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”]

I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might add to that

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

An article in The Wall Street Journal claims that desktop usage isn’t decreasing, as is often claimed. Jack Marshall explains that while the share of the market enjoyed by mobile internet access is growing fast, the total time spent online from desktops isn’t falling and might even be increasing.

However, Thad McIlroy on the Future of Publishing blog says this interpretation is misleading. The data The Wall Street Journal bases its findings on “encompasses all desktop computer usage, the majority of which relates to the Microsoft and Adobe application suites as well as email”.

“The real story is not that the PC usage is up, but that simultaneous device use — usually called ‘multi-platform’ — has changed the device landscape.” McIlroy says that data from another comScore report, The U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2015, shows that the number of people only using desktops to access the internet is declining sharply in all age groups, even the 55+ segment, and that across all ages the amount of mobile-only users is also growing fast.

This interpretation of the data – that mobile is growing at the expense of desktop – seems to be backed up by Google, which recently confirmed that it’s now serving more Google searches on smartphones than desktops in 10 counties, including the US and Japan. To respond to changing demands, Google is “rolling out new, smartphone-optimized ad formats that give users more reason to tap than its traditional AdWords. These include picture-heavy automobile ads that show users a gallery of their dream ride before directing them to dealerships, and hotel ads that sandwich together availability, prices, user reviews, and pictures into a compact mobile format.”

However, while the amount of mobile access might be outstripping desktop, an Outbrain study in the Asia-Pacific region shows that people consuming content on desktop are much more likely to engage with content compared to mobile, especially when it comes to paid content, reports Trak.in.

“In fact, if we compare desktop vs mobile, then engagement level falls drastically to 36% in Australia; and 9% in India. This means that if an Indian accesses a piece of content on mobile, then there is 9% less chance of his engagement compared to accessing content on desktop. Engagement here means sharing, commenting, liking the post or following the author/publication on social media.”

Of course mobile and desktop are both heavily used to access email. Yesware Enterprise examined more than 14 million messages sent by its users earlier this year to produce a detailed pattern of when and on what device people use to read their emails. This slideshow gives an insight into their findings.

According to Brady, it’s less about what you cover in your community and more about how you cover it that matters. Digital media need to build relationships with their audience and understand the issues that are important to them, then provide them with information they need to take decisions about their lives. It’s not about telling people how to think or what to do, but about giving them the tools they need to make their communities better in whatever way they choose. Future digital audiences won’t be satisfied with just being told what has happened and don’t want a diet of pure “accountability journalism” – “it’s the relationship with the local reader that will determine success or failure”.

News organisations should also remember that they are no longer the only voice in their community and use it to their advantage. Social media like Twitter and Facebook understand that people want other information sources and link out to other sites, and this makes them more attractive, not less. “How many of the top 100 papers in the country actively link to other media or citizen sites in their communities? Not many.”

As for what makes a successful online news operation, Brady doesn’t pretend that there’s a simple formula and doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge. It’s undeniable that audiences and revenues are moving away from legacy – all you can do is make sure you’re built for a digital future: find newsroom and sales staff who understand digital and reward them for it.

One thing that successful digital news sites do have in common is “a willingness to try something new, whether it’s a laser focus on a specific community, an interesting membership model or a major events business. Honestly, I don’t know that the traditional model of hiring a lot of reporters and just writing stories will ever work for a local digital news site.”

Mobile is now the most important platform to watch. “The move to mobile is happening at lightning speed, and there’s no sign it’ll slow down. And, to me, the key to mobile for local sites will be location.” Local media have to take advantage of the fact that they know exactly where their users are and what they care about – this is critical for providing the best coverage and the most relevant advertising.

He told The Drum that buzzwords like ‘mobile-first’ have become ‘meaningless’: “If you think about mobile first you are thinking of a specific-point solution, which is only one way of dealing with your audience, and if you start to think about it too much you forget about the other pieces.”

Instead of obsessing about specific platforms, the FT follows a ‘universal publishing’ strategy, making content available across the multiplatform landscape.

This would be quite a calamity, as what has truly hampered news publishers’ ability to innovate and reposition is not so much the need to restructure their business model for the digital era but, rather, the fact that this era is forcing on key industry players ever shorter cycles of disruption.

Take the printed press. It had decades to accustom itself to a multi-channel TV media environment and then a dozen years or so to adjust to the desktop internet, whereas today it barely has a year or two to be fully ready for the ‘mobile internet’ – let alone futuristic- sounding concepts like the gradually emerging ‘Internet of Things’.

In the past, content providers from less mature markets (from, say, the European periphery or Latin America) could take heart from the fact that they could learn from the successes and errors of pioneers, as publishers in the USA or the larger European markets would inevitably be – it is indeed a rare privilege to have constantly, through peer experience, a crystal ball at one’s disposal. But probably not this time: as ‘second tier’ digital economies go through a leapfrogging process, with swathes of new users coming online directly via mobile (having never gone through the, possibly intermediary, stage of the desktop or laptop), most news providers have to start with a slate that is unnervingly clean.

Still, sceptics of the mobile revolution abound – not so much with regards to the medium’s usage proliferation but its potential for advertising sales.  Indeed, with the percentage of mobile visitors to news sites rising inexorably – a current estimate would put it at an average of one in three – it is hard to dispute the prognosis that, in the near future, close to half (or more) of website visitors will be accessing content and services through a smartphone. Which means that publishers will need to find a coherent and sustainable strategy for monetizing the mobile half of their audience – and this is where things get complicated.

Any monetization strategy will rest on one fundamental parameter: the size and form of mobile advertising.  Unfortunately for publishers, this remains a major question mark.  Most pundits predict that the ‘time spent/dollars spent’ gap will narrow, as it did for the desktop internet over the last ten years – i.e., the fact that users spend more than 10% of their media consumption time on mobile devices yet only 1% or so of ad revenue is directed at this channel is unsustainable and will converge, possibly quite rapidly. Though there have been dissenting voices claiming that mobile will never be a branding medium (and absorb those big budgets) and so never become a leading marketing solution, the consensus – as outlined recently by eMarketer – is that mobile advertising will grow at an annual rate of 50% over the next two years, while desktop ad spending will remain broadly stable. Indeed, in 2017 mobile advertising is predicted to overtake desktop spending.

In theory, this would be welcome news for news providers worldwide as it highlights the key growth area while also underlining the potential weight of the different components; again, eMarketer considers video to be the strongest category, with rich media and native advertising a close second. However, a closer look at the current state of the mobile market can only be a cause of major concern: Google, Facebook and Twitter are absolutely dominant, leaving less than 20% of budgets to be contested by other providers. In short, publishers will struggle to gain what, in the end, may prove to be petty cash.  Indeed, in many ways the writing’s on the wall: mobile banner advertising tends to command lower CPMs and, even worse, is often sold on a CPC basis; ad networks often represent news brands, yet treat this inventory in a purely quantitative rather than qualitative manner. And while the most advanced digital markets count on the emergence of video ads and better creative (such as the IAB’s “mobile rising stars”) to reclaim the branding promise and increase value – and thus price – to the advertiser, at present the picture remains fairly grim.

Does that mean that charging users for content and services will be a sustainable strategy for most news providers? Probably not. Unless a publisher can provide truly unique content (if, for instance, it is the only news provider in the local community or offers some ultra-niche thematic content), it’s clear that the ‘drift to free’ that dominated the desktop web for years is replicated in the mobile environment. This is not to say that all mobile content and services will be free – rather, paid content is going to be more the exception than the rule and it is going to represent only a fraction of overall revenues for publishers. Indeed, as is the case already today with leading news brands, paid content on mobile is going to be part of a broader ‘one subscription’ (probably freemium) scheme that encompasses print, desktop, mobile and tablet.

So, if mobile advertising is mainly going to the global giants and, in addition, user revenues are not enough to sustain a quality news provider, what strategy can improve in the near term a news publisher’s position, especially those not at the very forefront of the mobile transformation? Possibly one that rests on three fundamental pillars, namely:

• A content mix that does not replicate the entire gamut of print or web content but that recognizes the particularities of the platform and the way it is consumed, i.e. during commute times or as a ‘snacking’ medium. This translates to a tailored product with an emphasis on the (latest) news stream – including (even bare bones) live coverage of events, particularly sport, as well as practical, often ‘static’, location-based information (e.g. where is the nearest XYZ?).  Based on examples of major news brands, two extra points need to be borne in mind. First, it may at first appear counter-intuitive given screen size, but short-form video content also scores very highly in user preferences, though its monetization is often problematic as pre-roll ads need to be edited down to be proportionate with, say, a 30-second clip. Second, for publishers active in app publishing, push notifications appear to be a key element in user satisfaction, leading to better affinity metrics and repeat visits – thus either to greater advertising inventory or improved chances to charge for some content or service.
• A marketing strategy that is heavily skewed towards social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. This does not refer to advertising solutions that these two platforms offer, but to an active posting/tweeting policy. Simply put: research from all regions finds that Facebook and/or Twitter are the new ‘home pages’, also for news, particularly for younger demographic groups. What this new form of aggregation means for the news industry is that publishers seeking to build their mobile audiences should be present at the news streams/feeds of their fans and followers in order to maximize referral traffic. They should also fine tune their specific editorial policies to each platform’s profile and consumption patterns. As things stand, it appears that Twitter is used for ‘harder’ news and Facebook for ‘softer’, and that Twitter works best on weekdays and Facebook on weekends.  Finally, it should come as no surprise that multimedia material, especially video, performs much better than straight text/photo articles.
• A commercial approach that does not rest on ineffective mini-banners, often sold through ad networks which means that revenues are only a fraction of a CPM that is already low, but relies on two principal elements. First, a drive for sponsorships, particularly for native apps, possibly as part of a cross-media deal, that gives maximum visibility to one partner through intrusive creative such as launch ads or interstitials – making a brand ‘co-own’ mobile content is one of the few ways to deliver value and raise noteworthy revenue, at least in less mature digital markets. Second, and more importantly in the medium term, a native advertising offering – with clear rules in terms of layout/notification, pricing and frequency – whereby branded content appearing in the publisher’s news stream is likely to yield positive results. It is hardly a coincidence that Facebook and Twitter’s meteoric rise has rested on varying forms of native advertising.

Will such an approach resolve all questions related to mobile strategy? Does it address all opportunities and threats portable devices pose to digital news publishing? Certainly not. However, it does provide content providers with a solid and scalable first step that does not require a massive investment in capital, human resources or technology in both a challenging macroeconomic environment and an uncertain emerging media ecosystem.

Finally, it brings further to the fore publishers’ key asset: news. Either as a main thrust of mobile content or as a critical ‘social promotion’ tool or as a way to present (clearly labelled) advertising, it is refreshing and encouraging to see that the newest of digital media may rely anew on our industry’s timeless core mission.

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.