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.

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.

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

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

Drone journalism: Potential and practicalities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Paton’s clarion call for digital transformation

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

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

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

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

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

Hackathons: Rapid innovation

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

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

GEN 2013 trends

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

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

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

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.

Good responsive design means customers will not be repelled by a cranky mobile site; instead, they will spend more time on the site and be more likely to read its content. Also, done properly, responsive design saves on development costs by eliminating the need to design separate sites for specific devices. In addition, using a single URL improves site analytics and SEO performance, and sites can easily be resized for new viewing formats.

Despite this endorsement, some disagree – the jury is still out when it comes to whether a news outlet should create separate mobile websites, or a single responsive design site. In fact, as Americans approach the Presidential elections, each of the two incumbents have chosen different approaches to their mobile strategies, which provide a good illustration of their strengths and weaknesses – President Obama’s website uses responsive design whereas Mitt Romney has a separate mobile site.

Brad Frost compares their websites using mobile designer Kristofer Layton‘s hierarchy of mobile needs which describes, in increasing importance, what a website should provide to its users.

Frost points out that using responsive design allows you to provide the same content more easily. In this case, Romney’s mobile website has far less information than the desktop version of his site.

Frost also points out that redirection to a mobile site sometimes gets missed, especially at lower levels of the site, which can cause problems with social sharing. A desktop user may end up clicking a link to the mobile version of the story, and vice versa.

On the other hand, Obama’s responsive design website has some great features but it attempts to do some fancy work with navigation menus, which unfortunately don’t end up loading on all sites. Romney’s menu may be simple in design, but it’s efficient for the user, and it works. Likewise, one must be careful when working with long articles or supplementary information with responsive design. In Obama’s case, some pages have too much content which requires scrolling down a long way.

Lastly, performance is an important point, especially in countries where mobile internet connections are not consistently fast or people pay based on data usage. Responsive design has a poor history when it comes to performance. According to the CTO of blaze.io, Guy Podjarny, only 3% of the small-screen versions of websites have significantly better performance than their large-screen counterparts. If you have a mobile website, Mobitest allows you to test its performance.

Responsive Design for News Sites

The Boston Globe is heralded as one of the (recent) pioneering responsive design websites for its premium content site.  Although it’s easy to point to examples of big newspapers with large budgets such as The Boston Globe doing technically innovative work, earlier this spring, a small liberal-arts college in the US produced a responsive design version of its student paper.  Two college students working on the Berkeley Beacon decided to use the Boston Globe example to create its own low-cost responsive design site.  It is focused very much on looking like a slick print article with each article just having a resizing photo and the article text.

One challenge they have is that at the moment, there are no ads on the mobile view of their site. When they do put ads on, it will involve some careful design to ensure it does not clutter their minimalist layout. The paper’s Editor-in-Chief said: “I don’t want to disrupt the reader experience just to be generating a lot of money…Maybe once our traffic levels are really, really steady and people are just automatically going there all the time, we might do more and more ads.”  Another student paper, the Daily Californian serving UC Berkeley and the surrounding area, also made the switch to responsive design when they overhauled their website using a WordPress CMS.

If you’d like to dive deeper into how to approach responsive design – down to the details – check out this analysis by the makers of the Boston Globe’s site.  It skims over the why and goes straight into the how, including such details as which design software they decided to use (InDesign), and why they decided to start their design at 960 px and use that as a base when designing for the smaller screens.

Ultimately, it is important to remember that, responsive design or not, you have to cater to your growing mobile audience and their needs.  The US Presidential example demonstrates that responsive design does not automatically equal a better user experience if you don’t first think carefully about what your user is looking for.

An interesting practical read on how to approach a responsive design website and, to some extent, a mobile website in general, is an article by Ste Everington, lead designer of BBC TV’s webpage. He described in detail the BBC’s thought process and design process in designing their new website.  A couple of takeaways from Everington, that apply to a responsive design site or even a regular mobile device site are to:

• Define the different groups of tablet sizes that you need to design for.
• Understand your user’s journey (through metrics or user surveys).  You likely have two groups of users: “I know what I want”, and “I don’t know what I want”. Design a site that works for both of those groups so it is both easy to navigate and easy to browse.

Whether you use CMS themes and plugins or develop a custom site, and whether you use responsive design or create a mobile site, the time is approaching that no website can ignore its mobile-audience no matter what region of the world you may be in.

Now, five years after the launch of the iPhone, the promise of mobile web seems to have been realised. Credit partially goes to Steve Jobs at Apple, who believed that people expected the same kind of web experience on their smartphone as they had on their computers, but it should also go to advances in fundamental web technologies. HTML5, the latest version of the underlying code that creates web pages, makes it far easier to create web content for a myriad of devices. Now, open-source web browser maker Mozilla, the organisation behind Firefox, is launching not just a new mobile browser but an entire mobile operating system based on HTML5.

Attempts at open mobile platforms have been stymied in the past by a lack of industry backing, but with the high-profile of Firefox and also a desire by phone carriers to wrest power back from Google and Apple, major industry players are showing their support.  According to technology site The Register, web tools maker Adobe, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm and carriers Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, US-based Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telenor are all backing this new competitor in the smartphone OS market. Chinese handset makers ZTE and TCL Communications Technology will start producing handsets using Firefox OS, and Telefonica is expected to start selling handsets using this OS in Brazil next year. Information Week, on the other hand, is skeptical about the level of support from other carriers until they too agree to begin shipping handsets with Firefox’s mobile operating system.

What it means for consumers

For the average mobile user, Firefox OS promises smartphone features on handsets that will cost much less than smartphones currently on the market, according to Nancy Messieh at technology site The Next Web. Smartphones only overtook lower cost and less capable handsets in the US in March of this year. These low-cost handsets, often referred to as feature phones in the industry, still dominate in most emerging markets. They are also becoming more and more capable, so that in many cases, feature phones would be indistinguishable to smartphones for most users. Smartphones still only accounted for slightly more than a quarter of all mobile phones, according to global figures from VisionMobile. In Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, smartphones account for only about 20% of all handsets being sold.

Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE are flooding the market with low-cost smartphones based on Google’s Android OS, but even these “low-cost” smartphones are priced at around US$100. According to Reuters, without operator subsidies, Firefox phones could cost around $50. Bringing down the cost of devices that have smartphone features could open the smartphone revolution to millions of more customers.

What it means for publishers

While it’s no longer necessary to consider hundreds of mobile web browsers when developing a mobile website, current web technology still requires quite a bit of customisation for the myriad of digital platforms on the market. HTML5 promises to make it easier to write once and publish everywhere.  And with the launch of projects like Firefox OS, it builds momentum behind HTML5 as a standard for creating not only next-generation websites but also web applications. If you want to see some of the web applications available, Firefox will soon be opening their web app store, the Mozilla Marketplace, in conjunction with the launch of its mobile OS.

Firefox is not the only organisation throwing its support behind HTML5 as the platform of the future. Google has its own web-based operating system, Chrome OS, which also leverages the power of web-based apps and HTML5, and Microsoft has thrown its support behind HTML5 as well. Microsoft says that HTML5 will form part of the basis for apps in its upcoming flagship OS, Windows 8. Windows 8 is intended to work not only on desktops but also include many features for tablet-based computers, and the Metro interface for Windows 8 is taken from Microsoft’s mobile OS.

We are not yet in the glorious future where digital content can be written once and then be easily adapted for multiple digital platforms, but with HTML5 gaining such widespread adoption even before it is finalised, and new initiatives like Firefox OS gaining industry support and HTML5 web browsers being adding to smart TV platforms as well as mobile devices, publishers will find it much easier to distribute their digital content in the future.

Some of the predictions are pretty obvious such as continued growth of mobile money and banking, and consolidation of carriers in Africa’s hyper-competitive mobile industry. Some trends are already happening just two years after the predictions, such as the availability of inexpensive Android-based smartphones. Low-cost Android handsets from Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, Google’s Motorola and Korean mobile phone star Samsung among others are expected to capture 80% the market in China, India and Africa.

Some of the more interesting predictions:
• John Wesonga of Mobile Monday Kenya predicted that cheaper access to the internet will translate “into more people in Africa using the internet to push rather than just pull content”, to create rather than just consume content.
• Marlon Parker, CEO of JamiiX, predicted that broadcast media will be primarily mobile “using location, social graphs, etc. to target content”.
• Steve Mutinda, founder of Shimba Technologies, said that Africa had yet to “fully capitalize on its local content”. He added: “(r)educed data costs on mobile will see mobile web grow exponentially as it will be the initial point of discovery and consumption of online content.”

With African tech entrepreneurs unanimous in forecasting continued rapid growth in the sector – and with just two years’ hindsight, many of the predictions already seem too cautious – the lesson for the news business is clear: ignore mobile at your peril. Africa is likely to skip computer-focused internet and go straight to mobile, which means African news groups need to think about mobile now because that is where their audience already is – whether it’s on the web or simply using SMS. A lot has changed in just the two years since these predictions were made, and in many ways 2012 is already starting to look a lot like the 2020 that these mobile savvy entrepreneurs envisioned.

Total users and engagement

125 billion friendships
2 billion likes per day
1 billion comments posted per day
901 million monthly active users
526 million daily active users
488 million monthly active mobile users
302 million photos uploaded each day

I’d flag up the number of total monthly active mobile users in this group, 488m. That’s a huge number, and moreover, this isn’t just people in North America and Europe on their flashy smartphones, this is also people in Africa, Latin America and Asia using Facebook’s mobile optimised site Zero for free with mobile phone carriers that have partnered with the social network.

User penetration (percentage of internet users who use Facebook)

85% Chile, Turkey and Venezuela
60% India, the United Kingdom and the United States
30%-40% Brazil and Germany
20% Japan, Russia and South Korea
0% China

Of course, Facebook’s financial report left out Asian countries including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines where the vast majority of internet users use Facebook and other social networking services.

Facebook isn’t the only social network and in some countries, most notably Russia, it is dwarfed by domestic competitors such as vKontakte. However, in many countries, Facebook ranks as the first or second most popular site.

With so many people sharing content with friends, Facebook can help bring new readers, viewers and listeners to the news and information you’re creating.