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”]

Quartz, which is owned by Atlantic Media, prides itself on its originality in delivering news – its pioneering daily email newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers – and its newest innovation doesn’t disappoint.

Writing in Techcrunch, Jon Russell says that “using a clear and clean design aesthetic, the Quartz bot interacts with you, offering up news stories which you can choose to get more information about or move on to the next.” A simple chat interface lets users decide on the level of detail – if you want, more just ask for it. The app has been rolled out for iPhones, with Android to follow soon.

For Mathew Ingram, writing in Fortune, “it looks and feels dramatically unlike almost every other news app available.” Its simplicity is its appeal, and the experience of using it is like a personal conversation. “There’s no front-page style list of headlines and images, there isn’t even a time-sorted feed of stories. There’s just what looks like a friend texting you, asking you in speech bubbles (complete with emojis) what you are interested in reading about.” You navigate by replying with simple phrases like ‘tell me more’ or ‘what’s next’. Another bonus is that it’s ad-free, except for a sponsor’s message at the end.

Writing in imediaconnection, Tom Edwards is ‘incredibly impressed’ by the app the “that gives the user the illusion that they are in control of the content experience“. There are three aspects that he particularly likes:

• Conversational flow: it creates an immediate bond with users because it’s so familiar.
• User-controlled experience: With an option to direct the experience by clicking on emojis, it makes you feel like you’re in control – it’s more conversational than disruptive.
• Conversational advertising: Over time, it will be possible to build a robust profile of users based on their interactions and integrate advertising as part of a conversation.

Edwards finishes by saying: “Kudos to the Quartz team for delivering a highly conversational approach to information overload and understanding the importance of empowering the consumer.” High praise indeed.

The logical next step for Quartz is to go native, according to Isabelle Niu in fusion.net – “getting on existing messaging apps and learning to become another person I talk to about current events, latest trends or viral videos.”

But as she points out, in China this is already an everyday reality. “Without the competition of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, a monstrosity called WeChat dominates the social media scene in the world’s largest smartphone market. WeChat incorporates some features of most western social networks, but it started out as a messaging app, and messaging is still at its heart.”

More than half a billion people a day log in to WeChat. Public accounts, which are like blogs, are integrated into the chat experience and many have distinctive personalities that enable an interchange between users and publishers. “It’s a bit like having a private messaging thread with the writer you like.”

Niu wonders whether this type of exchange could point to the future of news in an age of information overload. “We-media consumers generally tune in to only a couple of publishers, who must carefully time and choose what they want to say in order to stay at the party. The future of publishing is to become one of those publishers.”

The Quartz app for iPhone can be downloaded here.

While tablets and flagship smartphones might seem developed-world luxuries, mobile broadband and increasingly inexpensive internet-enabled mobile handsets are bringing digital media and communications to all markets. Desktop computer and laptop sales are set to decline in emerging markets, while smartphone and tablet sales expand dramatically, according to figures from research organisation International Data Corporation. As we have noted, for many transitioning countries, mobile is the only way that audiences access the internet.

If you do not deliver a mobile-optimised experience to your mobile audience, you are missing an opportunity to grow audience and grow revenue, as Terence Eden demonstrates in his look at mobile ad networks.

Serving mobile audiences need not be complicated or expensive, and independent news organisations are finding ways to launch mobile strategies despite the press of other priorities and lack of dedicated mobile resources.

Assess the opportunity

The first step in your mobile, or in fact, any strategy is to understand the opportunity, both editorial and commercial.

As Premesh Chandran, the CEO and co-founder of Malaysiakini.com, says, he views everything in terms of return-on-investment and opportunity costs. He outlined some of the thinking that went into assessing their mobile options:

Really, are we going to make money (advertising, subscription) with a mobile app versus a mobile site? What kind of resources will I have to put in? How do we sustain the development?

Malaysiakini, Malaysia’s largest independent news website, had plenty of other challenges and opportunities in the past few years, including defending itself against cyber-attacks that attempted to make the site inaccessible to its millions of monthly visitors.

Chandran had to determine whether the mobile opportunity was valuable enough to dedicate time and resources to when weighed against other demands.

Mobile market statistics for your country are one place to look. For Malaysia, the opportunity is clear. Mobile subscribers have expanded from 6 m in 2000 to 37 m in 2012, according to market research firm BuddeComm. “After starting off slowly, broadband internet has been expanding strongly in recent years and coming into 2012 had reached a remarkable 63% household penetration,” the group added.

Beyond relying on market statistics, you also have a rich source of information already in your own site data. By looking at your site analytics, you’ll be able to see who is coming to your site via mobile devices and also some basic information about the type of devices. This can help you develop a profile of your mobile audience. You can see if they are using smartphones, such as Android, Blackberry or Apple smartphones, or whether many are using more basic internet-enabled handsets, including Nokia’s Asha line of handsets, which target developing markets.

With more sophisticated analysis, you can determine whether mobile visitors are coming to your site and leaving quickly by analysing your bounce rate and seeing whether mobile visitors are a higher proportion of those leaving quickly. The article linked here highlights the three mobile statistics to focus on in Google Analytics and how to find them. The article says the three figures are:

• How many people are visiting your website on mobile.
• How your mobile bounce rate compares to your desktop bounce rate.
• Which devices your mobile visitors are using.

If mobile visitors are contributing more to your bounce rate than desktop visitors, it might indicate that they are leaving in frustration as your site fails to load quickly and eats into their data use. For many emerging market mobile data users, they are price sensitive and will not want to download large pages. It is not uncommon for modern pages with non-mobile optimised images to be a megabyte or more. On more basic internet-enabled mobile phones, these large pages will be almost unusable.

Mobile site, app or both?

Delivering a good mobile experience for your audience need not be difficult or expensive. After assessing the opportunity, Chandran was able to deliver a range of mobile options for Malaysiakini readers. He said:

We ended up with a mobile site (m.malaysiakini.com) an Android app (because one of our developers was keen to do it) and a iOS mobile app (because an external developer was willing to do it for free). The iOS mobile app, also had a tablet version (one app, two layouts).

Regardless of the project, this shows the value of hiring not just good, but passionate, developers, whether on staff or via contract. Good developers want to take on new projects and develop new skills.

Most publishers will want to start small, which means delivering a mobile site. Chandran said:

We think that for news sites, mobile browsing is easier and more cost effective to manage than apps. Apps need to be consistently updated with every OS version, which is costly.

Many content-management systems can automatically detect whether a visitor to your site is coming from a computer or from a mobile or tablet device and deliver the appropriate template. However, to take advantage of this, you’ll need to have a good mobile template, which includes:

• A basic fast-loading design modified for smaller screens.
• Mobile optimised search and navigation.
• Mobile optimised images that load more quickly over slower mobile connections.
• Mobile advertising options.
• If necessary, integration with your paid content system.

Achieving these goals are much easier than they were a few years ago. With growing mobile audiences, content-management systems have added mobile features, and for popular open-source CMSs such as WordPress and Drupal, mobile templates are common.

With the proliferation of devices and screen sizes, some news groups have turned to responsive design. Kayla Knight has a concise but comprehensive overview of responsive design in Smashing Magazine. In it, she writes:

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.

Malaysiakini does not use responsive design, and it is still very rare amongst news websites. As your mobile strategy and the revenue from it develops, you might want to consider it in the future. For those publishers who use WordPress, fortunately there are several very good free and premium themes that are responsively designed.

Revenue options

Of course, part of assessing the opportunity includes trying to estimate the commercial opportunity. As with your standard website, you can easily start to generate some revenue using mobile ad networks. As you develop your strategy, you will want to make sure that the ad network you choose meets the needs of your strategy, such as supporting not only a mobile website but also any apps that you might considering developing.

Ad networks can allow you to start earning revenue, but you will also want to make sure that selling your own mobile advertising is part of your revenue strategy. Malaysiakini does not have any advertising staff dedicated to mobile, but they are using both ad networks and in-house sales to support their mobile strategy, Chandran said.

However, one of the key things that many sites are finding is that advertising is only one revenue option in terms of mobile. As we saw in our recent article looking at paid content strategies in Latin America, mobile and tablet apps can be an important part of a paid content strategy. Smartphone and tablet owners are often more affluent than the general population, even in developed markets, and have shown a greater willingness to pay for content.

Mobile must be a part of your digital strategy or you risk artificially limiting your audience and missing the opportunity to establish yourself early in the mobile advertising market. Fortunately, delivering your content to mobile audiences is getting easier, and you shouldn’t wait to start taking a few simple steps to inexpensively serve mobile users in your audience.

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.

For most news organisations, the response to the mobile revolution will be one of distribution, but Cory Bergman, the General Manager of mobile-first news service Breaking News, says that the mobile revolution is about more than distribution. Distributing your content to mobile audiences is a challenge easily met, but media are only starting to grapple with the business challenges. Writing for the Poynter Institute, Bergman said:

The mobile revolution isn’t about design and distribution as much as it is about revenue disruption. … Both Craigslist and Google created new business models enabled by the technology and scale of the Internet. In the same way, mobile is enabling new business models and use cases. Just like the mid- to late 1990s, we’re at the leading edge of the ensuing disruption.

He believes that mobile payments and geolocation, the ability of phones to customise advertising and content based on a user’s location, could disrupt local advertising. “For local media organizations, that has the potential to destroy your business,” he adds.

This disruption is not far off, he says, and he points to the moment where mobile internet use will surpass desktop. If anything, the developing world is ahead of the developed world in this respect. As we’ve pointed out several times here at Knowledge Bridge, for many internet users in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, mobile internet access is people’s sole way of accessing the internet. In many countries, mobile will dominate, rather than the desktop internet.

This isn’t just about differences in distribution channels. Just as importantly, there are dramatic differences between the business of the mobile and desktop internet. As Bergman says:

There’s a huge gap in advertising yield between desktop and mobile experiences: $3.50 versus $0.75 in average CPMs, according to Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker. Mobile is growing so quickly, the explosion in available inventory is depressing advertising rates.  Ad agencies typically lag demand, which means this gap won’t be bridged anytime soon.

Bergman’s worry is that news organisations’ response to the mobile web will be similar to that of the desktop web: that with such low advertising margins, it would be too easy to focus the business on the desktop web, even though this would ignore a growing segment of the audience.

However, as the news industry is realising with the desktop web, simply applying advertising and revenue models from traditional media to digital media isn’t proving to be successful. The same holds true for mobile media, and the strategies that worked for monetising desktop audiences will not be the same strategies required to monetise mobile audiences. It will take creative thinking both in terms of content and commercial teams to come up with appropriate and successful strategies for mobile.

To develop these successful strategies, Bergman suggests that news organisations consider how the mobile experience differs from the desktop internet. “Mobile is not merely another form factor, but an entirely new ecosystem that rewards utility,” he said. News organisations need to consider how to tap into the high level of social media use on mobile, the opportunities of location both for targeted advertising and targeted content and also the increasing use of mobile payments as potential ways to build this utility and the commercial activity needed to support their mobile efforts.

Last year alone mobile data traffic almost doubled, and the volume of mobile data traffic was 61 times larger in 2012 than it was five years earlier, according to a report by US networking company Cisco.

The report is packed with similarly staggering figures that highlight the growth of mobile data, including a prediction that by the end of this year, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the world’s population.

The report provides not just these-attention grabbing global figures, but also regional and in some cases national figures that will help publishers and editors at news organisations make decisions about how to reach their rapidly expanding mobile audiences.

Explosive growth in the next five years

The report, The Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Forecast (PDF) , gives a sense of just how rapid the growth in mobile data will be over the next five years. It draws on a number of sources including Informa Telecoms and Media, Strategy Analytics, Infonetics, Ovum, Gartner, IDC, Dell’Oro, Synergy, ACG Research, Nielsen, comScore, Arbitron Mobile, Maravedis and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The global figures predict global data usage in 2017 with growth rates so fast that the figures truly are mind boggling:

• Mobile data traffic will grow almost three times faster than fixed line traffic.
• By 2017, global mobile data volume will increase by 771 times from what it was just 10 years before. This means in 2017 mobile data traffic will be the “equivalent of 2,789 million DVDs each month or 30,742 million text messages each second”.
• Data use from Android devices is now higher than that of iPhones.

Diving into the details of the report, there are a few things that are important to note: Cisco includes not only data over traditional mobile networks but also data using WiFi. In fact, the amount of data over WiFi is dramatically higher than that over mobile networks.

Also, the global figures themselves already seem staggering, but when you focus on specific regions or countries, the predictions of growth seem even more astonishing. Some highlights from the the report include:

• Africa and the Middle East will see incredible growth in mobile data between 2007 and 2017, with mobile data traffic growing 3405 times in that decade, the report predicts. By 2017, there will be almost 850 m mobile users in the region, up from 661 m in 2012.
• From Central and Eastern Europe including Russia, mobile data speeds more than tripled last year to 551 kbps.
• “In Latin America, 67.7 million devices were added to the mobile network in 2012,” the report says. However, that is just half of Africa, where 144.7 m devices were added to the network.
• In the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Asian giants India and China, some 385.5 m devices were added to the network, just in 2012.
• For all the talk about smartphones, basic handsets still make up the vast majority of devices on the network, accounting for 82 percent.

The value in this report for news organisations outside of North America and Western Europe is this richness of regional and even major country data. To see highlights for your region, Cisco has created a website that allows you to find the statistics by region as well as by major countries in the regions. I will say this: the major countries in each region do tend to skew the data for these types of reports when it comes to digital media usage.

What does this mean for news organisations?

As a company that sells networking equipment, it’s in Cisco’s interest to make these numbers look large, but the multiple sources of data that Cisco uses are credible. The company estimates that, if anything, its estimates have erred on the conservative side by 2 to 10 percent.

The bigger question is why this information is relevant to news organisations. We all know that the mobile revolution has arrived, and it is sweeping across the globe. Publishers and editors need to know how to respond to the ways their audiences are using mobile devices by understanding:

• What devices are they using? How many are using smartphones? How many are using basic phones?
• Are tablet users a significant part of your audience?
• Are they using WiFi, 3G or 4G?

For example, in Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America, digital means mobile. As we noted last year, in countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, Senegal and Brazil, the majority of internet users are mobile-only internet users.

This will mean that not only will publishers need to understand how to deliver their content to these mobile audiences, but they also will need to develop revenue models that will support this expansion of mobile. Monetising mobile audiences is a key strategic goal for many digital media companies, and, while early in its development, there are mobile advertising strategies such as better targeting – both of the customer and the customer’s location – that are proving successful. In addition to advertising, mobile audiences are more willing to pay for apps and information. Mobile payment systems also make it easier for users to purchase things using mobile devices, opening up opportunities not only for paid content but also m-commerce.

Cisco’s report shows that mobile use has exploded past the elite, early-adopter phase and is rapidly moving into the mainstream. It’s another platform, with its own unique challenges, but also its own unique opportunities. Almost regardless of where you are in the world, if you don’t have a mobile strategy, you’ll want to develop one this year.

The overview is truly global, including not only giants from the US and Europe, but also stars from rapidly developing, emerging markets. Coming second only to Google is Chinese Mobile, that is also joined by Chinese internet giants Baidu and Tencent and Chinese gaming powerhouse Shanda Games. China is not the only emerging market represented in the list. South Africa’s Naspers also joins the list and, as paidContent has pointed out, Naspers is a “case study in how to expand digitally”.

[It] is best known for making savvy online investments in fast-growing emerging markets. Naspers owns or partly owns the shopping sites Allegro (eastern Europe), Ricardo and OLX (Latin America); the social networks Gadu-Gadu (eastern Europe), Mail.ru Group, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki (Russia); among others. It also owns a third of Chinese internet giant Tencent, from which it gets around a half of its internet revenue.

Take a look at the full list, as well as the individual entries. paidContent has a summary of its own takeaways from the list.  The first is the rise in digital revenue; the pc50 boasted $150bn in digital revenue. However, they point out that of these companies, digital still only makes up 16.5 percent of total revenue.

However, I think you need to dive a bit deeper into the data before you can pull out an average like that. In the list, you’ve got internet companies like Google, Baidu and Tencent. While Google earned 96 percent of its $36.4 bn  from digital revenue, there is almost $29 bn separating Google from second place, China Mobile.  There are a range of different companies in the list including search companies, social networks, telecommunications companies, advertising agencies, broadcasters and news groups making it a challenge to compare like-for-like.

Another takeaway that paidContent highlights is that a lot of digital advertising revenue is being captured by major agencies. This has been one of the major challenges for news organisations: in the shift to digital, other players are capturing significant slices of the digital advertising pie. Google and other search engines such as Yandex and Baidu capture a huge percentage of digital advertising. paidContent shows that major advertising agencies including the Publicis Groupe in France, British group WPP and Japanese groups Hakuhodo DY and Dentsu, a 200,000 employee giant of a company, have aggressively expanded into digital advertising services. For example, Dentsu is the official advertising partner for Facebook in Japan, and WPP went on a global buying spree last year, making 36 acquisitions including in Vietnam, Russia, China and Brazil.

Social media challenge more than Facebook

Here are some of our takeaways at the Knowledge Bridge.  US internet companies like Google, Groupon and Facebook get a lot of attention for their success, but, as paidContent’s list shows, major digital media companies are growing outside of the US. Chinese internet companies are moving outside of their home market. For example, Tencent opened up operations in Indonesia late last year and is already making waves in what it sees as a key market.  Earlier this summer, it launched a mobile messaging app, Qute, which works across both smartphones and low-end phones with internet access.  With little promotion, the app has already seen a million downloads.

As we pointed out earlier this year, Russia’s social media giants, Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki are both tapping into Russian-speaking audiences outside of their home country.

News organisations need to realise that in the competition for digital advertising revenue that they are not just competing against other news groups but also against search engines and social media services.

Diversify

The battle for advertising revenue is fierce in digital, but you only have look at Naspers to find a great example of generating digital revenue through investment and diversification. The newspaper group expanded into pay television in the 1980s, and it has made some incredibly savvy digital investments in emerging markets. It is worth looking at some of their investments and acquisitions, which include shopping sites, social networks, online gaming firms and even a social shopping firm, Multiply, which provides social media tools to help merchants promote their goods to potential customers.

Paid content

As paidContent points out, the list is split between those who charge and those who don’t. We’re starting to see a number of promising paid content developments, including the success of national paid content groups like Slovakia’s Piano Media and also metered paywalls, including the high-profile launch of one at the New York Times last year. Under a metered paywall model, readers get some content for free but either have to pay for certain types of content or are asked to subscribe once they have read more than a certain number pages.

Looking at the previous point, diversification, one area where paid content is thriving is business content. Business giant Bloomberg is number three on paidContent’s league table, and there are a number of other business data and information providers that have made the list. It is worth thinking about business news and information opportunities for possible revenue opportunities to pay for your critical accountability journalism.

Zimbabwe news business Alpha Media Holdings recently held what it described as Harare’s first ever hackathon, which brought together mobile, web and software developers in a fast-paced collaborative competition.

The competition saw 16 entries from 25 web, mobile and software developers working individually and in teams for 9 hours. To help give focus to the event, AMH – which publishes NewsDay, The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent, and is an MDLF client – told participants that their applications should focus on one or more of the following:

1. Mobile applications to disseminate media content.
2. Crowdsourcing applications for the newsroom so that citizens could report news such as incidents of corruption or problems such as burst pipes.
3. Applications that compiled daily commodity prices for traders.

Prince Kaguda took top honours for his SMS and USSD-based (unstructured supplementary service data-based) news application, which allows users to subscribe to the news service for free, with financial support coming from advertising.

Participants were told that not only would winners take home some nice gadgets, including a Samsung Galaxy tablet and a Nokia smartphone, but that they would also be introduced to companies to pursue further development of their projects.

Kaguda told technology news website Techzim:

We’re going to incorporate the feedback we got from the judges and, with the assistance of the Alpha and Telecel, launch the news application.

The second place prize went to Shaun Benjamin, who tried to tick all of the boxes in terms of the criteria set out for the competition by creating a crowdsourced platform for collecting and distributing commodity prices. The final prize winner in third place was Tonderai Shamuyarira, who created an app that allows people to anonymously submit text or images for news reports.

Hackathons rising in popularity

Hackathons, also known as hack days or hackfests, are gaining in popularity as a way for developers to show off their skills, to build applications that address specific issues or to increase collaboration in organisations. In addition to this hackathon held last week in Zimbabwe, the Open Data & Democracy Initiative will host a 48-hour hackathon in Cape Town this weekend to encourage the development of applications to help make government more transparent and accountable.

For developers, it is a chance to show off their skills to fellow developers and also to potential employers or investors. For groups like the Open Data & Democracy Initiative, it allows them to promote development of certain types of apps.

For AMH, chairman Trevor Ncube said: “The purpose of the event is to identify people throughout the country interested in building applications to help Zimbabwe solve economic problems.”

The hackathon is just a start, and AMH wants to create a technology hub, a permanent place where developers and entrepreneurs  can collaborate on projects to take advantage of the mobile and technological boom sweeping the continent. Innovation centres and technology hubs have been popping up all over Africa in countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.

How to host your own hackathon

News organisations including the BBC, the New York Times and the newspaper where I was an editor, The Guardian, all have held hackathons or hack days.

Why? For news organisations, it’s a great opportunity to break down the walls in your organisation. For editors and journalists who are not familiar with developing mobile and web applications, it gives them an opportunity to build up experience with the process. Editors and journalists learn what can be done in a short amount of time. The type of rapid development that is the hallmark of a hackathon parallels the demands of tight editorial deadlines, and developers get a sense of the urgency that breaking news requires.

At The Guardian, we also made a point 0f including external developers and digital thinkers to help inject new thinking, and as they developed, we also started to introduce commercial staff to the mix. This meant that we weren’t just being creative with the technology but also developing ideas on how we could earn valuable revenue through these innovations.

Hack days aren’t just a place for blue sky thinking. They can also deliver practical new projects. The first hack day at The Guardian gave rise to the very popular Data Blog and was pivotal in helping launch the paper’s data journalism efforts.

When planning your own hackathon:

• Include both staff and external developers and digital thinkers.
• Give the hackathon, for example, mobile, social or location services, to help focus participants.
• Think of practical ways to develop innovations created during your hackathon.

Already, Africa boasts an estimated 649m subscribers in Africa and an estimated 86m new subscribers will be added by the end of the year, according to the mobile operator industry group GSMA. The number of mobile subscribers has grown by 20 percent each year over the past five years.

On the Knowledge Bridge, we have talked about the surge of mobile communications in Africa and given emphasis to the impact it ought to have on news groups trying to reach their audiences. Research from InMobi, the largest independent mobile advertising network, has found that this rapid growth in mobile use is also leading to rapid growth of mobile media consumption and mobile advertising across much of the continent.

According to the report, South Africa has experienced an increase of 14% in mobile advertising impressions on InMobi’s mobile network over the first three months of 2012, whereas the market grew 12% in Kenya. However, that pales in comparison to growth in Nigeria which saw a growth rate of 37%, the fastest in Africa, netting advertisers more than 8bn advertising impressions. Nigeria also had the distinction of being Africa’s largest mobile advertising market. With such growth, mobile technology is becoming a mainstream marketing and advertising medium through which to reach African consumers.

Mobile websites a must

A new report from Juniper Research finds that in-app advertising spend across all mobile devices will reach $7 bn by 2015, up from $2.4bn in 2012. Juniper says that some brands have moved quickly to reach consumers via their mobile devices while others have yet to even create mobile websites.

In making the digital transition, it is key that news organisations not miss out on the shift to mobile, especially in markets like Africa where many consumers are skipping the desktop internet and going straight to mobile. Just as Juniper recommends that brands need, at the very least, to have mobile websites, news organisations need to make sure that their sites are prepared to serve the growing percentage of their audience who only use their mobile phones to access the internet.

Earlier this year, browser developer Opera, maker of the popular Opera Mini mobile browser, found that of its 169m users worldwide 56 percent only access the internet via their mobile phones. That figure was even higher in some African countries, with 68% of users in Senegal and 61% of users in South Africa exclusively using mobile phones to get online. Without a mobile website, you could be failing to reach the majority of your audience. If you only have a site intended for desktop computers, not only will it load slowly – if at all – for mobile web users, it could also cost them money as the larger page file sizes eat into their data allowance.

Revenue opportunities from the mobile web

Without a mobile website, you’re not just cutting off a large part of your audience, you’re also missing out on advertising opportunities.

In South Africa, the mobile advertising market is expected to grow to 1 billion rand, $118.7m, this year, doubling in just one year. Jason Probert, Head of Vodacom Mobile Media, told South African tech site Memeburn:

Previous estimates have dramatically underestimated the size of the mobile advertising industry as they focused on reports submitted to the DMMA by online publishers. When you take into account the entire mobile advertising ecosystem and include mobile ad networks like AdMob, operator services like Apple, mobile search and social networks like MXit, the picture is dramatically different.

South Africa is a relatively advanced mobile market, but the growth in mobile advertising will follow the audience, especially as advertisers find ways to successfully reach that audience. In Ghana, Volkswagen ran a text-based mobile advertising campaign to promote its new SUV. Mobile marketing agency Optism said the campaign had a 30% response rate and that 90% of respondents asked for more information. Optism quoted a Volkswagen representative as saying:

In our business, timing is critical. With Optism and Tigo Ads, we know we’re reaching people who are interested in our ads, and we can be confident they are reading our messages because mobile messaging is so reliable.

Optism says that while text-based advertising can be effective, getting permission from consumers is critical to success.

Mobile advertising is developing rapidly and one of the lessons of the digital transition is that news businesses need to make sure that they are not left behind, either in reaching mobile audiences or generating revenue to support journalism from mobile advertising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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