Reuters Institute Digital Report, points out in an interview with The Media Briefing. Tablet users in both the UK and the US say the device provides a better experience for news than a computer, and they are therefore significantly more likely to pay for online news. The rebundling of news into apps makes it very easy for the 56% of all British tablet users who use news apps on their device as the main way of accessing online news to pay for the service. All it takes is a simple touch on a branded icon in the app stores. Of course, Apple’s Newsstand – an app dedicated to downloading digital magazines and newspapers – has made it much easier for traditional publishers to develop digital subscription models.

But mobile devices are not just altering online news consumption in developed markets. Smartphones, and to some degree tablets, are irreversibly changing the way users access the internet in emerging markets as well. Russians for example are very attracted to the new devices, especially in major cities. Analysis by Yandex shows that 56% of consumers own smartphones and 10% own tablets in Moscow. Other big cities like St. Petersburg show similar results. Russia is still behind Western Europe and the US in terms of mobile internet usage, but the user base is growing rapidly, increasing by 2.5% during the first two months of 2012. And user patterns are similar to those in the US, with for example 57% of all iPad usage in Russia taking place in the evening at home.

Even markets with internet penetrations as low as 1.1% have burgeoning smartphone markets that are changing the media habits and attitudes of consumers. Nielsen’s Southeast Asia Digital Consumer Report from 2011 shows that while computers continue to be the primary way to access the internet in the region, smartphones are on track to supplant them. In Indonesia for instance, more than three-quarters (78%) of consumers own internet-capable mobile devices compared to just 29% who own laptops or 31% with desktops. Tablets are just starting to make their mark in Southeast Asia, but they are likely to show rapid growth in several countries in the region in the year ahead, Nielsen reports. And while reading and sending emails is the most popular activity for users in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand, reading news is the favourite digital activity in Indonesia and Vietnam.

This new consumer behaviour is clearly something news organizations all over the world can benefit from by building mobile services to drive news consumption, promotion and communication. Apps have now become enough of an integral part of daily life in developed markets as well as in emerging markets to offer some hope to traditional newspaper publishers struggling with new competition and falling profit margins, as the Reuters Institute report emphasises.

On the other hand, we should remain cautious in interpreting these figures – especially in emerging markets. It is still very early days for tablets in particular, which largely are in the hands of richer and better educated groups who are more likely to be prepared to pay for news. Also, it is essential to highlight that consumers and their preferences and needs differ from one market to the next, as Jasmeet Sing Sethi, senior specialist at Ericsson ConsumerLab, says in connection with a study on mobile developments in Russia, India and Brazil. In India for example, smartphone users are predominately focusing on personalisation – screensavers, images for wallpaper and themes – whereas social media applications are big in Brazil. And looking at Russia, you find a lot of productivity and performance types of applications including “navigation and maps, shopping comparisons, barcode scanners, translators, (and) dictionaries”, Ericsson Consumerlab reports.

The survey found that 47 percent of internet users in Brazil and 44 percent in Argentina read UGC on newspaper websites compared to only 35 percent in the UK and 26 percent in Germany. Latin Americans also submit articles or comments on the websites of newspaper publishers at higher rates than people in other regions, with 27 percent in Brazil and 26 percent in Argentina. Across the region, there was an increase from 11.9 percent to 23.4 percent of internet users engaging with UGC between 2010 and 2011, whereas the percentage of internet users in the UK and Germany submitting comments or articles to news sites declined over the same period, falling to 12 percent and 17 percent respectively.

Across Latin America, UGC engagement levels as well as blogging and posting behaviour vary significantly by country. According to Jimena Urquijo, VP Business Development of Kantar Media-TGI Latina, this depends on a mix of factors like internet penetration and the use of new devices to go online. “The larger the internet base, the more potential for UGC development,” she says, explaining Latin America’s lead in online interactivity by the region’s dramatic increase in internet accessibility over the last couple of years.

Overall the Latin American online population grew faster than any other region in 2011, rising 16 percent to 129.3 m in December 2011, according to the 2012 Latin American Digital Future in Focus report by ComScore. Brazil, the largest online market in Latin America, grew 20 percent in the past year to 40.5 m users, while Mexico’s online population surged 21 percent to 18.1 m. And Venezuela, which represents a relatively small online market at 2.9 m, achieved the highest rate of growth in the past year at 27 percent. As Urquijo explains, the path for this growth is paved by the increased usage of internet-enabled devices such as mobile phones, consoles and iPads. ComScore reports that internet usage on mobile phones and tablets continued to increase in 2011, with Puerto Rico leading the region with 7.7 percent of all digital traffic consumed away from a personal computer.

Another important element of the high level UGC engagement in Latin America, Urquijo emphasizes, is cultural. “Latin American consumers are outspoken, informed and have well rounded opinions,” she says. Close to 83 percent of Latin American internet users believe it is important to be well-informed. And they place less importance in trusting online media than in other regions. When asked how important it was that they trust the websites they visit, only 73 percent of internet users in Brazil and 71 percent in Argentina agreed that it was important, Kantar Media reports. In comparison, 82 percent thought trust was important in Saudi Arabia and 80 percent in Kuwait. This factor may help to explain the acceptance of and willingness to contribute to content production in the region.

The result is that even smaller Latin American markets, like Peru with 9.9 m internet users as of 2011, have embraced new communication forms like social networking and UCG. Peru is now one of the most engaged social networking markets worldwide along with four other Latin America countries – Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Mexico. Since 2008, Peru has had its own citizen-generated newspaper, Gua 3.0 – the first of its kind in the region – which aims to report facts that mainstream media miss.

This growing appetite for UGC presents an opportunity for news outlets to attract new audiences and build relationships with existing audiences. Providing consumers with easy ways to interact and contribute to the news-making process builds loyalty and can be an audience-building tool. Geoff Wicken, Head of TGO International at Kantar Media agrees:

Today’s digital world has enabled consumers to move from being passive recipients of news coverage to playing an interactive role in how news is distributed. While the doomsayers take this to signal the end of the traditional newspaper, savvy publishers understand that they need to encourage and engage with people providing content, and use it as means of underpinning their role in this ‘Brave New World’.