About authors:

Clémence Petit-Perrot is the Children’s Radio Foundation’s Learning and Innovation Director. She oversees the development all new initiatives within the organisation. Part of her portfolio includes piloting technological solutions like WhatsApp to increase listeners engagement and measure the radio shows’ impact. Before joining CRF, she was the Southern Africa correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI). She also worked for the South African production company DOXA, producing social documentary films and leading a digitisation project of anti-Apartheid audiovisual archives.

Linda Daniels is a journalist by training and has worked in print, digital and broadcast media. She has reported on a range of issues, which include climate change, Intellectual Property and South African politics. Her work has appeared in local and international publications. Between 2013 and 2018, she worked at the Children’s Radio Foundation as the Radio Capacity Building Associate and managed the WhatsApp Integration project.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WhatsApp-for-Radio-Toolkit.pdf” title=”Guide #6: WhatsApp for Radio Toolkit by Clémence Petit-Perrot and Linda Daniels”]

There’s a pattern you might be forgiven for having missed: most technological developments on the web have been driven by these industries. Think online casinos. Think credit card usage. Think video. Think VR. Users demand greater financial and data privacy — after all, who wants to admit they’re signing up for porn or gambling sites? – and better bang for their buck — a streaming video better be a lot better quality than any of the millions of free sites out there to be worth signing up for, all of which pushes these industries tothe bleeding edge of innovation. Buried in early versions of the Bitcoin software – the cryptocurrency that offers a future of transactions beyond the gaze of banks and governments — are hints of a gambling connection, after all. WebRTC is now no different.

So first off, what is WebRTC, and why should you care? WebRTC is an open source project that embeds real-time voice, texts, and video communications capabilities in web browsers. The technology enables peer-to-peer communication (P2P) among browsers. It does not require specialized software applications or browser plugins for communication. In essence, it’s the engine that powers a lot of the messaging that goes on between apps — think video, audio. The RTC bit in it, after all, stands for Real Time Communication. The Web bit is because the standard at least started life as a way to make using video and audio to communicate through a web browser as easy as using text, without any plug-ins. But it has moved beyond that, and can now sit within apps on mobile phones and elsewhere.

That may seem like quite a modest goal. But it’s only recently, with Apple’s decision to include WebRTC in its Safari browser (from version 11 and in the iOS browser in version 12), that a years-long battle to agree that WebRTC is the standard everyone can agree on is more or less won. Now, you can use a host of services to do Skype-like video and audio chatting via your browser without having to

1. a) register with any service
2. b) install any software
3. c) worry about what kind of browser you’re using.

(Of course, there are still caveats.)

This is quite a feat, if you think about it. Not because you’ve been dying to do this, exactly, but because it means that this kind of capability — real time voice and/or video communication, in real time — can be added to any web page. This means, for example, that you can now stream directly from whatever news event your reporters are covering, or direct from your newsroom, or hold a Q&A with readers, without them having to worry about plug-ins, browser versions, etc. etc.

Beyond the browser

And it doesn’t stop there. WebRTC obviously started with the web, and the browser, but that was because that was where we spent most of our time back then. Now things are mobile, they’re often app-based, and the way we communicate, and the way we consume video, has changed a lot.

WebRTC has ended up being a way for the industry to agree on a bunch of standards which have enabled all sorts of things to happen more quickly and seamlessly than they might have done had WebRTC standards groups not been working away in the background. Varun Singh, CEO of callstats.io, which measures quality of experience of live and real-time media, explained that by agreeing on this standard suite of protocols, WebRTC has quickly wormed its way into pretty much every messaging app, from Snapchat to Facebook Messenger.

And it’s not just there. Dean Bubley, a consultant who has been watching WebRTC since 2009, believes “it’s still lacking in recognition in some quarters; there are many more applications that could benefit from it.” In a white paper funded and published by callstats.io, he explored how real-time communications are becoming embedded into devices and applications, into different formats, into processing (think AI) and more platforms. As users become more accustomed to accepting of voice and video technologies (would you have imagined we would have allowed listening robots called Alexa and Siri into our homes as easily as we have five or ten years ago, or been as comfortable taking selfies or video-ing ourselves?) So these technologies are likely to continue to evolve and, of course, become more commonplace in every day life

“In other words, society is now much more amenable to new use-cases for RTC,” concludes Dean. “There is familiarity with many of the UI tools, and less self-consciousness in front of cameras. This,in turn, means that the “cognitive load” on users’ brains is lower, meaning that the interactions are more natural – and more productive.”

It’s only in media, I suspect, that we’re still a little stuck with old formats: the newsreader, the correspondent talking to the camera, the interviewee stuck in a studio somewhere, or on Skype with a picture of a horse in the background. I strongly believe we have an opportunity to have a chance to break away from this.

In media

I see the opportunities here as at least initially more modest.

Firstly, internally: I have long been frustrated at how internal newsroom discussions can be starved of creative oxygen as much by poor technology decisions as by poor leadership. Reliance on dialling in to a conference call number seems both archaic and wasteful use of resources. More often than not the more creative thinkers on the call are drowned out by the noisier ones. A simple WebRTC link in the browser should solve that, using simple tools like talky.io which require no plugins.

Then there’s content. Varun of callstats.io says WebRTC offers content creators the chance to make content simply, just with a camera, which users can access from the news organisation’s website directly — bypassing YouTube or Twitter. Think webinars, game shows, he says: “it’s fairly trivial, say $50 to set something up, and have it viewed an unlimited number of times.”

So where does porn, gambling and auctioning come into it?

Well, I think the future of WebRTC for media lies in the ability to seamlessly stream events to users as if you were a professional broadcaster. It’s one thing to be able to record or stream a few jerky minutes of a demonstration, but soon enough it will be possible — even expected — that any media organisation, large or small, can, with little preparation, livecast an event with little or no lag.

Alexandre Gouaillard, CTO of a company called Millicast, says these industries are the ones pushing for this. With Adobe no longer supporting the Flash plugin, the mainstay for such industries, there’s a demand for low latency video but at scale: Millicast promises broadcast across the globe in less than 500 milliseconds. The packages range from 10 concurrent viewers (free) to 5,000 ($1,500 a month.)

This may be lower latency than required, but it’s a glimpse, I believe, of the future. I think we’ve been held back from using video in part because of its awkwardness in setting up, and the glitchiness, that makes interactions painful. Those days are coming to a close, mainly because of WebRTC.

You don’t have to be into interactive porn to imagine the possibilities of having people seamlessly integrated by a video connection, wherever they are: if your reporter can walk around with a smartphone mounted on a $150 gimbal, confident that every shot is being beamed to every user; or a Q&A with an editor accompanied by graphics and whiteboard is crystal clear to all 5,000 viewers in a monthly editorial catch-up, then perhaps in a year or two an augmented reality- or virtual reality-, or 360-degree- broadcast from a sports game or political rally — then we’ll be able to thank a porn star or a gambler for marking the way for us, once .

We are currently in a phase of seeing in blockchain, the ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the solution to problems in nearly every industry. There is something alluring about a technology that is so easy to set up, does not require a leader or central controller, and which can store anything permanently. But would it work for media?

First off, it’s worth talking about what blockchain is – and isn’t. Blockchain is the name we have given the underlying database system created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the so-far unidentified maker of bitcoin. Nakamoto needed to solve a couple of problems if he (or she) was to create a digital currency that was unhackable. He first needed to get around the problem of copying: when it’s easy to copy something digital, a digital currency needs to not only be impossible to duplicate, but also everyone needs to be able to see that it cannot be duplicated. The other problem he wanted to get around is to make sure the process of recording and validating transactions was not dominated by one person, either relying on some central authority, or that someone could take over the system and manipulate transactions.

These problems were neatly solved by the blockchain. Embedded in software, copies of the ledger of transactions would be stored on multiple computers — basically anyone who wanted to join in. All subsequent transactions would be added to the ledger in sequential order, connecting each block cryptographically, so any attempt at tampering with the record would be discarded. The task of recording those transactions would be done by miners — people who had a copy of the blockchain on their computer, and used their computer’s resources to run through permutations until they found a particular sequence of digits. The first to do so would have the right to add a block to the chain, and earn bitcoin. This created an incentive for people to participate in storing copies of the blockchain, and to record the transactions.

So what has all this got to do with journalism? Well, the blockchain has lots of parts to it that appeal. Together they offer what some believe would be a different way of connecting the components of the media economy — those who produce content, those who consume it, those who publish it and those who currently finance it through advertising.

To understand this, it’s better to take each part of blockchain’s appeal one by one.

Micro-transactions

Micropayments — basically defined as pay per article — have long been the holy grail of digital media, as an adjunct to rather than a replacement for subscription and advertising. The idea is compelling because it means that people who care enough about a single piece of content could pay for it; no need for a subscription, no need to whip out a credit card, no need to think too hard about whether the content is worth it.

The reality is that micropayments will only work when the transaction costs are reduced to near zero. This hasn’t happened because we’re still using credit cards, or a variation thereof (PayPal, Apple Pay), where costs remain high. The alternative is to store value elsewhere — in a wallet, say — which is then transferred in the form of micropayments. But it is still one or two many steps for most users. Wallets are only appealing to users when there are obvious benefits or no alternative. Think ride sharing, or bike sharing. If I can only unlock a bike by uploading credit to their account, then I’ll do it, but I won’t be happy, because that money is all locked with them. And in a recent case, the money might disappear entirely if the company closes down suddenly. Expect wallets to get a bad rap from here on in.

So how could blockchain help? The first, and perhaps only, proven use case of blockchain is Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain network has been running for nearly 10 years, and has an uptime of 99.992364787%. (Really.) So it’s a proven payments system. Unfortunately, it’s also hugely expensive: to move bitcoin from one address to another (in other words, to make a transaction) is still costly — often more than the value of the transaction itself. This is because the miners — the people running the computers that are adding blocks to the blockchain — need an incentive beyond earning bitcoin from the correct ‘guessing’ of the mathematical puzzle. So those making a transaction add a ‘tip’ to the transaction request to bump it up the queue. All this is hugely inefficient and often means transactions can take hours to be recorded. This is fine if you are moving large amounts, or if you just see bitcoin as a valuable commodity, but this is not what Bitcoin and blockchain were designed for. The idea is that it would make it possible for people to transact simply, securely, and without anyone creaming anything off the top (or blocking the transaction.)

Now we’re getting closer. If cryptocurrencies can overcome some of their limitations — high transaction costs associated with adding blocks to the chain, poor usability and security issues — then they definitely offer a way forward. You’d still have to convert from fiat into a currency or token, but that might be feasible if the transaction costs can be lower than real-world transactions. This will probably happen first on Bitcoin Cash, which is what is called a ‘hard fork’ from the original Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Core.) Bitcoin Cash adherents talk about reclaiming Bitcoin from the Core people by focusing on increasing the transaction volume; Bitcoin Cash supports about 100 transactions per second. Compare that to Bitcoin Core’s 7.

One example of a media company exploiting this is Yours.org. The site, according to its founder Ryan Charles, is a platform designed to reward content creators. After trying several other cryptocurrencies unsuccessfully, they turned to Bitcoin Cash allowing users to charge for content if they wished, using Bitcoin cash. One user, Rivers and Mountains, charges about $5 for the full article after a short précis. His articles (about Bitcoin Cash, mostly) earn him up to $900 each. (Yours charges 10 cents to post content and takes 5% of purchases.)

As the founder of Yours, Ryan Charles, puts it: “With Bitcoin Cash we have actual low fees and the payments are actually irreversible. This is kind of amazing. This didn’t used to exist. This is actually the fantasy of micropayments that people have talked about since the 1990s. We actually have it for real starting last August.”

Tokenisation

Yours.org is somewhat unusual in that no extra tokens are involved. You buy Bitcoin Cash and you use that to pay for content. And that may end up being the most popular way of doing things. But most other platforms in this space use their own tokens — basically a version of bitcoin on its own blockchain, like a separate currency. Remember, a blockchain is like any database, it can pretty much store whatever you want on it. Bitcoin, a digital currency, was the original use case which inspired (and required) blockchain. But anything could be stored there, usually in token form.

Steemit, for example, is a social media platform that rewards users with its own token — Steem — which can be converted into dollars on an exchange. And, like Yours, not only are content creators rewarded but anyone clicking on like buttons, adding or voting on comments. All this, the argument goes, helps to oil the ecosystem and promote better content. (Steemit is doing very well, although you might think of it as more of a social platform than a media one. Steem’s market capitalisation — if you add all the tokens together and sell them at the present price — is more than $400 million at the time of writing. It has about half a million accounts.)

Having tokens opens up new ways to move value around the system. Brave, for example, is essentially a browser like Safari, Firefox or Chrome, that among other features builds into it a way for users to reward publishers. It works like this: download Brave, buy some Brave Attention Tokens with a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, and then decide how much you’re going to pay your favourite websites each month. So long as you use the Brave browser to visit those websites, this will be calculated and distributed automatically.

This is probably too many steps for most people, but it’s a start. Brave, like a lot of blockchain-based startups, raised money through something called an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO. An ICO is a bit like an IPO, in that those who are enthusiastic about the business buy into it by buying the tokens. Owners of those tokens can then use them in some way tied to the service. But as I explain below, this is not quite as simple, or legal, as it sounds.

In theory though, the idea is simple enough: those holding tokens can reward other people on the same platform — Brave, for example — for activity that benefits them. The token is a currency, but with benefits. The obvious one is paying for articles but they could also be used, for example, to reward contributors to an article (crowd-sourcing): So the author could ask for data for an article, and disperse tokens matching the size of each contribution.

The potential of tokens is that could unleash all sorts of new micro-transactions, effectively monetising content and content-related activity that so far has not been monetised. For example, existing content — think all the stories lying in archives, photos, videos, lying in archives that can’t be readily monetised because it would be too administratively cumbersome. Each item could be indexed to the blockchain and each user charged via a smart contract (more on them below.) Tokens promise a way to increase the overall value of content and access to content created by other readers. So, for example, you could charge users to comment on certain stories, effectively filtering out (some of the) time-wasters and trolls, and thereby increasing the value of the content produced by commenters by raising the bar. Similarly, you could charge for access to that content, creating a sort of club of readers. These costs would be small, but might act as enough of a barrier to flippant and time-wasting content.

Fighting censorship

Another appeal of blockchain technology is its distributed, decentralised nature. The blockchain — the ledger of transactions, but also potentially the database of the content itself — is not held anywhere centrally, so no one person or institution, in theory, can close it down or change that content. (Nor, in theory, can they monitor it because, while the transactions themselves may be visible to all, who or what exactly was transacted may not be. The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, can be explored in detail, but all you can see are amounts of bitcoin, bitcoin addresses (where the bitcoin travelled from and to) and the date and time of the transaction. Deeper study might reveal patterns, especially when an address is linked to an individual. But it’s detective work, and still more art than science.)

The blockchain — the ledger backbone — can therefore not be easily destroyed, disrupted, hacked or altered. That means it is more likely to survive some government’s, or individual’s, attempt to stop information from finding its way out. But it also means that the information stored on it has credibility: it’s much more likely not to have been tampered with, and because it has timestamps and other data attached, can be relied upon as an accurate record of what happened.

So several outfits are exploring opportunities the blockchain offers to reduce the potential for censorship. Publiq, for example, offer their distributed storage infrastructure to store all content — think of a peer to peer network like Napster, where users who host the content would be rewarded with Publiq’s tokens. A hash — a short unique code — of each piece of content on Publiq’s P2P network would be stored in Publiq’s blockchain, so any corruption of the data, intentional or otherwise, would be noticed straight away. So no-one can alter or remove the existing content — think censors or fake news hackers — but the content can be amended. So authors could for example add notes or corrections to the original content. Publiq’s Gagik Yeghiazarian tells me this has already happened, when one content provider was able to add amended transcripts to a story that some readers rightly claimed was incorrect. The correction was added to the original content, leaving it annotated but intact. With even mainstream news organisations over-writing or ‘fixing’ content without properly flagging it to readers, this feature is welcome.

Funding

The obvious way to reward journalism — the creators of content — via the blockchain is to remove the obstacles preventing people from paying for content that has been created — the micropayments model described above. That’s great for people who can create content on spec — in the hope that someone is going to reward them for it, either through tips or through a paywall.

Then there’s the funding of proactive journalism: the crowdsourced model, where enough people believe the story or content will be worth consuming that they’re ready to pay for it in advance. Similarly, the blockchain can help, not only with micropayments but with an immutable record of who paid what for what, and what that entitles them to.

But what about bigger content that require deeper funding — an investigative podcast series, say, or a documentary? Companies like Qravity are looking to break down the various tasks of a project, which are then farmed out to team members. Instead of being paid for their contribution they’re given tokens, which give them a stake in the ownership of the project proportionate to the number of tokens they hold. They’re therefore transparently tied to the project and can share in its success.

Content licensing

And then there’s monetising that content once it has been created. Or finding a way to monetise one’s archive. Take AllRites, a media company based in Singapore which handles licensing of content on behalf of major TV and video players in the region. They’re creating a platform that would move this marketplace onto the blockchain, in theory simplifying the licensing of that content, while also opening up B2C licensing — where you or I could buy streaming rights to movies, tv shows or documentaries by the hour, say — as well as a content funding platform. Initially, content would be represented on the blockchain via a unique identifier, but ultimately, their CEO Riaz Mehta hopes, technology will allow the content in its entirety to be stored on a blockchain, simplifying the process.

So why? What’s the point of this? There are several advantages, Mehta says. First off, an ICO allows them to raise money that venture capitalists would never provide because they wouldn’t see the longer term, and they’re only just starting to get blockchain. “For them,” Rias told me, this is the frontier land and they’re very cautious about what they put into it.”

But more significantly, they believe that not only will it make for a more efficient marketplace, but that content locked up in the long tail of providers could be more readily found and monetised. By registering the content on AllRites’ blockchain even niche providers or content creators themselves would be able to prove their rights, advertise their wares and sell to a much larger market.

There are other efforts in this area. Po.et is a shared ledger recording ownership and metadata for digital assets. Qravity is both a studio and a distributor of content created by decentralised teams. Both aim to build platforms that level the playing field for content makers. In other words, disintermediating the middle parts that conspire against smaller producers of content.

Smart contracts

A key part of the appeal of blockchain is the idea that embedded into it could be more than just tokens of value. You could store the content itself, theoretically, or you could store applications — code that actually does something. These are, or could be, smart contracts — a piece of code that, in its simplest form, kicks off an action, or sequence of actions, based on some input. So, on a certain date, ownership of a token could change hands. So imagine I have loaned a video to you, the record of which is stored on the blockchain. When that loan expires, ownership (and control) of that video returns to me. Part of the smart contract could delete it from your device, say, or require you to extend the loan, releasing tokens to me in payment. These smart contracts would effectively unleash a lot of the potential for what is otherwise just another database. Qravity, for example, plans to use smart contracts to determine how many tokens to distribute to each member of a team based on their contribution, in the example described above.

Warnings

ICOs

There are concerns however. Quite a few of these blockchain companies are launching, or have launched, initial coin offerings, or ICOs, to raise funds. These have proved very lucrative for some startups, but their appeal is beginning to fade. Regulator anxiety is forcing every ICO to move away from calling their tokens securities, for one thing — so while they are still raising money from the sale of tokens, those tokens do not represent a stake in the underlying company. Instead the tokens will be used to buy services or products. And there’s the issue of incentive: if companies do raise money through ICOs, how can they be held to account over how that money is used?

The first problem with ICOs and the subsequent blizzard of tokens is: why? Why can’t people just buy those services with their own currency? The argument is usually two-fold: the tokens allow money to be transferred without constraints of borders/currencies, and secondly, that it allows more value to be transferred than was available previously. Brave moves tokens (value) between the three main pillars of media — the users, the publishers and advertisers. So users, for example, can earn money directly from advertisers by giving their consent to view ads. Similarly, they can reward content producers on a proportional basis depending on how much of their content they viewed during a month.

But I think the bigger worry is that these systems are too complicated for the end user. I tied myself in knots trying to chart the various transactions that would take place within Brave’s ecosystem. And that was one of the simpler ones. These complicated arrangements may work in B2B, but the diagrams that accompany nearly all these models highlight the same problem: For the solution to work it must be invisible or intuitive to the end user. He or she must not have to juggle multiple tokens, or perform elaborate calculations in her head, or have to require lots of separate apps, accounts or wallets. And they don’t want to see lots of real money locked up in tokens. I can’t help coming away from reading some of these white papers (the conventional way these days to explain how these blockchains and tokens might work) and feeling there might well be a simpler way of doing things.

Blockchain is often mentioned in the same breath as the invention of the internet. That could be true. I would say that for it to be successful it must be closer in analogy to the invention of the World Wide Web — when Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with a simple layer of links embedded in a familiar text-and-graphic interface which unlocked the potential of the plain vanilla and impenetrable internet. Until the blockchain is able to offer that, talk of its disruptive power in media is premature.

Of course, I might be wrong. Efforts like Civil hope to build a whole ecosystem — a platform encompassing many of the features I’ve described — and are already building a portfolio of news organisations. They describe it as a Netflix strategy — instead of waiting for someone else to aim big, they’re doing it themselves. And Yours Inc’s Charles points to his company’s buy button, seamlessly woven into any webpage, that would allow anyone with Bitcoin Cash to pay a user for his content, in the same way we click on the Facebook like button now. So there is traction, of sorts.

Platforms and standards

Most of the startups I spoke to are keen to point out that they’re not pursuing blockchain technology blindly, and ignoring other technologies — like artificial intelligence, for example. Inkrypt’s co-founder and CEO Muhammad Ali Chaudhary, for example, says: “It is important to realize that blockchain ledgering is just one piece, albeit a very necessary one, of the technical solution being provided by Inkrypt. We are implementing blockchain technology in a particular way for a specific use case and at the end of the day we are a media tech company, as opposed to a ‘blockchain’ company.”

For sure, there will come a time when these companies decide it’s better not to even use the word blockchain to describe what they’re doing. And I think we’ll see some quietly disappear when they realise that journalism is for most people both a passion and a job, and that it might be hard to build a critical mass of journalists and content creators willing to be guinea pigs for untried and untested business models.

What I think needs to happen in the longer term is that independent media, organisations, or funders should work on building standards and platforms that allow all these tokenised initiatives to cooperate. We are some way from a world where people will be comfortable with handling lots of different tokens, and it feels like a reverse if we push users in that direction. Better would be to encourage interchangeability — say an exchanges where you can easily buy and transfer your tokens. Or, where one token rules all. In that sense, companies like Yours.org may have a head start — building APIs, or application programming interfaces, software that allows services to talk to each other — for other content makers to plug into the Yours.org platform.

Ultimately though, I am optimistic that out of all these spaghetti-like flowcharts might emerge a model for media to find a better way of rewarding great content, keeping advertisers happy, and tapping into loyal audiences. I just don’t think we’re quite there yet.

1. Know Your Exit Plan Before You Buy

This is a big, often-overlooked issue and one software providers often don’t like to address. You need to know what file format your data will be when you receive it back. The more standardized the file format, the better. Packages that operate in Microsoft SQL are the best because SQL is widespread and you will find an abundance of programmers to prepare your files for your next package, should you ever have to leave. Most, but not all, large providers use SQL, but smaller providers may use various kinds of freeware or proprietary database structures that are not easily converted to other formats. Always ask what file format your data would be returned in and also ask if there would be any charge to return your data. Some providers make it as difficult as possible to leave and do everything from charging a high fee to return your data to giving it to you in a format which is so archaic that your next software installation is likely to fail. Know your exit plan, before you buy! Don’t assume that software marriages last forever. You may outgrow it down the road or find it just wasn’t the right product for you.

2. Find Out What Kinds Of Support Packages Are Available

If you are buying a package that is worth its salt, it is powerful enough, complicated enough and customizable enough that your use, expansion and improvements in your processes will require ongoing support. Nobody who buys software wants to hear this. Software sales reps want to minimize the cost of the product, and buyers want to hear that it’s turnkey once purchased, but it’s not. Systems that run your business can be tweaked, customized and adjusted to continually improve your business. It’s not a static process. You should find out what kind of ongoing consulting packages are available, and meet regularly (preferably monthly) with your software provider, to address business systems that you find time-consuming or less than optimal. By improving and evolving your systems on a monthly basis, you’ll make your consulting fees back tenfold. Your employee costs will always be your main company costs, not your software costs, so focus on ways of improving efficiency, saving man hours and reducing labor costs and you’ll make a lot more money in the end. Buyers who go into a software relationship on the cheap have high failure rates, don’t fully utilize systems, and never achieve the kind of economic efficiency they can have if they continuously attack inefficient processes within their companies.

3. Drill Down Into The Details

The smartest companies draft up an RFP outlining what features they are hoping to have in their software package and they have the vendors fill them out. The best companies look forward to this comparison and the weaker vendors will not.

4. Require Your Potential Providers To Rank Their Competitors

The good vendors usually know the market and know what they are good at and what they are not good at. Ask them to name their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find out pretty quickly which competitors they respect and those they genuinely think are weak competitors.

5. How Long, How Big and How Many?

Find out how long the vendors have been around. It’s very hard to start a software company and compete with companies with mature products. The mature products have a decade or more of a head start and usually ten million dollars or more in development. Find out how many clients your vendors serve. The ones with the broadest customer base will have larger development staffs and tend to race ahead while other vendors can’t due to their small size. Find out how many full time employees each vendor has. If the answer if five, you should think twice. It’s almost impossible to provide any sort of support and development process with so few employees.

6. Touch The Product

Ask the vendors to use an actual copy of the software. There is no safer way to evaluate than to get your hands dirty and really experiment with the actual product.

7. Don’t Be Sold By “We don’t have that feature, but we’ll throw in custom development of that feature if you’ll sign right here”.

This is what companies that don’t have robust products do to try and get a deal done. Many clients are fooled into thinking that company A is more helpful than company B. But its fool’s gold. Any software company that becomes tied up in custom work for each client won’t be focused on developing new features that serve its overall client base. Custom work adds to maintenance costs of the overall software package and the best companies will focus their efforts on making their software package customizable by you, not trying to create custom reports and features for you. You may be the focus while they are trying to get you to sign on the dotted line, but they’ll move onto the next custom project once you are on board, and you’ll notice that your future needs are not being met because the company’s development staff is doing custom work for the new client. It’s a slippery slope that the best software companies don’t go down.

So, do features matter? Yes, but don’t fail to realize all of the other important considerations when investing in software for your publishing company.

“We would like to find out whether the physical newspaper can be replaced by a reading device delivered with the subscription”, said Santtu Parkkonen, Producer, Helsingin Sanomat development. “The ePaper device also enables new types of subscription-based products. Ideally, readers could take contents of Sanoma’s multiple media brands and compose their own favorite magazines. A personalized newspaper has long been the stuff of dreams, but now it can become reality”, Parkkonen said in a press release.

Read more:

Helsingin Sanomat tests solar-charged e-reader

New Color e-Reader being Developed in Finland

Foto: Leia Media

• The Seminar presented the following topics:“Technology Platforms & Decision Criteria”.  The presentation outlined the key decisions involved in selecting and maintaining web platforms.  The presenter discussed the pros and cons of in-house versus outsourced development as well as proprietary versus open source software.  Detailed decision criteria are recommended.  Because of the importance of the Content Management System, the presentation closes with a comparison of the three open source CMS platforms – Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Platforms; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Product Management Roles and Responsibilities”.  The presentation focused on the role of product management as a ‘translator’ between the needs of users and technology’s ability to deliver web products to meet these needs.  In particular, the seminar outlined key elements in a business plan and product specification.  Examples of online and software products used to support the product development and bug tracking processes are also included.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Product Management; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Opportunities in Online Advertising”.  The presenter detailed the elements of online advertising standards including pixel dimensions, file size and other graphic requirements.  The discussion outlined new trends in online advertising targeting including behavioral and contextual targeting.  The rapid emergence of real-time bidding or programmatic buying and its key components is also introduced with specific examples and a summary of companies working in the Russian/Ukrainian market.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Advertising; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Development Metrics: Measuring Your Site for Improvement”.  This section presented a model for online metrics including examples of data sources and calculations.  Three types of metrics are discussed.  Foundation metrics provide basic audience behavior (visits, page views) and audience descriptions (location, gender, etc.). Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are discussed in terms of developing measures that assist in making business and content decisions to optimize websites for traffic or revenue.  Finally, tactical measures like A/B testing and heat maps are introduced as techniques to acquire specific information to make tactical decisions about a website.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Metrics; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Website Hosting Fundamentals”.  The Seminar presented the key types of hosting, their different uses and recommended criteria for selecting hosting methods and vendors.

The Seminar aimed to provide media managers with decision-making and management techniques for working with technology including content management, advertising and ad serving, and metrics systems.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 9 – 10 October 2013

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Technology, Product and Commercial Managers

All of this represents an amazing opportunity and an incredible challenge to news organisations who want to engage with their audience and generate revenue to fund their journalism.

As the mobile phone has become the primary means of accessing information, entertainment and socialising for billions of people, mobile advertising has become the primary means of remuneration for content owners.

In many countries, mobile advertising is a mature industry.  No longer the preserve of dubious links offering “Free Crazy Frog Ringtones!!” – mobile advertising is used by global and local brands to drive engagement with users.  If it’s still in its infancy in your country, it won’t be for long. It offers a credible and sustainable way for media organisations to produce their content at no direct cost to their users.

In the old-fashioned days of advertising, every newspaper would have an ad-sales desk.  Hordes of salesmen (and it was nearly always men in my experience) would shout down the phones trying to convince companies to buy a quarter-page advert in the weekend edition.

All that has changed.  Rather than employing sales people to negotiate directly with potential advertisers, most mobile sites use an Advertising Network.

Understanding ad networks

Ad networks are really simple to understand.

• A business owner creates a space for advertising on their mobile site (or app).  This is called a “slot”.
• The advertising network analyses the content on the page and the people who are visiting it.
• The advertising network then conducts real-time bidding among the advertisers.  It looks through all the adverts that it has on its books, matches up the adverts that it thinks will get a high rate of engagement, then sees which company is willing to pay the most to be shown at that specific time, on that specific page, to that specific user.
• The advert is then shown to the user in the page’s slot.

All of this happens in just a few milliseconds.

Getting paid

Broadly speaking, there are three ways that mobile adverts make money for content owners: CPM, CPC and CPE.

CPM – Cost Per Mille is the most “traditional” way of advertising.  It is also the least profitable and is falling out of favour.  It simply measures how many times the advert is shown to a user.  For every thousand (mille) impressions a fixed sum is paid.

CPC – Cost Per Click is the most common way of measuring mobile advertising.  Whenever a user clicks on a mobile advert, a variable sum of money is paid out.  Depending on the advertiser, and the market, this can be anywhere from a tenth of cent to a dollar.

In some cases, the advertising network will track whether the user went on to purchase a product or install an app based on clicking an advert – if so, it will pay out more money to the content owner.

CPE – Cost Per Engagement is the newest – and potentially most profitable – method of mobile advertising.

Using HTML5 – the latest version of the code that creates web content – it is possible to create interactive adverts which don’t result in the user leaving the site.  For example, clicking on an advert could play a trailer for a movie.  In this case, the advertising network pays out every time a user engages with an advert.

Mobile advertising networks

There are dozens of mobile advertising networks available.  The industry is still relatively young and contains many companies which have grown rapidly in just a few years.

When choosing a mobile advertising network, be sure that the company has an account manager located in the same country as you, and also ensure that they have sales teams in the countries you wish to target your content.  Finally, make sure they support the platforms that you are currently on – and those to which you wish to expand.  For example, you may be mobile web only now, but do you have plans for an Android app?

While there are hundreds of mobile advertising networks (http://mobithinking.com/mobile-ad-network-guide), there are a few major players.

InMobi

InMobi started in Bangalore, India, and has rapidly expanded into Russia, Asia, Africa and Europe.  They support mobile web, Android, iPhone, and Windows 8. The author is a former employee of InMobi.

Google AdMob

Google is well established in the mobile advertising world.  AdMob will only work on SmartPhone apps – it will not work on mobile websites.

Google AdSense

Google’s AdSense platform allows publishers to monetize mobile websites.  If you already use AdSense for Web, you will be familiar with its layout and how it works.

Amobee

With offices from Buenos Aires to Singapore, Amobee is well placed to integrate with a variety of mobile devices in a wide range of markets.

BuzzCity

Specialising in Asia and Africa, BuzzCity is serving billions of mobile adverts every month.  It can target mobile web, Android, and iOS – as well as older devices such as BlackBerry and J2ME.

Hunt

Dedicated to the Latin American market, Hunt has seen huge growth over the last few years.  It can deliver adverts to mobile web as well as app.

In addition to choosing an ad network, there are several other things to consider when working with mobile ad networks.

Filtering adverts

It is vital that your mobile advertising network allows you to maintain quality control on the advertising you are showing.  For example, you may decide that you don’t – or legally can’t – show gambling adverts.  All good networks will offer you fine grained control over what content gets shown on your site.

All networks will let you filter out adverts by category.  Some will let you filter by keyword or destination URL.  That means you can block your competitors’ adverts from appearing on your site.

Make sure that your network will fully explain how their filtering works – your reputation may be at stake if you allow advertising which runs counter to your editorial position.

Of course, the more adverts you filter out, the fewer adverts may be shown.  This will lead to a high NFR…

NFR

One important thing to consider when choosing a mobile advertising network is their NFR – No Fill Rate.

Every time you request an advert from your network, they will perform a complex series of calculations to determine which advert will be best suited to your content and your visitors.  On occasion, they may find that they have no suitable adverts – or their advertisers’ budgets have been depleted and they cannot afford to advertise with you.

At this point, the content owner is faced with either showing the content without advertising, or using house advertising.

House adverts

Most mobile advertising networks will let you run “house ads” at no extra cost.  A house ad is an advert for your own internal products and services.  For example, a newspaper may run a house ad encouraging readers to download their branded Sudoku app or to subscribe to the paper’s print edition.

Running house ads is a great way to show off your own content to your readers.  It is also a low-cost way to deal with NFR.

Mediating networks

Why choose just one mobile advertising network?  Rather than signing a contract with a single provider, it’s possible to use an advertising mediator.

The concept behind mediation is simple, you engage multiple networks to bid against each other for your advertising locations.  If one network has a high NFR you can use another network to ensure that the advertising location is filled.

You can choose which advertising networks you want to integrate with your mediator – and which you wish to exclude.

With most mediation networks, you will still have to sign contracts with each individual advertising network.

There are two potential downsides to using mediators.  First, they may take a percentage of your earnings as commission.  So while you may get more advertising, it may not be as profitable.

Second, you run the risk of duplication.  For example, suppose that your primary advertising network has shown the user a Coca-Cola advert.  After displaying the advert 5 times, the network may conclude that as the user hasn’t engaged with the advert, it’s unlikely to elicit a response and so it will stop showing it – thus generating a NFR. At which point, your mediator will pick another advertising network which will start showing adverts for Coca-Cola.

This is a waste of time for all concerned – and is particularly likely to annoy your users if they are bombarded with the same irrelevant advertising.

Here are some of the major mediation platforms:

• Smaato
• Mopub
• AdWhirl, which is now being integrated in AdMob.

Mobile ad formats

Mobile phone screens vary in size and shape.  That’s why it is important to choose a mobile advertising network which supports a variety of advertising formats.  As well as the “traditional” banner ad – which takes up the width of the screen and usually around 10% of the height – there are several other formats which may be suitable for your content.

Rich media

Taking advantage of HTML5 features allows mobile advertisers to break out of the banner.  When a user clicks on an advert, they are not taken to the advertiser’s site – instead, the advert expands and its contents are displayed in situ.  The user can then watch an animation, view a video, interact with the contents, etc.

These sorts of adverts are popular with users due to their fun and interactive nature, but because they require a modern web browser and a high-powered phone, they aren’t available to all users.

Interstitial

An interstitial advert comes “between” the pages of a site.  For example, clicking on a news headline may take the user to a full screen advert for Volkswagen’s latest car, the user can then click through to their desired content.

Although interstitials have reasonably high engagement rates, they also can negatively impact your brand. Some users find the disruption of an enforced delay to their instant gratification deeply annoying.  Interstitial use should be very carefully tested before deploying.

How much money can a content company make?

By some estimates, the mobile game “Angry Birds” is the most popular way for people to spend time on their phones.  An estimated 65 million minutes of gameplay per day nets the company around US$1 million per month!

It’s relatively easy to construct a formula to estimate the revenue a content producer can expect to receive via mobile advertising.

Let’s make the following assumptions:

Every page on the site has 1 advert.

There’s a 5% NFR.  This is variable depending on your advertising partner and mediation network.

CPC is 10c.  Again, this is highly variable. If your site attracts viewers likely to click on adverts for Rolex watches, this could be much higher.  If your readers are less wealthy, that CPC could be lower.

The click-through-rate (CTR) is 3%.  That is, for every hundred adverts shown, three are clicked.  That’s the industry average – although it will differ depending on sector and the quality of the adverts.

Pages X Fill Rate X CTR X CPC = Earning.

If you have 100,000 page views per month, the formula is:

100,000 X .95 X .3 X .10 = $2,850

This formula contains a lot of assumptions about demographic and advertising partners.  The best way to increase your revenue is to work closely with your advertising partners, let them know the demographics you are targetting, make sure that they understand the areas that you work in, send them whatever keyword data you can so that they can expertly target the advert to the reader.

Finally, none of this works without a sizeable audience.  Make sure your content is compelling and keeps the user visiting your site.

How much are other content providers making?

Naturally, it’s hard to find detailed, commercially confidential information.  The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in the US recently published a detailed report into how newspapers are coping with mobile advertising.  It’s well worth reading.

Highlights include a newspaper making $200,000 per quarter from their “non-traditional” advertising – not bad for a circulation of 50-60,000.  Other news providers talk about expecting triple-digit mobile advertising growth over the coming year.

As the world shifts inexorably to mobile, we can expect a larger percentage of revenue to come from users engaging with content on their phones and tablets.

As audiences shift to mobile, if your advertising strategy doesn’t take this into account, you are missing an opportunity.

Choosing a mobile advertising network does not need to be a complex affair.  All good networks will make it easy for your web or app team to integrate advertising into your products.

If, at any time, you feel dissatisfied with the performance or quality, the level of competition in the market is such that it should be easy for you to switch to a different network.

The Arab region accounts for 6% of the world’s mobile connections. This may not sound like much, but dig a little deeper and you can see that the region has had a remarkable mobile decade – with connections growing at more than 32% a year for the past 10 years.

Research by Deloitte for the GSMA has revealed that by the end of 2012 there were 391 million mobile connections across the Arab states. Just ten years ago that figure stood at 19 million. The only region where mobile connections have grown at a faster rate during that period is sub-Saharan Africa.

Looking ahead, these trends are expected to continue, not least because two-thirds of the MENA population is under the age of 30. Young and increasingly tech savvy, the Arab Digital Generation may be leading the way, but take up of mobile technology is starting to cut across all demographics.

The good news for media organisations is that “news and feeds” apps are popular amongst the region’s mobile smartphone users, but it is essential for news organisations to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in developing a mobile strategy, as use varies widely not just across this diverse region but also within countries.

One region, many markets

Like other developing markets, although the MENA region has experienced dramatic mobile growth in the past decade, the picture is more complex than headline statistics suggest. Not only are there huge variations between urban and rural populations within countries, on a regional level large, wealthy countries’ usage distorts the region’s mobile figures.

Much of this complexity stems from the fact that, despite many shared linguistic and religious characteristics, the Arab world is far from homogenous. In particular, there are considerable socio-economic differences between the Gulf countries in the Middle East and the Arabic (and French) speaking nations of North Africa.

These differences – which include household incomes and employment levels – also manifest themselves very clearly in the adoption of new technology. The region is polarised between countries such as Saudi Arabia which enjoys a mobile penetration rate of 209% – and a smartphone penetration level of 54% – and South Sudan where mobile penetration is just 22%.

Recognising that the Middle East is not a single market but many different markets is an important starting point for news outlets. What works in one country, may not work in another for a number of reasons including connectivity, competition and context.

Another factor which can skew our understanding of the region is the dominance of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Collectively they account for 40% of all mobile connections in the Arab world, as well as some of the region’s largest online and offline populations. Egypt alone represents 20% of the MENA population, whilst Saudi Arabia  – with an internet population of 8.5m – has an internet universe 17 times larger than that of nearby Oman.

Given this, it is not surprising that these two countries heavily influence markets for content consumption and social media activity.

In the social sphere, as the Dubai School of Government’s 5th Arab Social Media Report  showed, usage of Twitter in the Middle East is dominated by Saudi Arabia. With 1.9 million active users in March 2013, it dwarfs its nearest rival (Egypt, with 519,000 active Twitter users).

Conversely, Egypt dominates MENA’s usage of Facebook.  Of the 54.5 million active Facebook users in the region, over a quarter are in Egypt. With just 16% of Egypt’s population on Facebook, there is plenty of room for growth too.

For news organisations looking to develop mobile strategies, they will want to make sure not to rely on regional statistics but the most up-to-date information about their own countries.

Deciphering mobile behaviours

Although there is an increasingly rich seam of data about mobile take-up in the Middle East, understanding what users do with this technology is harder to ascertain. Nonetheless, we can establish some characteristics about mobile behaviours in the region. The most striking of which is the volume of mobile usage.

Research by Northwestern University in Qatar concluded that MENA residents are online for 17 hours a week  through wireless devices.  How this time is spent is unknown, but anecdotally chat apps, social networking and gaming are all popular pastimes. Given that users spend 2-4 hours a day on social networks, it is likely that much of this activity is undertaken on mobile devices.

Q: How much time per week do you use the Internet through wireless handheld device(s)?
BASE: Internet and Wireless Hand-held Device Users
Base with selected filters: 5177

Much of this activity is on Facebook, which is used by 94% of social network users. This is followed by 51% on Twitter and 45% on Google+. These findings offer further clues for news providers about where they should focus their social presence and the extent of the potential social opportunity.

Alongside Northwestern’s study, new data from Ipsos MORI offers further insights into the online habits of users across 6 MENA countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon and Kuwait).

Of particular interest to news businesses is the finding that amongst smartphone users, “news and feeds” is the top category for app downloads across four of the six countries they surveyed (see slide 22).

This is good news for providers such as LBCI News, Alarabiya and BBC Arabic – all of whom have produced a range of mobile apps – although these figures do need to be treated with some caution, as downloaded apps do not necessarily translate into use and some of these smartphone markets are still quite small.  In Egypt, for example, just 5% of the total population own a smartphone, against overall mobile penetration of 105%, and in Jordan this figure is 19%, compared to 143% total mobile penetration.  Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether “news and feeds” remains the top download category in these countries as smartphone adoption grows.

A further encouraging statistic from Ipsos lies in the role played by the web as the primary platform for daily news consumption amongst internet users. This finding was reinforced by Northwestern’s study, which reported that 49% of internet users in the region used the web daily for local, national or international news.

As with social networking activity, it is not clear how much of this daily news consumption is undertaken using mobile devices. However, given the high levels of mobile web browsing in the region, it is likely that much is through wireless devices.

The GSMA notes:

Due to the limited coverage of fixed-line networks and the associated cost of computers, mobiles are quickly becoming the main platform for internet browsing. Eleven countries in the region rank above the world average in mobile web browsing.

In countries such as Sudan, mobile browsing accounts for 45% all internet activity, followed by Libya, Oman and Kuwait at around 25%. This is compared with a global average of 10%.

Of course, as we noted with desktop digital media, consumers are often ahead of advertisers. You will need to evaluate not only the consumer appetite but also the business opportunity as you determine how to stage your strategy.

Further Implications

Whilst we need to undertake further research into what content mobile users are consuming, these statistics should provide encouragement for news providers. On the horizon, content providers should also consider these three developments which may shape their editorial vision and portfolio:

4G and Video

4G is a reality in some Middle East countries and about 167 m videos are viewed every day on YouTube across the region. As with Twitter this is a network where Saudi Arabia leads the way. With 90 m video views every day, Saudi Arabia enjoys the highest number of YouTube views in the world per internet user. And although most YouTube consumption is typically through a desktop, this is not the case in Saudi Arabia where 50% of these views are on mobile devices.

Across the region mobile video consumption is only likely to increase, particularly as LTE networks expand. Cisco’s Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, argues that the Middle East and Africa will be the fastest growing region for mobile data, with a growth rate of 77% CAGR between 2012 and 2017. Globally, Cisco estimates that by 2017 video will account for two-thirds of the world’s mobile data.

Managing technological divides

Alongside the roll-out of 4G networks and an increased penetration of smartphones, content providers must continue to be mindful of digital divides. Outside of cities, for example, fixed line connectivity is often quite low. Mobile broadband may therefore be the only way for some rural audiences to enjoy online content.

For feature phone users, SMS based news and information may remain popular for some time, especially if smartphone adoption in the region fails to exceed 40-50% in the next five years as Ericsson’s 2013 mobility report  suggests.

What’s interesting about this prediction is that some MENA countries already exceed this level of adoption.  Nielsen  noted in 2012 that Qatar has a 75% penetration of smartphones, a figure higher than the total mobile penetration of some Arab countries.

As Northwestern University in Qatar recently noted across the region there is:

…a genuine digital divide, between the four wealthy Gulf states – Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE – and those that do not share such abundance – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. The digital divide demarcates technological abilities in the Arab world about as starkly as anywhere on earth.

Content providers therefore may wish to consider repurposing their output to reflect these technological realities. Basic technologies such as SMS and FM radio continue to sit alongside more sophisticated mobile technology such as 4G, and to reach the largest possible audience, news organisations will want to serve both high-tech and lower-tech audiences. Ideas submitted to the annual Knight News Challenge offer some suggested ways forward, as do some of the strategies employed by Al Jazeera. The network simulcast their English service on FM radio in Doha, and to reach US audiences which might not be able to watch Al Jazeera English on cable or satellite networks due to lack of carriage, the channel offers US audiences a telephone number they can call so that they can listen to it on their phone.

Media literacy

Finally news providers also have a role in promoting participation in news discourse and its consumption. With the technology increasingly in place across the region for audiences to consume content via a mobile device, publishers may need to encourage this adoption by educating audiences on how to do this. Western broadcasters such as the BBC have used promotional campaigns and presenter endorsements to promote Video on Demand and other online services for some time.  As with some of the other ideas in this article this is arguably something Middle Eastern media could do more of.

The good news for news providers is that high mobile penetration levels, coupled with a strong interest in news  – as well as the popularity of mobile browsing and social networking – mean that the building blocks to create a mobile audience are already in place. By harnessing the creative potential of these platforms and promoting their services to a wider range of users, then digital news in the Middle East can move forward to the next stage in its evolution.

There were quite a few themes covered in this year’s GEN News Summit, but if there was an overall theme, it really would be their unofficial slogan: Hack the Newsroom. ‘Hack’ in this case doesn’t mean breaking into computers or denial-of-service attacks, but rather to try and try again to solve difficult questions, and then to try some more.

The conference looked not only at new developments in digital news but also about how to achieve organisational transformation.

Drone journalism: Potential and practicalities

The session that left me with a proper sense of future shock looked at the rise of drone journalism. Using small, inexpensive and flexible remote-control flying machines like the Parrot AR, journalists and news organisations are able to do aerial camerawork that would have once required helicopters. Drones like the Parrot can be controlled easily using a smartphone or tablet. The kind of footage possible with these flying machines is illustrated by a self-described drone journalist who recorded protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and posted the results on YouTube.

The story didn’t end so well for the Taksim drone itself, however, as police eventually shot it out of the sky.

In the US, universities are already exploring how drones can be used for journalism. The University of Nebraska used a $25,000 drone and other remote-controlled aerial vehicles to cover the extreme drought last year. In this video, you can see not only the footage from the drones but also how they operate.

A recent report by Robert Picard and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Mark Corcoran for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that while $25,000 might seem a lot, the cost of a drone is much less than a helicopter or a fixed-wing aircraft. Costs vary widely, however, from “a few hundred pounds to a few hundred thousand pounds”.

The cost of some drones and the risk of police shooting them down are just two of the issues surrounding the remote-control aircraft. Their use for journalism also raises questions of legality and privacy, as they can be highly intrusive. While there isn’t a cloud of drones chasing Justin Bieber – at least not yet – the report looked at some of the legal and ethical issues of drone usage.

In many countries, drone use will require regulatory permission. This means that governments that want to prevent coverage of protests will find it relatively easy to ground them. Privacy laws, which are already being used to block traditional journalistic coverage, will almost certainly be used to curtail their use as well.

BBC Live Editor Guy Pelham and Nick Pinks, a BBC R&D engineer, noted that media organisations’ lawyers should already be studying aviation law in addition to privacy law to be ready for the questions that drones will inevitably raise.

John Paton’s clarion call for digital transformation

For me, the best talk at GEN – both in terms of its informational value as well as its well-argued message – was from John Paton, the CEO of Digital First Media. The US company manages the MediaNews Group and the Journal Register company. Paton argued that the past success of media companies does not ensure a successful future. He said that $1 of profit in a traditional media company today will become 56 cents of loss in five years. He even says that his company will need to do more in terms of growing digital revenue, managing digital costs while investing in digital products, sales and infrastructure and making cuts to the legacy, meaning print, business. He said:

Over the next three years if our digital revenue goes up again around 87% and digital costs go up again about 73% – mobile, video, digital sales and content don’t come free – then profit will be down 37%. Not up but down.
We can no longer treat digital as a bolt-on to our strategy and protect the legacy business.

He wants to motivate his employees to change. He said:

There can be no risk without reward. Smart, risk-taking legacy news organizations will successfully transform. Wealth will be created. And that wealth has to be shared for the employees who are taking those risks with the Company. To that end, Digital First Media will roll out in the coming weeks the details of a profit-sharing plan for all employees. It will include non-union and union employees alike but not senior executives. They’re well paid and it’s enough already.

The entire text of Paton’s talk is available here.

Hackathons: Rapid innovation

To help organisations innovate, GEN has held a series of ‘hackathons’ in various cities worldwide over the past year. A hackathon is a competition in which small teams attempt to solve a specific problem by creating a product in a limited amount of time, with the most complete product usually winning. The GEN News Summit therefore represented the World Cup of news hackathons, with 11 teams worldwide invited to Paris, where they were given the following challenge: rethink your homepage in the context of user engagement.

The winning team was the Netherlands’ De Volksraant, which created a new front page that provided summaries as well as entire articles, and provided visual clues as to what a reader’s friends were sharing.

GEN 2013 trends

It’s always fun to go to a news industry conference and play ‘buzzword bingo’, a game where you have a bingo card filled with new media buzzwords and cover them during the presentations. Of the new media themes, one of the most frequently used buzzwords at GEN 2013 was ‘engagement’, with numerous speakers discussing methods and measurement of audience involvement in the news. ‘Committing acts of journalism’ was another phrase that stuck in my mind – and my notebook – as another way of referring to citizen journalism or user-generated content.

Another buzzword was ‘responsive’, as in design. It refers to new design methods and technology that allow digital content to automatically respond, or resize, to the screen size of the device. Responsive design allows news content creators to design a page once rather than having separate designs for desktop, mobile and tablet audiences. While it makes perfect sense, there still aren’t many organisations executing responsive design well, which design guru Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects pointed out in his talk.

One of the reasons conferences are great is that it allows you to get an idea of the state of the art. While one cannot easily achieve all of the best practices presented, they provide food for thought. At GEN, it seemed that the state of the art is to be digital-first, drone-ready, responsive, ethical and ready for a hackathon. All in a day’s work, right?

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

It is not surprising that internet use continues to grow and that emerging markets are largely driving this growth. However, dig a little deeper into famed internet analyst Mary Meeker’s latest annual report on the state of the internet, and you’ll find several important insights for news organisations as they navigate the digital transition.

Internet tipping point in major emerging markets

While some say that Meeker is merely restating conventional wisdom, if you look closely at the data she provides, she is doing more than stating the obvious.

It is widely understood that emerging markets are powering continued global growth in internet use. However, some of this growth is coming from unlikely countries, such as a 205 percent year-over-year internet growth in Iran, 58 percent growth in Indonesia, 57 percent growth in Argentina and 39 percent growth in Colombia.

Of course, high growth figures can simply indicate growth from a low base, but the other thing you notice in the International Telecommunications Union data that Meeker highlights is that the majority – or nearly a majority – of the population in major emerging markets now have access to the internet.  Now, 49 percent of the Russian population have access to the internet. In Turkey, 47 percent of the population have access and 45 percent of the population of Brazil now have internet access. The explosive growth in internet access in Argentina, now means that 68 percent of the population has internet access.

We don’t have a sense of the speed of these internet connections, but the fact still stands that in many emerging markets significant parts of the population now have access to the internet.

In another recently released report, US computer networking giant Cisco said that by 2017 half of the world would have internet access. To put that in context, in 2012 only 32 percent of the world’s population was connected. The report also predicted that the average broadband speed would more than triple from 2012 to 2017.

The key take-away is that in many emerging markets, internet access is reaching a tipping point, and this will lead to a tipping point in digital media access.

Mobile and tablet growth is booming

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Mobile internet access continues to grow, now accounting for 15 percent of all global internet traffic. If the current trend continues, mobile internet traffic will soon rise to 30 percent of all global traffic.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Mobile internet growth isn’t a recent phenomenon, but Morgan Stanley data showed that smartphone subscribers will grow 31 percent this year. The percentage of smartphones as a part of the total mobile subscriptions varies widely from market to market. Indonesia and Russia only have low double-digit smartphone use as a part of mobile subscriptions, 11 and 12 percent respectively. However, other emerging markets already have much higher smartphone use. For instance, Malaysia, at 35 percent, has a higher level of smartphone use as a percentage of total mobile subscriptions than Germany or Italy, at 29 and 23 percent.

However, the shift to mobile is about much more than the increased use of smartphones. Tablets, most of them based on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, have remade the digital landscape in a short time. Android and iOS, whether on smartphones or tablets, have ended Microsoft’s dominance in terms of personal computing.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

iPad sales grew three times faster than the iPhone, Meeker said, and while that might seem more relevant to wealthy, developed markets, dramatically less expensive tablets based on Android are being developed for emerging markets. Acer has been developing a $99 tablet for the Indian market.

Of course, the line between smartphones and tablets is beginning to blur as so-called phablets win over consumers who don’t want to have multiple devices. Phablets are large screen smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note or the Asus Fonepad, with its 7-inch screen. Analysts say that phablets are set to sell well not only in the Asian giants of China and India but also in the social-media capitals of Indonesia and Malaysia.

For news organisations, the growth of tablets and large-screen smartphones means that in the future it is more likely that your readers will be using a tablet or large smartphone rather than a traditional computer to read your stories, listen to your audio or view your video.

Publishers and broadcasters will want to make sure that their digital content is optimised for these platforms.

Is mobile growth translating into mobile revenue?

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

Last year, Meeker highlighted how advertising on mobile lagged far behind the amount of time that people spent with their mobile devices. However, as she showed this year, not all of the time that people spend with their mobile devices is spent consuming content. In fact, of the 150 times a day that smartphone owners reach for their handsets each day, news, alerts and the web account for only 10 times they check their phones. Attention is very fragmented on mobile devices.

Meeker still sees a tremendous opportunity for mobile advertising. In the US, people spend 12 percent of their time consuming media on a mobile device but only 3 percent of advertising is spent on mobile.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

This year, she pointed to Facebook’s success in offsetting declining advertising revenue from its desktop users with rising revenue from mobile advertising. This shows both that it is possible to earn revenue from mobile audiences and that the social network will present fierce competition to news organisations for mobile advertising.

The report highlights not only how the digital transition is accelerating in many major emerging markets, it also shows while the future holds incredible promise for mobile media, opportunities already exist. News organisations must now think about mobile when they think of digital.