Mary Meeker. Photo Credit: Jasveer10 [CC BY-SA 4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Slide 186 is simple enough: global shipments of smartphones by year, from 2007 until last year. It’s the decade when everything changed, when our computers were replaced by devices many times smaller, and when everything became mobile. The key thing from that chart is that it’s s-shaped, meaning it starts out slow, rises precipitously, before levelling out. In short: We bought no more smartphones in 2017 than we did in 2016. The S-curve was discovered by Richard Foster in 1985 and made famous by Clayton Christensen, who invented the term ‘disruptive innovation.’

The key thing here is that we’re are at that levelling out part. That’s when both Foster and Christensen predict disruptive things happen. Foster called discontinuities, Christensen called it disruption, but it amounts to the same thing: other companies, peddling other technologies, products, innovations or platforms, are poised to steal a march on the incumbents and leave them by the side of the road. But what?

Well. If much of the past decade has been driven by smartphones, and it has, then we’re near the end of the smartphone era. It’s been an interesting ride since 2007/8, but shipments tailed off in 2016, and my interest in what the new Galaxy or iPhone might be able to do tailed off about then too. That means uncertain times, as incumbents search for new technologies, new efficiencies to ward off newcomers, and the newcomers experiment with a disruption that works. I believe the future will have to be beyond smartphones, to the point where we don’t need to interact with them at all and will stop treating them (and fetishising them) as prized objects. That, of course, is some way off. But it will come.

For now though, there are some interesting opportunities, especially for the makers of content.

The first one is this: Apple won the hardware value war, but has probably lost the peace. Consider the following, all taken from Meeker’s data:

• Other operating systems than iOS and Android have disappeared for the first time (slide 6). The platforms are now clear: Android will not be forked and owned by any hardware maker. (When did you last hear of Tizen in a phone?) Nor will any other challenger survive. There is absolutely no point in trying to build a new operating system for the phone. For other devices, maybe.
• Google’s Android has maintained market dominance: three-quarters of all smartphones shipped last year ran Android. You would think that as the average selling price of phones increases, high-end Android devices would succumb to the more flashy iPhones. Why not finally get that iPhone you’ve been dreaming of. But people don’t. Why? It’s probably because Apple phones are still significantly more expensive, meaning that the shift would usually be to one of the older, cheaper, discontinued, sometimes refurbished, models. (A significant chunk of iPhone users are those on older devices.) In status-conscious places like China, that’s not an acceptable switch. Better a new model of a lesser brand, now that those brands are pretty nice looking: think Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung. Bottom line: as phones go into a replacement cycle, more and more high-end rollers are going to be on Android.

So. What does this mean for media and content producers? I believe it represents an opportunity. As the market for hardware slows — fewer people buying new phones, more people taking longer to replace their old ones — more money is freed up to be spent elsewhere in the ecosystem: on software and services, in-app subscriptions, purchases etc. Apple has traditionally benefited more from this — iOS users spend more in app stores and in-app purchases than Android users (per download a user spends $1.5, as opposed to about 30 cents per downloaded app for Android users, according to my calculation of App Annie data for Q1 2018.) But this gap is narrowing: consumer spend on Google Play grew 25% that quarter, against 20% on the iOS store.In other words: Despite the obvious growing affluence of many Android users, the operating system is still ignored by several key media constituencies — the most obvious of which is podcasts, which are still mostly the domain of iOS users, because Google has been late to make it a core feature of Android. That is changing, offering a window of opportunity. Any effort in focusing on Android is likely to have benefits, because as an OS it clearly isn’t going anywhere, and despite the fragmentation within Android, there’s still huge markets to win over. Don’t ignore the Droid!

This is part of a bigger picture, a larger shift for the main players as markets get saturated. All the big tech players are competing increasingly on the same field. While part of it is what I would call equipment (hardware and software) most of it is going to be over what you use that equipment for. As Ms Meeker points out:

• Amazon is (also) becoming an ad platform, sponsoring products on its websites and apps
• Google is (also) becoming a commerce platform (via Google Home ordering)

You might add to that

• Netflix, Google, Amazon, Apple are all creating content.

Everyone is trying to do everything because they can’t afford not to.

All recognise that the future lies not in hardware, or software, or even platforms, but in stacking the shelves of those platforms. This is not, per se, about e-commerce, but in being the place where people live within which that e-commerce — that buying, subscribing, consuming — takes place. The most obvious example of this is the voice-assistant — Google’s Home or Amazon’s Alexa. These are spies in the house of love: devices that become part of the family, learning your wishes and habits obediently and trying to anticipate them.

It’s artificial intelligence geared towards understanding, anticipating and satisfying your inner selves.

For makers and purveyors of content, the challenge is going to be to understand this shifting playing field. Somehow you need to elbow your way into one of these channels and provide a service that fits their model. Obvious targets would be to ensure you have a ‘skill’ on Alexa’s platform, where users can easily activate your news service over others. But deeper thinking may yield other opportunities — spelling games for kids that leverage your content, etc. I’ll talk more about these opportunities in a future column, and would love to hear your ideas and experiences.

This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

So what is A/B testing? Simply said, A/B testing is a method which allows you to measure the effect of changes to your website on the visitors without actually making them.

Imagine as an example a web page with an article to which you make a small change – let’s say you move a picture from its current place in the right column into the center. Now comes the trick: you display the new layout version to a very small portion of your visitors. What will happen? Will visitors stay on the page for a longer or shorter time? Will a smaller or a larger percentage of readers finish reading the article?

After a few thousand views of both versions, you will be able to neatly and relatively exactly compare and determine whether the change is – or is not – an improvement. If indeed it is, you know what to do – change the picture position for everyone. If not, no problem – you can test some more.

You can test any changes this way – always on a small percentage of visitors and find out whether something works even before widely implementing it. And what is important, you are not limited to testing just one change but for example five different options. Using the same example as above, you can test positioning the photo in various places (left column, right column, top, center…) and by trial, find out where its positioning works the best.

Simply speaking, A/B testing gives you a luxury that we would probably welcome in all parts of life – the possibility of not having to make a decision every time we want to do something and then wait and worry whether we have made the right decision.

Instead, thanks to A/B testing, you have the option to choose the best solution from the multiple possibilities before making it available to all your readers.

Why should we run A/B tests?

A/B testing is one of the most practical tools for improving your website, primarily for the following reasons:

• Low cost, quick start: one of the best things about A/B testing is that, unlike using questionnaires or usability tests, you can start immediately. And if you decide to use one of the free services that are available, you won’t even incur any costs. No complicated searches for participants or long preparation times. One test idea and an observation of certain rules discussed below and you can be on your way. You don’t have to hire an expert. You can easily do it just with this article.

• The right sample: With a survey or questionnaire, you will always face questions such as “do we have the right sample of people?” or whether the group of people surveyed had been “representative”. There are no such questions in A/B testing – you know 100 percent that you have the right sample. It’s the people that come to your website, exactly those that you are improving your site for. There is no need to look for anyone elsewhere.

• Very practical: Standard questionnaire surveys often bring theoretical findings, such as people are more interested in sports news or perhaps that they would welcome more videos in articles. But what should an ideal piece of sports news look like? Where exactly should the video be in the article? A/B testing, together with usability tests, offer very practical findings, which are – as a bonus – all immediately applicable. They not only provide you with information about what to do but also how exactly to do it.

Getting started with A/B testing

So how do we do A/B testing?

1. Hypothesis. At the beginning of each test, having a “hypothesis”, i.e. a question you want answered by the test, is very important. For example – “Would visitors click more on an article if it had a larger headline?” Any new function you would like to implement on the website is also a hypothesis – e.g. will the function bring a better reaction from the visitors? You probably already have a number of ideas as to what to test. You can also find some tips below.
2. Alternate versions. The second step is the proposal of changes with which we will verify the hypothesis – let’s say the creation of alternative versions of the original website with new functionality or design. At this point, it is important not to limit yourself to just one alternative to your current site. You can come up with as many versions as you would like. This way, you can be sure that you have not missed the best solution possible. For example, if you are testing a larger headline for your article, why not include various fonts, colors and/or size? The test will let you know the best solution.
3. Test variables. Often, defining the test variables is a much underestimated step. A test variable is anything you can measure and which allows you to objectively determine which page is better. It could be the number of clicks on a certain link, the time spent on a page or even whether a visitor had completed a certain operation (confirmation of a subscription payment). People frequently measure the number of clicks, but is that always the best? Always consider carefully what to measure and test more variables. That way you can see whether your new version won’t do more harm than good (e.g. the change forces more readers to click but they leave the page immediately because they hadn’t found what they were looking for).

Which tools to use for A/B testing?

Once you have done all three things listed above, only one thing remains – deploy the test. Let’s look closely at how to do it.

Ideally, you would use one of the ready-made solutions available. There are plenty of them and some are even for free. And it is certainly simpler than having the A/B testing tool custom programmed directly for your website – a solution which is possible, but definitely not simple.

When choosing, look mainly for simple implementation (do you have a programmer at hand or will the tests be administered by someone who knows programming?). Of course, the price is also crucial. Paid tools often offer free tutorials or assistance, so free does not always equal the best.

Here is a list of some of the best known A/B testing tools:

Google Analytics is among the best known A/B testing tools. One of its main advantages when compared to competing products is the fact that it’s free. And it works in a simple way: basically, you create and add all versions of your web page to the server – if the current page is at article.php, you create article1.php, article2.php, etc.

What follows is an easy step-by-step process of implementation:

If you do not have an account in Google Analytics, create one and after registering, click “Experiments” in the “Behavior” section of your website profile. Click on “Create experiment”.

Type in the URL of the website you want to test (in our example, it’s article.php) and select the measured variable – for example average visit duration, revenue, etc. Decide the percentage of your users you want to include in the experiment – determine the number according to the number of users that usually visit your site – if you have a lot of visitors, you can test the page on 1% of your visitors. If, however, you have few visitors, you could wait for the results from a 1% sample for a long time.

Then you just add the URLs of the changed pages to be tested. The last step is to add a special JavaScript code to each one. The code will determine which page is shown to which user.

And that’s all. You can find more details on how to do A/B testing with Google Analytics here.

Optimizely.com is one of the best known paid tools for A/B testing. Other paid tools mentioned below all work in a similar way. Compared to Google Analytics, they all have one significant advantage – you do not need a programmer to run the test – it’s enough to include in the page one very simple JavaScript code. Everything else can be “clicked” and selected without needing to know the source code. It’s almost as if you were editing text in Word or some other text editor – you can play around and change the text, the font size, anything. You choose the percentage of visitors to which you’ll display the tested version and select the measured variables. The tool saves the changes and, after starting the test, it will display your altered pages to random visitors.

Other popular A/B testing tools include Unbounce.com or VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com. Choose the one that suits you best. An overview of the best known tools is here.

Understanding the results

Most of the split testing tools offer results as you go along and even calculate which version has the highest chance of winning the test. At the same time, the tool helps to determine the right sample. At this point in the process, you don’t need to do anything else.

This, however, can become a double-edged sword. Despite the simplicity of A/B testing, it can be spoiled (just like anything in life). Watch out for these common mistakes:

• One variable, one hypothesis – one of the most common mistakes in A/B testing is that we want to test too many things at the same time. An example would be two completely different article visuals (each has a completely different layout, ordering, as well as elements). Remember: one A/B test, one hypothesis you are testing, one change. This is a way to avoid potential problems of not being able to understand what actually brought the change when reading the test result. Was it the background color? Or omission of a large ad space? Always change only one thing. Then test it.

• Attention – sample size too small. The second most common error is impatience. Frequently, one of the tested versions can have much better results very early on. Do not stop the test! Continue to the end of the test – it can often have very different results at the end than it seemed at the beginning. Contemporary A/B testing tools contain a function which automatically calculates the number of users you need to test in order to ensure the test is right. Here you can find a calculator which helps you to find out the approximate sample size even before running the test. If you are testing a large number of versions, it pays off to wait a little longer for results. Also, you may want to repeat the test one more time – test fewer versions the second time (e.g. original vs. winner and runner-up from the first test).

• Poorly chosen metrics. Even if you manage all of the above well, there is still a chance you are failing in the selection of the metrics with which you’ll be measuring the effect of your changes. Is the version that gets more clicks really better for you? Or are you more interested in whether visitors, after they click, subscribe to your publication? Number of clicks tends to be an alpha and omega for online media so pay attention to other criteria that may prove significant for you.

Testing tips

You surely have many ideas on what to test. A/B testing is practical any time you want to introduce something new and you discuss in your team how to proceed the best way. Don’t limit yourself to new functions you’d like to add to your site though. Think about things already present on your site, especially:

• Things that seem self-evident to you (if you hear someone say “people love xxx”, “the best way to do this is xxx” without having A/B test results to prove it, don’t just believe the statement – try it).

• Things on your site you think are done really well (this link has many clicks, the ad in the right corner works beautifully) – what if these things can be done even better? Don’t forget that every hundredth of a conversion counts!

• Things you think don’t matter (font color, font size, or moving an ad box 10 px more to the right). If you test a lot, you’ll find out that many of the results may not make much sense to you, yet they work. Do not rely on your rational criteria only and do not think that minute details don’t matter. They do – test everything.

Here are a few tips for tests you can run right now:

• A correct looking lead on the home page – is a smaller headline, full-width photo and no lead, or a larger headline, smaller photo and more text better? Or should it be altogether different? Come up with all different possibilities and find out what users prefer.

• Ad formats – you know that when there are too many, they don’t work; when there are only a few, conversion is higher but revenue smaller – so what is the right ratio? Try out different ad distribution on your page and select the best one.

• Homepage layout – there’s an everlasting fight within online media about the homepage. Each service, each journalist wants to see his or her article there, yet they cannot all be there. What is the right number of articles for visitors to still click? Which section is better suited for the right column and which will do better in the middle? The simplest way to find out is trying it.

• Test the wording of all buttons on your page. Compare “Enter the article discussion” to “Discuss the article now” for example. Test what works best and you may be surprised.

You can find lots of ideas and inspiration for A/B testing at www.abtests.com. It includes a number of case studies, so you can see the findings right away. Many of you may be surprised by them.

Still not enough? Suggested reading about A/B testing includes Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Although recommendations related to the implementation of Google Analytics experiments (the tool was formerly known as Website Optimizer) have become obsolete, the book offers hundreds of ideas and ways to improve your web site.
So what are you waiting for? Dive into A/B testing now!

Internet is often described as ‘the most measurable medium ever created’, thus real-time analytics is designed to monitor very precisely the current data on the behavior of visitors in order to help you optimize your website, content and overall online operations by delivering live and granular data. Through knowledge of what users are doing on your website right now, it is possible to understand the consequences of short-term changes and content updates, and respond to them immediately. It’s about moving with a greater speed towards previously unknown questions, defining new insights and reducing the time between what is going on on your website and your proper response or reaction within minutes.

Omnipresent generation of data in online environment is not just about transforming your content itself, it is, at the same time, also the transformation of workflow in news organizations and helping to develop effective content production strategies related to actual demand. New tools – like real-time tracking – are being deployed in newsrooms to provide insights around how your content is performing on site, in social networks, news aggregators and search engines. A new role in digital newsroom has been created: an audience editor is in charge to deliver and interpret real-time perceptiveness into the heart of the news workflow. This change in interaction with live audience improves how internal resources are deployed and what new perspective is explored in the newsroom.

Real-time analytics allows digital editors, content producers and analysts to easily inspect content viewing patterns on their own websites and to monitor visitor’s activity trends as it happens on site and react within minutes accordingly. The reports are updated continuously and each user’s activity is reported seconds after it occurs on your site. For example, you can track how many people are on your homepage right now, what is their geographic locations, the traffic sources that referred them to your site and which pages they’re interacting with after leaving your homepage. With real-time analytics, you can immediately and continuously monitor the effects that site changes and content updates have on your traffic, whether a new and changed content on your site is being viewed, what content is being consumed massively and monitor the immediate impact on traffic from a blog/social network posts or tweets. We can also see when you have stopped receiving visits from the social network, which helps you to realize when to reengage.

Better understanding of content consumption trends in progress leads your editors to more relevant, high-interest content creation. It helps to draw your attention to a particular information demand even on a kind of seemingly unimportant topics (you can also track and see, based on the traffic referrers, how people got to an article which led to rapidly growing reader’s interest trend). This way you may find that readers are significantly more attracted not by a present lead article and cover story on your homepage but greater information demand is focused to an article that is not listed on your homepage. Based on this finding, you can decide to place a link to the article on a location of your website through which people tend to visit your site. At the same time, you can instruct editors to supplement and enrich the article with related links, images, video or to add to the article a chart or infographics, and thus creating a compelling reader’s experience.

Based on continuous (a second-by-second basis) measurement of visitors’ behavior, it is easier to understand which various factors contribute to your visitors’ satisfaction (e.g. increase time spent on site), and how to convert a random visits to a loyal, returning visitor. More granular up-to-date data will generate fast yet informed decisions for your news desk. Soon, you will realize that just refining the title of an article can make a huge difference in terms of numbers of visitors accessing the article.

How to choose the right tool to fit my needs?

Before you start to compare the different real-time analytics tools, their features and the granularity of the reported data, think about what questions these tools should answer and solve for you. You must have a clear answer to questions like these: What criteria do you use to decide which articles to publish on your homepage? What are the types of things your editors disagree about internally and you have to decide intuitively? What everyday decisions have a major impact on the way your site looks and feels? According to what criteria do you control and assess the quality of content processing on your website? Do you know which time during the day is the most effective use of social networks? Who will be in charge of working with real-time analytics in the newsroom and what are his/her expectations? What would be needed to simplify and streamline the work?

Once you can answer these questions, you have got quite a clear understanding what features are a must for your daily use, so you can start comparing different real-time analytics tools.

Real-time analytics tools

There is a wide range of on-site measurement tools from different vendors that provide real-time analytics software and services. Data from your site is usually gathered via page tagging – an embedded tracking code, usually written in JavaScript or Java; increasingly Flash is used. (Of course, there are also other data collection methods, e.g. packet analyzer.)

Here you can find a very useful comparison chart of different available real-time analytics platforms: http://clicky.com/compare/. Another well worked-out comparison might be found in this Google Doc. Yet, other good up-to-date overviews of available web analytics tools are: Top 30 Web Analytics Tools and 53 Alternatives to Google Analytics.

Case studies

Reynolds Journalism Institute  hosted Journalytics Summit in September 2013. Following presentations are case studies given by representatives of real-time analytics company and their clients:

Outbrain (Visual Revenue) case study

Dennis R. Mortensen, Outbrain

Rhonda Prast, The Kansas City Star

Chartbeat case study

Joe Alicata, Chartbeat

Joy Mayer, Columbia Missourian

Parse.ly case study

Andrew Montalenti & Mike Sukmanowsky, Parse.ly
Adam Felder, Atlantic Media

Related article:

Real-time analytics can help you use scarce editorial resources more effectively

How all kinds of data is helping newspaper companies go after more and more subscribers? Read more: The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data scientists, and conversion specialists by Ken Doctor

The study revealed that “internet users (in the country) are mainly from the ‘working middle class’, as opposed to upper (as defined by living standards measures)”, Joanna Wright wrote in the Media Online. Internet penetration is still low in the country, with upper estimates standing at 35.2 percent, according to the Stats SA 2011 Census. The Census also looked at where South Africans had access, either at home, at work, via mobile phone or some other location. It is important to note that twice as many South Africans had access via mobile phones, 16.3 percent, than had access at home.

However, while internet penetration might be low, this new study by online research firm Columinate, which was commissioned by the Digital Media and Marketing Association in South Africa, shows that use is expanding beyond higher income levels.

The Columinate study also challenged another assumption about the digital market in South Africa, that it is predominantly young. The study found that 11 percent of users were over 50 years old, and most, 60 percent, were between 25 and 49 years old.

“(It’s) not necessarily a youth market. You are accessing South Africans who work, who have disposable income,” said Elna Smit of Columinate, the online research group responsible for the study.

And internet users in South Africa are well educated. The research found that 13 percent of internet users in the country have a degree, while only one percent of the total population has a higher education degree.

Publishers need to leverage data to woo advertisers

Research like this is key to helping you win over advertisers who might be sceptical about the reach of digital advertising as your market transitions to digital media.

“Marketers often complain that digital won’t give them the mass market, the bulk of South Africans,” Smit told Media Online, but added that advertisers need to look beyond simple reach. “You should be asking: What percentage of the people who spend on your brand are you reaching?” Smit said.

To win over advertisers, you need the data to answer this question. In the early days of the digital transition, audiences might appear small when compared to traditional media, but if you have effective audience measurement tools, then you can show how targeting can deliver a more relevant message to a more receptive audience.

You can begin your audience measurement work by investing in services such as ComScore, and you can also monitor your social media metrics using Facebook’s built in tools or other social media metrics tools such as Chartbeat. Data is becoming even more important to ad sales as even real-time bidding or programmatic buying reaches larger emerging markets such as Russia and Malaysia.

Even as you grow your audience, you will still need to make sure that you speak not just of the size of your audience but the income, age and geographic distribution of your audience. News publishers and broadcasters who invest in knowing their audience will find it easier to win over advertisers and compete more effectively against targeted advertising from search engines and social networks.

Defying the print media crisis in many parts of the world, Latin American newspapers and magazines continue to enjoy rising circulation and advertising revenue due to growing middle classes and economies left largely unscathed by the financial crisis.

However, internet use is growing rapidly in Latin America, and traditional media groups are exploring digital paid content strategies to try to protect and consolidate their dominant position, especially in the face of competition from new digital-only news organisations.

For instance, the Brazilian newspaper Folha continues to enjoy sustained growth in print circulation while also developing a dominant market position online, and it has become the poster child for paywalls in Latin America with the launch of a metered paywall strategy in January 2012.

While metered paywalls, in which users are able to access a certain number of articles before having to pay, are one of the most popular strategies globally, it is just one approach in use in Latin America, a reflection of the diversity in media markets across the region.

Latin American media experiment with different models

Until 2011, digital paid content strategies were the exception not the rule for news websites around the world. In the US and in Western Europe, paid content strategies have been driven by a drop in print advertising and the inability of news organisations to make up for that fall with digital advertising. News groups had to diversify their sources of revenue. The major shift in the industry came after the New York Times rolled out its metered paid content strategy in 2011, signing up 668,000 digital subscribers, according to its most recent quarterly report. Since then, more than 300 newspapers in the US and newspaper groups in the UK and Germany have implemented paid content strategies, and many have followed the lead of the New York Times and rolled out metered paywalls.

This success has given important legitimacy to paid content strategies globally. But for Latin American news groups, the economic imperative to develop paid content strategies is less, as performance in their print business remains strong. As in other regions, digital media market conditions vary widely in Central and South America, and there is no one-size-fits-all paid content model.

In our last look at paid content strategies, we highlighted the wide range of models in use as news organisations move beyond the binary debate of paid versus free and experiment with a wide mix of models. To recap, the major approaches include:

• Hard paywall with no access to digital content to non-paying customers.
• Free online but paid on mobile.
• Hybrid paid and free networks.
• Freemium strategy where general content is free but specialist or premium content requires payment or subscription.
• Long-form magazine or investigative journalism is repackaged and sold on ebooks or tablets.
• All access bundles in which subscribers pay a single price for access in print and digital platforms.
• Metered paywall in which a certain number of pieces of content are free but payment is required above the limit.

Of these strategies, all-access bundles, metered paywalls or a combination of both are proving to be the most popular and the most successful, and often, all-access bundling is part of a metered paywall strategy.

Market conditions help guide the choice of the most appropriate paid content strategy, and with the diversity of markets across Latin America, media companies have implemented a number of different approaches.

All access bundle and metered paywall – Folha (Sao Paulo, Brazil) – Folha was the first newspaper to implement a metered paywall in Brazil in January, 2012. They initially charged only for their tablet and mobile phone apps, but in in June of that same year they included their website.

Folha gained 45,000 new digital subscribers during their first year. Since then, many other newspapers have either followed suit or are studying how to implement a similar strategy.

When Folha launched their paywall, the rules were that each visitor would have 20 free articles per month while the homepage, cultural schedule and a site for children remained free. After reaching the 20 article limit, readers would have to register some information, then they would have an additional 20 articles before they had to pay.

In March 2013, the limit was lowered by half to 10 free and an additional 10 after registering. The ability to change the number of free articles is seen as a strength by proponents of the metered strategy. Unlike the New York Times model, which does not count pages accessed via links from social media towards the monthly limit, Folha does not make this distinction.

Folha offers two types of subscription:

• Those that subscribe to the print edition and have access to the digital products.
• A digital subscription that enables access to the content on any of the platforms.

According to Roberto Dias, Digital Content Director, Folha’s website has 21 million unique visitors per month, with over 270 million pageviews. “Today, every article by Folha is read by a lot more people than 30 years ago. What we really need to do is to look for sustainable models for the journalistic production process, which is expensive.  I think every newspaper is going to find their own; we are looking for ours as well.”

Hard paywall – Reforma (Mexico) – Since 2002, the Grupo Reforma have had a paywall on their websites and charged online subscribers 20% less than a paper subscription.

This was a means of protecting the print business, according to Jorge Meléndez, vice president of new media in an interview with the Knight Center.

After nine years, Reforma has 50,000 online subscribers and its daily circulation reaches 300,000. Currently, they have 5,555 new users per year. However, when they started the paywall, traffic shrunk by 30% and it took one whole year for it to return to its original level.

They currently offer a digital-only subscription that is good for up to four devices and a paper subscription that includes access for up to six devices. Offering bundles that encourage readers to continue to receive the newspaper is common, especially because print advertising still commands a dramatic premium over digital ads.

Digital kiosks – This model, similar to Apple’s Newsstand,  is particularly prominent in Spain, where Orbyt, Vocento and Kiosko y Más are some of the market leaders. In most cases, these kiosks provide access to a PDF version of the publication (similar to the one in print) and people can buy one or more publication from the kiosk at a price that is on average 50% of cover price.

In Latin America, kiosks are a fairly new concept, though one that is being developed.  One of the first to operate in the region is a Colombian kiosk for magazines called Pasalapagina.com; they offer access to 30 Colombian magazines for a monthly subscription fee.  According to a market survey, the amount people are willing to pay at the kiosk in Latin America is about 50% of cover price.

Platform specific strategies in Colombian media –  Semana, a political magazine, is the only Colombian media outlet ever to charge for the content they offer to tablet users.  Initially, the magazine launched a free app that reached over 110,000 users. They then introduced a fee charging for the digital subscription.

El Tiempo and El Colombiano, two of the leading dailies, are also working on paywall projects that they hope to implement in 2014.  Currently, these newspapers have free access to their digital editions and rely on online advertising for revenue.  However, they also offer a product called e-paper (an electronic version of the newspaper) for a discounted price.

In March 2012, El Colombiano, located in Medellin, implemented in its tablet edition a ‘freemium’ model which, after registering, allows the user to download the newspaper in its PDF version and have access to other publications such as smaller neighborhood newspapers and magazines. During the first month they attracted 7,000 users.

Markets in transition

When developing a paid content strategy, publishers and media executives will need to consider the specific conditions in their market to determine whether a paid approach is appropriate and, if so, which strategy to choose.

Determining the market opportunity is key, and it is important to consider the unique market conditions in your country, both in terms of digital consumer adoption and digital market development.

The vast differences across Latin America help explain the wide range of paid content models being used. The overall level of internet penetration is currently at 42 percent in Latin America, but that only tells half of the story. Internet use varies widely, ranging from 66 percent in Argentina and 58 percent in Chile to 16 percent in Honduras and Guatemala, and 14 percent in Nicaragua.

Paid content systems involve costs in terms of development and infrastructure, and if internet penetration is too low, it might be difficult to generate meaningful revenue. There is also the issue that many Latin American consumers are not yet comfortable with sharing credit information online. However, it’s important to note the rapidly changing market. The online population of Latin America grew faster than any other global region in 2011, rising 16 percent to 129 m visitors in December 2011, according to The 2012 Latin America Digital Future in Focus report by comScore.

While Latin American internet users might be fewer in number than in some other regions, the intensity of their use to some extent counterbalances this. As in other parts of the world, social networking is driving much of the growth in internet use. Moreover, Latin America is home to five of the most engaged social networking markets worldwide.

As internet use continues to grow in the region, the digital market opportunity both in terms of paid content and ad-supported strategies will increase for news organisations, but so too will new digital competition.

Mobile segmentation strategies in which users pay for the convenience of accessing content on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, while being able to read it for free on laptop and desktop computers, face challenges in Latin America. Tablet use is lower and growth has been slower due to pricing, limiting the immediate opportunity to use tablets as part of a platform segmentation strategy. According to market research company GFK, it is estimated that in Chile there will be 400,000 tablets by the end of 2013, for about a 2 percent market penetration.  In Colombia, 7.4% of the population owns a tablet, but tablets rank first when it comes to desired possessions. In the poll, 20 percent of Colombians indicated they wished to have one, according to an IPSOS-Napoleón Franco poll.

Of course, mobile phone use is high and smartphone use is growing. It is important to remember there are great differences between countries in the region, so fragmentation will be key. In Brazil, there are 27 m smartphone users, and in Mexico there are 23 m smartphone owners. Mobile phone penetration is 55 percent across the region and much higher in individual countries, such as Colombia with 95 percent penetration.

Other challenges exist including limited bandwidth and the broad prepaid user base. In countries such as Guatemala, 94 percent of mobile phone accounts are prepaid, and even in  Brazil, 80 percent of subscribers use prepaid accounts, according to the GSMA, a mobile phone trade group. Prepaid subscribers tend to be more price sensitive

All of these factors need to be considered when building a paid content strategy around mobile phones.

Facing the challenge from digital content start-ups

The diverse market conditions make the challenge facing the industry a complex one.  On one hand, there are the opportunities presented by the increase of the potential audience both for the print edition and its digital counterparts. On the other, there is the risk of squandering them by cannibalizing their own print product. A premature move towards full digitalization at this time may sentence healthy print editions to an untimely death, but failing to develop digital products and revenue streams may cede future digital opportunities to new competitors.

The Colombian experience in this regard is interesting: fast-growing all-digital outlets such as La Silla Vacía and Kién & Ké are gaining ground on their traditional media counterparts, particularly in the younger demographic.

Most current strategies focus on differentiating the various digital products – online, on tablets and on smartphones – in order to serve the needs of the audience, while keeping an eye on the fierce competition from other digital-only media outlets. These digital competitors are probably betting on a faster rate of decline for the traditional model, especially as Latin America moves closer towards its development goals.

Audience measurement key to strategic choices

Many experts agree that traditional print products in Latin America still have a bright future ahead of them. In order to navigate the complex set of strategic choices across the markets of the region, newspapers and magazines have developed or need to develop tracking features to better understand their users and the ways they are consuming information.

For example, a newspaper might be interested in knowing their audience breakdown based on users in cities versus smaller towns, or what percentage of readers are coming from abroad.  Not all users are the same and not all of them are willing to pay the same; similarly, advertisers might favour a certain category of users or a certain pattern of online behaviour.

The next step for traditional media in Latin America is to figure out what kind of digital strategy is best suited for their particular publication. Technology will provide many of the tools to make this assessment and come up with creative ways to court the audience and develop digital products with a range of revenue streams.

The amount of information available and the level of depth of niche-specific content are also important factors when considering a paid content strategy.  For instance, sports content in Latin America is a type for which users have been more willing to pay; on the other hand, music and entertainment news content is rarely purchased.

In the end, innovation and creativity are a must when it comes to designing the models that will govern the region’s paid content strategies.  The question is, in the interim, while traditional newspapers still enjoy healthy circulation and advertising revenues, will they invest in integrating newsrooms and developing radically different models to stay ahead of the digital game, or will their current success lock them in a potentially obsolete way of doing business?

In digital publishing, let your audience guide your daily schedule rather than the printing presses. Photo credit: By Waferboard from Flickr

In newspapers, the daily rhythm is dictated by the press, and in the early stages of the digital transition many newspapers still stick to this schedule to the point where they often publish their stories online at times that reflect when they went to press rather than when their audiences are most likely to read them. However, that is starting to change as newspapers adopt strategies such as dayparting, to make sure that they publish content on a schedule that matches the traffic patterns on their websites.

In the not-so-distant past, even advanced newspapers would publish their stories online all at once, often very early in the morning when audiences, particularly local audiences, were thin. However, beginning a few years ago, they realised that the stories would get far more traffic if they were published to match the ebb and flow of their digital audiences rather than the daily schedule of the presses.

In a recent memo to staff of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, managing editor Raju Narisetti encouraged staff to continue their efforts to publish more content when their audience was visiting the site, rather than later in the day after print deadlines when traffic was starting to trail off. In February 2013, Narisetti was promoted from his position as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network to become the senior vice president and deputy head of strategy for the new News Corp, the print division of News Corp that will be spun out of the corporation later this year. In the memo, he explained to staff:

The green line in the chart below is when readers come to us looking for the terrific journalism WSJ promises them, as measured in the % of daily readers who come, each hour.

The blue line was when we were publishing our stories, by the hour, in 2011-12.

The red line shows how all of you moved the needle significantly in recent months to get more of your great journalism to your audiences when more of them were looking for it on our site.

Journalism website Nieman Lab referred to this as dayparting, the concept of breaking up the day into parts and delivering different kinds of content during different parts of the day. It will be a familiar concept to broadcasters. Radio and TV stations have long broken up the day into parts with specific types of programming. In radio, you have “drivetime” to cater to commuters, and in TV, the concept of primetime is well understood. However, the idea is only now being applied to websites.

The early stages of implementing such a strategy is simply: analyse your traffic patterns and make sure that your digital publishing schedule corresponds to when your digital audience is greatest. But that’s just the first step. Dayparting is not just about the volume but also the type of content matching the type of viewer. Morning television news shows, daytime, primetime and late night TV content have all been developed for the type of audience that schedulers believe are greatest at that time of the day. Similarly, a handful of news websites are starting to analyse not only the traffic spikes but also content consumption patterns of their audiences. To start your analysis, look at the traffic peaks during your day:

• What sections are people viewing? Is it news content, features or opinion pieces?
• When are people most likely to comment or share content via social media?
• How are your audiences viewing your site? When does mobile access spike? When are most people looking at your site via a desktop or laptop computer?
• When are they most likely to view multimedia?

Once you find this out, you can start to consider your digital publishing strategy. One news group I worked with had a wealth of statistics on the behaviour of their audience and found that people often read longer pieces and pieces where they could comment during their lunch break. Armed with this knowledge, you might want to consider publishing pieces designed to spur debate and discussion to coincide with the middle of the day.

Many websites see a spike in news reading when people get up, when they arrive at work and right before they go home from work. Also, if people check your website right before they go home, you might consider providing them with information they will need for their journey home. Is traffic a problem for your community? Maybe you should create a sponsored traffic feature for the morning and evening commutes?

In markets where tablets are on the rise, such as India, they are also seeing a late evening tablet mini-spike when people check the news, often from bed, on their tablets.

Again, we come back to the idea of the need to dive deeply into your analytics and data. Television and radio stations have traditionally had to rely on external measurement companies, but the beauty of online publishing is that you have access to a gold mine of data that can help you decide on your dayparting strategy. It’s a brilliantly obvious strategy when you think about it, but one that is still very nascent even amongst advanced digital publishers.

The other positive aspect of dayparting is that it is low-cost and applicable regardless the size of the news organisation. It can deliver benefits to the Wall Street Journal and also to local news websites, and adopting it can help deliver a competitive advantage as you fight for readers’ and viewers’ time and attention.

The main digital challenge facing many news organisations isn’t attracting an audience but monetizing that audience. With dropping digital advertising rates due to an excess of digital advertising returns, and a host of new competitors for digital advertising revenue, reaching digital profitability can seem like an uphill battle.

To compete effectively, news organisations need to improve their use of data and engage with other digital advertising innovations, says  Rodney Mayers, the chief revenue officer of data and analytics company Proximic.

“Advertisers know more about your audience than publishers do,” Mayers told the independent publishers Association of Alternative Newsmedia digital conference in the United States. Publishers need to respond with their own data to earn better returns on their ads.

Use the data tools that advertisers use

The advertising industry is becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of data to assist buying decisions. Proximic provides page level analytics to media buyers allowing them to understand more about potential ad positions, including content category, potential impact for brand advertisers and overall page quality. All of this is done in real-time, which Mayers says means less than 5 milliseconds. They work with such major companies as eBay, WPP’s GroupM and AdMeld, which was acquired by Google in 2011.

In an interview with Knowledge Bridge, Mayers challenged publishers to use these data tools to get to know their audience better. Editors and publishers used to rely on their gut instincts to deliver stories that their audience wanted to read and an audience that advertisers wanted to reach. He said:

Back in the day, that was the what the editors knew. They had a feel for their audiences. You couldn’t put it into data, but they had a feel for their audiences. That helped shape the voice of the paper. It helped attract the audience, and then the audience was able to be sold.

But where once gut feeling was enough, Mayers says there’s now an opportunity for publishers to exploit the data revolution and refine their understanding of their audiences. Data allows publishers and editors to test the “feel for their audiences” against measurable outcomes to drive more traffic and more engagement with their journalism. Higher audience numbers, higher engagement and better audience data can help publishers make the case for higher ad rates than the industry average.

For advertisers, Mayers said: “…if they have high confidence that they are reaching their target audience with the message they want in an environment that allows that message to be communicated, they don’t mind paying a premium for that. They really don’t.”

However, Mayers was frank in discussing the differences in the way that journalists and advertisers define premium content and, therefore, premium ad rates.

“The journalistic side (of the media business) says, ‘I did good work. This is journalistically sound. This is excellent. We are the major newspaper, and we are worth $35 (CPM),'” Mayers said. To put that in context, an analysis by comScore in late 2011 found that the average CPM for newspaper websites was not $35 but $6.99.

However, it’s clear that the premium probably isn’t $35 CPM. Mayers said:

Gone are the days of ‘I declare my CPMs and you just pay it’ because as with the competition of news and information, broadly speaking, you have a general competition for attention. If you prove, in your case, as a publisher, that you have won or are competitive in the attention game, that your folks disproportionately spend more time with you versus someone else, that supports a higher CPM. Just declaring, I am who I am and I’m worth it. That doesn’t work out here.

With the glut of digital ad inventory, media buyers are turning to data to improve the effectiveness of the ad buys for their clients. Proximic is just one of a number of companies that have launched to feed this need for data and analysis in the media, advertising and marketing industries. comScore provides audience data, while bluekai and Lotome provide data management platforms and other data services for marketers, publishers, ad agencies and data providers.

Mayers recommends that publishers consider using these data services to help improve their advertising returns.

The tools that are available to advertisers, publishers need to take them and flip them around and say, “…How do I use it to better describe my audiences so that I can sell that to my advertisers?”

For instance, he said that advertisers practice “impression weighting” on a site to determine which pages are getting more traffic and attention. Publishers need to use the same technique to sell those pages at a slight premium “because that is where the audience is”, Mayers said.

However, local publishers also have an advantage over most big advertisers. The advertisers might have national data, but local news organisations often have much more granular local data, including offline data that can help them pitch to advertisers. He said:

You have to be the expert (on your market). (Advertisers) will have big national numbers and distributed trends and beautiful graphs, but at the end of the day, you have to say that I know more about this because I did 14 events in the last 13 days. I have connections with the X,Y,Z (name the local organisation) and I’ve been in this market for the last 25 years.

Offline market data is hugely important even in the digital age, Mayers said:

Why? Because no one else is going to bring them that. No cookie in the world is going to describe that. That is where you get the premium side of the buy. Audience analytics. Knowing your audience better than anyone else will set you apart.

Do you have a product worth selling?

To win advertisers and get premium rates, publishers also need to be prepared to demonstrate how engaged their audience is with their content. Advertisers want to know not just how many people came to your site, but also that they stayed on your site long enough to engage with your content and their ads. Advertisers also realise that, just like journalists, they are in a battle for attention and they don’t want to be on a page where they are one of eight ads. They want to be on a page where they are one of three ads, or possibly just the only ad, Mayers said.

While he urged publishers to adopt data and analytics to improve their commercial performance, he also said that data tools are important in improving editorial performance. He said, “Publishers need to embrace that side of what they do right down to how many people read this article. Was this article important?”

If an article attracts zero readers, you don’t have anything to sell to advertisers. He added bluntly, “if your audience doesn’t think this is a product that they want to spend time with, nothing is going to help your CPMs.”

That is not something that most journalists and editors will want to hear, but if you know which stories no one reads online, that can help you allocate editorial resources, which are for many newsrooms becoming increasingly scarce. That doesn’t mean that you have to stop covering those stories, but it should make you rethink, at the very least, how you cover those stories.

Mayers’ advice for journalists, editors and publishers can appear direct, possibly even blunt, but all journalists want to have an impact and reach the widest audience possible. Data and analytics insights from companies such as Mayers’ could help your journalism compete for your audience’s precious time and attention, and to help you compete for revenue to support your journalism.