“Events are a proven way for media companies to diversify revenue that, if done right, are significantly harder to disrupt than other revenue models,” writes Kevin Loker of the American Press Institute, which has produced a detailed study of the do’s and don’ts of media events hosting. “They deepen connections with audiences and sponsors. They reinforce multiple values of a publishing brand. And they can grow.”

Last year, the non-profit Texas Tribune in the US generated 20% of its revenues from running events, with several others earning more than 10% from conferences, seminars and community events.

Events fall broadly into two categories: journalism events, such as debates, panels and other news-making opportunities; and community events — exhibitions, contests and non-journalism functions. Both can be closely aligned with brand positioning, as well as being potential money-making activities.

The study, which focused on small- and medium-sized publications, is part of API’s Strategy Studies, examinations of how publishers can build new revenue models.

API identified these key lessons:

• Use assets you already have: Build on your strengths of organising information, accessing thought-leaders and as a community platform.
• Leverage existing audiences and grow new ones: Use these principles to define event types and subjects.
• Identify and hold off competition: Event-hosting can help reinforce your brand position.
• Take creative approaches: Identify new partners and forge new relationships.
• Weigh the value of different pricing strategies: Event sponsorships are usually more lucrative than audience fees.
• Go all-in with promotions: Launch events wholeheartedly – promotion is vital.

API has created a simple worksheet to help you work out what events’ strategy would work for your business.

The two charts above may seem contradictory. Yes, global online ad expenditure has multiplied tenfold since 2004. Yes, digital spend will surpass the printed press worldwide (in many countries, it already has) in 2015. But despite this impressive turnaround, the newspaper industry still gets most of its rapidly diminishing advertising revenues from print, not from digital. Indeed, many traditional news brands have reached huge audiences online but just a tiny amount of the global digital ad revenue cake. Why is that? Just a lack of vision, or is it an unfinished digital transformation?

The advertising paradox

The slow transformation to digital has indeed played a role for many traditional media, but unfortunately it is not the main factor behind this paradox. The most important cause is competition and this cannot be fixed. Media have moved from a world where ad revenues were shared among a very small bunch of papers, TV and radio stations in each country to a world of limitless competitors, from the huge new arrivals like Google or Facebook to the myriad bloggers. It’s almost a perfect market, awash with inventory, that is now getting even more ‘perfect’ with the development of programmatic buying, where machines (not fallible or emotional humans) match supply and demand in real time.

The laws of economics are ruthless. With an increase in competition/supply comes, inevitably, a decline in prices: so digital advertising has always suffered and will always suffer downward pricing pressure. This is why news outlets all over the world are searching with renewed passion for complementary revenue lines. And the main focus is now on ‘user generated revenues’, either traditional revenues based on editorial content or revenues based on new services.

Revisiting ‘editorial revenues’

Only five years ago, almost every news outlet in the world was banking on an open-web-pure-advertising-revenue model. But the global economic downturn and the low prices of digital advertising described above convinced many of the dangers of ‘single crop farming’ in digital. Only two international business brands – the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times- were previously pursuing a subscription-based model, based on the exclusivity of their contents and the predominance of companies among their customers: WSJ as early as 1997 and the Financial Times 10 years later. But it was only in 2011 that a major general news property, the New York Times, dared to put its contents behind a paywall.

Three years later, the NYT has grown to 760.000 digital subscribers, an impressive number that has encouraged many to follow suit, even if The NYT’s journalism and singularity are difficult to match. Just in the US, there are already 450 national, regional and local news outlets (out of 1,380) that have introduced a digital subscription model according to the Pew Research Center. Are the models all the same?

No. Indeed, the discussion around ‘paid content’ and its presumed nemesis the ‘open web’ became so heated (creating two quasi-religious factions), that no one wants to talk about ‘paywalls’ any more. The forbidden word, as in Harry Potter’s ‘Voldemort’, is now replaced by ‘membership’, ‘club’, or anything else without ‘pay’ in it. And in most cases the offer does go beyond a pure payment for contents, offering users access to extra services, apps or discounts, and – of course – a special engagement with their favorite news brand. In any case, all offers include one or many of the following features:

• Hard paywall

It’s the oldest and usually simplest mechanism tried by publishers online. Users can only visit the homepage for free (sometimes also the sections’ homepages and/or ‘soft’ contents like photo-galleries), while most of the content online is reserved for subscribers. This was the system used by the Wall Street Journal in 1997 (now, fine-tuned) and by some general news big brands around the world at the turn of the 21^st Century, like El País in Spain in 2002. But most of them reverted to open websites after a disastrous drop in audience and very limited digital subscriptions. Surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch announced and put in place a hard paywall at The Times of UK as late as 2010. Last year, The Times and The Sunday Times totaled 130,000 digital subscribers, with a massive fall in online traffic (also affecting the paper’s audience) of more than 60% and a similar drop in digital advertising revenues.

• Soft paywall/Metered paywall

Introduced in 2007 by the Financial Times and popularized by The New York Times in 2011, this scheme tries to ‘square the circle’ of subscriptions and advertising revenues. The idea is to design a paywall that is porous enough to allow a very big number of free visits (and, therefore, a large enough digital advertising inventory), but not too much so as to discourage subscriptions.  The logic behind the system is the fact that loyal and very active readers are more willing to pay than casual users – though the latter massively outnumber the former. So the system relies on a ‘meter’ counting the number of times that a user visits the site and, from a set number of visits per month, the paywall pops up asking the user to log in or subscribe.

The Financial Times launched its paywall with a limit of 10 visits per month, excluding the homepage that is always open. Four years later, The New York Times took a much more cautious approach, because it had a much larger audience and advertising revenues to loose, and because the ‘exclusivity’ of a general news outlet is always more questionable than that of a financial one. So, the Times opened the limit to 20 free visits per month, excluding homepages and photogalleries which are always open. And to allow the virality of the internet to continue its magic (the main ‘collateral damage’ of paywalls), the NYT decided to keep access open to any visit coming from search engines and social networks.

All in all, this metered paywall only reduced the number of online visits by 5% and page views by 10% when it was launched. And to the surprise of many who thought this was too open an approach,  the number of digital subscriptions grew to the current 760,000. In the meantime, the NYT has reduced the number of free visits per month to 10 but, on the other hand, has completely opened access to video, whose ads are especially lucrative, and to some areas of content outside the US, where the rate of loyal users is lower. Indeed, the key to ‘metered paywalls’ is precisely this: they give publishers the ability to tweak the system on-the-go, depending on usage results and the need for inventories.

Ever since the NYT launch, hundreds of news outlets worldwide have introduced a metered paywall, including titles as different as The Telegraph in the UK, Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil, The Onion in the US and El Mundo in Spain. Most are very recent developments, so we do not have meaningful numbers yet, but it will be interesting to see whether they are able to reach similar conversion rates to such an iconic brand as the NYT and whether they also manage to keep advertising revenues almost untouched.

• Freemium model

Freemium models are almost as old as the basic paywall. Their logic is straightforward: you cannot charge users for the same contents you were offering for free just before. So the basis is to keep the existing web open, while creating separate contents and/or products only for subscribers; i.e. a Free area + a Premium area. Indeed, this is a very typical model for software or mobile apps, which provide a basic service free of charge and a paid premium for accessing advanced features.

Many media outlets, old and new, have tried this model, including the New York Times previous ‘Select’ offer, Le Monde, Slate (very recently) and even the champions of the open web, The Guardian, with its premium tablet and mobile apps only for subscribers. But many ditched this approach after trying it out because it didn’t trigger a large number of subscribers (most users are fine with the free part) and because it usually involves an extra effort/cost from the newsroom or the publisher to create additional content/services for the premium area.

• Membership

Membership usually brings a set of advantages to the subscriber in addition to the editorial contents of the publication – such as free or discounted prices for conferences, exhibitions, theatre and concerts; or special events with the newsroom, etc.) to make him/her feel like they are a member of a ‘club’. As noted above, most paid offers from publishers – be they paywalls, freemium models or some other form – are also marketed as memberships. The emotional and ideological link with the news brand is indeed one of the – if not the only – most important factors for readers entering a paying scheme. Importantly, the New York Times realized recently that users respond better to a marketing campaign focused on the survival of the quality journalism they represent, than to other campaigns focused on the many features and advantages of their offer.

New media properties also use this emotional link with their readers/users as a key to their survival. New brands all over the world are being launched thanks to crowd-funding campaigns among their potential readers: people willing to pay to enjoy the type of journalism the brand promised. And many of them are inviting these readers to become subscribers or ‘members’ as a way to avoid a heavy reliance on advertisers – especially dangerous for small companies – and to support independent journalism. As the new Dutch kid on the block, ‘De Correspondent’ (famous for raising more than 1 million Euro of crowd-funding in eight days) put it: “De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, but our business model focuses on selling content to readers, rather than selling readers to advertisers”.

Beyond publishing

‘Diversification’ is the magic word for many media groups searching desperately for new sources of revenue in addition to advertising and to the – always challenging – paid content. The logic behind this model is: if I have a trusted brand and X hundred thousand – or even million – users visiting my website every day, I may be able to offer them other services or products endorsed by my brand. This way, publishers can leverage their own media power to build new businesses more or less connected to the editorial, instead of always relinquishing this to advertisers.

Given the difficulties of moving from the publishers’ trade to the service providers’ or retailers’ one, media groups are typically partnering with specialists or even buying their way into these new businesses. The two most widespread diversifications are online services and e-commerce.

• Services

Many publishers worldwide have been offering ‘collateral’ online services to their readers for more than a decade. Indeed, some of these services – such as classifieds – were a regular and very lucrative offer on print papers, and it was a natural transition to exploit them online too. The main difference between media players has been the size of their stake in this market, and their speed to approach it. While some news outlets have been particularly slow and cautious to enter the online business (for fear of harming their declining print product), others have been fast and assertive. In markets where supply of these services is mature, the late entrants are struggling to earn decent incomes from their affiliations with big players, but those who got in early are earning very significant revenues from their own fully-fledged operations. In some cases, much more than their revenues from the editorial business.

The Nordic champion Schibsted and the German group Axel Springer have been the most bullish in this diversification, and not surprisingly they are also the two European players with strongest digital revenues. Schibsted began as early as 1999 to position itself very aggressively in the online classifieds business in Norway, then bought start-ups in Sweden, France and Spain that are now blockbusters in their respective markets. Today they are shopping for a second round of personal finance services websites all over Europe to replicate the feat.

Springer initiated its diversification a little bit later, 2005, buying startups also in classifieds, affiliate marketing, price-comparison and women’s communities. In 2012, the German group was already earning more revenue from its digital operations than its print publications (that includes the 3 million daily copies of Bild!). A little bit further behind, the Guardian Media Group also relies on its dating and jobs classifieds online services for more than half of its digital revenues, and has recently sold part of the family silver – its 50.1% stake in Autotrader – for more than £600 million to finance its money-losing editorial operations. Last year, Autotrader made £252m in revenues and £32m in pre-tax profits.

• E-commerce

“Retailers have been very good at being publishers for a long time, it’s time for publishers to be good retailers,” the commercial director of the Daily Mail Group, Marcus Rich, said last year. DMG consumer media division is undoubtedly pushing e-commerce as a key strategy for the Daily Mail brand extension; they already make £5 million in direct cruise sales alone. Pure players like Gawker Media are also keen to run this race and, according to its founder Denton Memo, will make around 10% of their digital revenues from E-comm this year. Even media power houses like the Italian RCS-Corriere della Sera are swiftly moving from taking their first steps in e-commerce (selling ‘extended editorial content’ such as books or movies) to the second step (partnering with retailers around editorial topics such as travel or beauty) and even third steps (integrating pure e-commerce offers in the editorial content), according to RCS’s CDO, Alceo Rapagna.

But most publishers are still in the early infancy of an e-commerce strategy, even if they consider it important.  According to a Forrester Consulting survey of 106 media companies in December 2012, more than 70% thought that having an online store was important, and about the same number said that having a separate deals site was important too. Indeed these two options were ranked third and fourth for driving audience and revenue only after an ‘Advanced website functionality’ and ‘More online advertisers’. But 30% of them added that they didn’t have the budget for adding real e-commerce. Are we in Year One of e-comm for publishers, just as 2000 was for services?

The ad is a sign of the times for Nepal where owning a mobile phone has become common throughout the country, even on the slopes of Mt.  Everest.  The Nepal Telecommunications Authority reports that in August 2013 mobile phone penetration reached 72% of the population.  Mobile “smart phones” have also contributed to the rapid increase in Internet penetration in Nepal, growing from 19% in 2012 to almost 27% in August of 2013.

Newspaper publishers in Nepal have begun to experience the early stages of their audience’s shifting media habits.  Consequently, Nepal’s Centre for Investigative Journalism hosted “Doing Digital” a seminar for publishing executives trying to understand the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital transition.  MDIF presented “Journalism in the Digital World” a summary of the opportunities and the challenges presented by readers, listeners and viewers all merging to become the digital audience.  The digital transition is clearly a tale of the best of days and the worst of days, the good and the bad.

For publishers, the best of days is epitomized by the wealth of new tools and techniques.  Digital has made online story-telling a new narrative form combining the use of text narrative, audio, video, data and infographics.  Examples discussed included the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning “Snowfall” as well as other examples from around the region.  The discussion highlighted two key points.  First, for these multimedia stories to be successful, journalism has to be combined with technology.  Second, the recognition that most publishers do not have the resources of the New York Times and that there are free or low cost tools like Timeline.js to help publishers tell multimedia stories.

Digital technology has also made data journalism a new opportunity for journalists and their audiences to find patterns and stories in the data.  Data journalism like Veja’s Rede de Escandalos provided tangible example of data journalism’s reporting power.   One of Brazil’s oldest news magazines, Veja used its own past reporting on scandals in Brazil to create a unique database of scandals, actors, government bodies involved in each scandal.

Finally, digital technology revolutionizes the way publishers, editors and reporters communicate with their audience.  Digital in many cases has turned audience communication into stories.  India’s website “I Paid A Bribe” website demonstrated how audience engagement and communication can create ongoing coverage of key themes, like corruption.

But publishers attending the seminar also focused on the business models needed to survive the transition. Unfortunately, the discussion of business models presented the challenge facing all digital publishers, where will online revenue come from.  The challenge is acute in countries like Nepal, where audience adoption of online has grown much faster than local advertisers’ transition to online.

During the seminar, MDIF discussed several examples of revenue streams that publishers should evaluate as they begin to actively publish online.  Since online advertising remains a very small revenue opportunity in Nepal, the discussion focused on enterprise and project social funding services, often called crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding services have expanded greatly with regional specialists, like Africa’s mobile fundraising platform M-changa or industry specialists like IndieVoices, which focuses on independent media and journalism projects. In addition to crowdfunding, syndication and content expense sharing partnerships were also discussed where two organizations partner to share the cost and potentially the revenue of a digital reporting project.  Finally, different subscription and paid content models were presented.  Though many of the Nepali publishers believed that the technology to easily collect revenue from their online audience was not yet available in Nepal.

Nepali media and media in any region undergoing a rapid digital transition face both opportunities and challenges.  Digital reporting and story telling tools have created a whole ways of communicating a story.  But, these new tools require training, technology and infrastructure support.  None of these are free.  Revenues from advertisers typically lag the audience’s move to digital platforms, creating a gap in digital’s ability to generate revenue.  This leaves publishers who move online with the challenge of how to generate some new revenue to support these new requirements.  CIJ Nepal’s seminar for regional publishers created a foundation for an active discussion and experimentation with both the opportunities and challenges facing Nepal’s traditional print media.

Educating advertisers

It is one of the paradoxes of digital journalism that increasing the size of your audience doesn’t always result in higher income. Some of that disparity can be attributed to the fact that while advertisers want to shift their advertising budgets from offline media to online media, they also need to learn about the opportunities, Chia said. Educating advertisers about the possibilities of digital advertising is an important first step in building an effective and revenue-earning premium advertising strategy.

Educating advertisers starts with producing rate cards and media kits to fully introduce their site to advertisers. One of the key messages is that digital advertising is not a blind mass campaign, she says. Online advertising is about about measurability and being able to target specific audiences. She said:

You need to have a demographic breakdown (of the visitors to your site). That is the main product you can use to attract advertisers and convince advertisers to come and buy advertisement on your website.

To deliver better targeted and better performing digital advertising campaigns, publishers need to invest in technology that allows them to build a demographic profile of their audience. Malaysiakini has detailed information about the age, income and education of their audiences. They have information about the interests of their audience, such as whether they are into automobiles or online banking. All of this data, which is included in their media kits, provide essential demographic information to advertisers so they know who they can reach by partnering with the site.

In addition to printed media kits, Malaysiakini also has an advertising blog which provides further information about advertising packages and advertiser-focused events. These events and conferences are another way to educate advertisers and communicate to them the opportunities they have with digital advertising.

“We actually have a new media school. We discuss different topics, and we invite advertisers, agencies and advertising department staff,” she said. They sometimes charge for these conferences, particularly when they have high profile speakers who bring expertise in digital advertising campaign measurement, models and services. Some conferences are on very specific topics such as how to use measurement tools like Google Analytics.

Premium advertising strategies

One of the factors contributing to the challenge that news organisations have faced in earning advertising revenue from their digital audiences has been downward pressure on digital advertising rates. Many early stage news websites are reliant on advertising networks for their ad strategies, but falling rates over the past several years have made it difficult for news sites to earn enough revenue from digital advertising alone to cover their costs. Malaysiakini earns less than 10 percent of its advertising revenue from ad networks. Instead of relying on ad networks, they have developed premium advertising strategies based not just on the richness of the demographic data but also on providing new ad formats that appeal to advertisers.

Malaysiakini charges premium rates for premium placement on their site. “It is usually the top spot, and it has very high engagement and is very creative,” Chia says. Malaysiakini does not put ad network slots on the top of their pages because it would undermine their efforts to charge higher rates for those slots.

Premium buy advertising is sold by their own in-house sales team, and the premium pricing is for advanced campaigns. Companies allocate a lot of money to premium campaigns, she said. This is where the demographic data of their audience is key in convincing advertisers to pay more, not just for premium placement but also to reach specific audiences.

Chia says that you also need to have flexible site designs to make sure that audiences don’t suffer from “ad blindness”. Ad blindness occurs when publishers have fixed spots and formats for their advertising. After a while, audiences simply learn to ignore these areas of the site.

Be nimble

News publishers need more than just flexible designs. They also need to be nimble to keep pace with the rapid changes in digital advertising. Real-time bidding is coming to markets like Malaysia. As we’ve written about before, real-time bidding, also known as programmatic or algorithmic buying, uses site visitor data to buy, sell and display highly targeted advertising. Publishers are concerned that real-time bidding, or RTB, will put further downward pressure on advertising rates.

“RTB is one type of ad network,” Chia said, adding, “your ad will only appear to your target audience. … (RTB) is not a blind network but a highly targeted network.”

She gave the example of two computer companies, Acer and Toshiba, trying to sell their laptops. They will enter their bid price, and Malaysiakini will enter their floor price, the minimum price they will sell their advertising for. If the companies bid over the floor price, and if the target demographic visits the site, their ad will appear.

There are concerns that RTB will affect their premium ad strategy, but in this industry, when everyone launches a new technology, “we cannot escape from the new landscape,” she said. “We need to be part of it.”

News start-ups covering specific niches such as technology or politics are finding the most commercial success in using events, and general interest news groups are using events build audience and increase audience loyalty, which has also had a positive impact on revenue. In fact, some news groups have even regretted not pursuing events as a possible revenue stream, which was part of a larger lack of business focus at launch, Batsell said.

“A lot of news start-ups tend to come from very idealistic roots, from journalists who haven’t had much business training, and they feel like if they go out and do great watchdog journalist that it will pay for itself,” he said, adding, “That is not always the case.”

His research on events, which has been released in a peer-reviewed paper and will be included in an upcoming book, explores how to decide whether an events strategy is right for you and how to develop that strategy.

In a presentation (see at the end of the article) at the International Symposium of Online Journalism in April, Batsell summarised the best practices he identified in 100 interviews with more than 20 news organisations during his research.

• Designate an event planner.
• Seek out sponsors to make money.
• Networking is a key attraction for attendees.
• Build support in the newsroom.
• Provide memorable experiences.
• Don’t expect a “golden goose”, a huge revenue generator, “but with an authentic approach, events can produce revenue and audience goodwill – preferably both.”

Evaluate the opportunity costs

“I think there is an opportunity in just about any market to put together some kind of event that is going to be meaningful to your community, to assemble your community in a way that only you can as a media outlet,” Batsell said.

Almost every community has key business or cultural groups that can form the basis of an event, and asking the right questions will help you evaluate the opportunity:

• Are there leading business communities in your area, such as agricultural, technology, transportation or the media, that you could create an event to serve?
• Could you provide these groups an opportunity network?
• Do you already have special sections covering these business areas?
• Does your community have key cultural dates during the year that you could create an event around?

Identifying the most promising business or cultural group or demographic will help you identify sponsorship opportunities and estimate potential income.

To be successful with events, Batsell suggests appointing a person who is responsible for the events business.   He said:

Ideally, if you have a director of events, that is great, but not everybody can afford that. If you’re a newsroom who has a social media manager or community relationships manager, that might be a place to go where someone can handle that on part-time basis.

In some instances, a journalist or journalists will be involved, to host and/or cover the event, and Batsell says that key in determining whether or not to pursue and events strategy is to determine the opportunity costs of the staff involved. The opportunity cost is the value of the best opportunity that you have to forego to carry out your event. In other words, does the value, both commercially and editorially, of hosting an event outweigh the staff time spent doing existing responsibilities or another activity?

Build sponsorships

While some event strategies are focused more on building audience numbers, loyalty or both, most events are developed with a specific commercial goal. To be successful commercially with events, sponsorships are essential because the bulk of revenue from events is generated by sponsorships, not ticket sales.

It is essential to identify clear sponsorship opportunities early, at the project evaluation stage. If you can’t locate enough sponsors, or if sponsors aren’t willing to pay enough to help you earn meaningful revenue from the event, you might want to either change the type of event or drop it entirely.

Batsell says that is why it is essential to have a member of staff whose job, either part-time or full-time, it is to develop the events.  He said:

You have to have a point person coordinating these events and seeking sponsorship for these events because that is really where these events make their money. It’s not through ticket sales. It’s through finding a good corporate sponsor who wants to put themselves in front of a demographically desirable audience that a news start-up can assemble.

Build newsroom support

After analysing your market and weighing the opportunity costs, Batsell found that news leaders need to make sure that they solicit the support of journalists and editors. He said:

There are still many journalists who were trained that journalism and business were separate entities that should never be mixed. Of journalists that I encountered at these events, some were very comfortable, more or less serving as emcees at these events and intertwining it with their journalism. Others were not so much. They saw it as a marketing exercise, and that is not what they signed up for when they went to journalism school.

If I were a news manager of newsroom where there were some sceptics, what I would point out to these journalists. “Hey, if this can generate more revenue that can save more jobs and pay for more journalism, aren’t we all for that?” I think some managers are better than others at communicating that goal and underscoring to your staff that being ambassadors for your brand and reaching out to your audience in person is part of the job these days. There may be some resistance to that in the DNA of journalists but you gotta get past that because it can help feed the journalism.

Successful examples

Batsell found the most financially successful examples were those news organisations or news start-ups that targeted a commercially desirable demographic and gave them opportunities to network.

Geekwire

In Seattle, he looked at Geekwire, a site that covers the tech start-up community. In 2012, they held nine events which made up 40 percent of their total revenue, boasting a 20 percent profit margin. The events include their tech start-up awards, which provide not only sponsorship but also a chance to generate coverage for the site. Other events are just for fun and act to bring their audience together socially, such as a ping pong tournament. The events are “designed to bring the local tech community together like no one else does”.

Geekwire was profitable during their first full year, but they fell just short of profitability in 2012. Co-founder Todd Bishop told Batsell the shortfall was partly due to costs they inherited from an event they took over from another organisation, which highlights some of the challenges of events. “Events are not a panacea,” Batsell said.

Texas Tribune

Texas Tribune is a non-profit news organisation in Texas that provides coverage of state government. They have a number of events including a regular series called Trib Live, in which Texas Tribune editors and journalists interview newsmakers in front of a live audience. In addition to streaming the video on the Texas Tribune site, it is also streamed on Facebook.

It is paid for by a small number of corporate sponsors. Batsell said:

It’s free to the public, but it often produces news content. Newsmakers say newsworthy things, and the insiders feel like they have to be there. There are 200 to 250 lobbyists with legislative staff at 730 in the morning at the Austin Club, all there convened by the Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune makes about 20 percent of its total revenue through events. As a non-profit, the Texas Tribune has a number of sources of revenue and financial support, including foundation support, member contributions and sponsorship. Last year, their revenues were higher than their costs.

Mount Pleasant Sun

The Sun is a newspaper in Mount Pleasant Michigan, and they held an Art Walk event in conjunction with the local arts council. They set up a satellite newsroom at the event and had staff working there for half the day over several days during the event. They didn’t have corporate sponsors, but they did have a special tabloid advertising section in conjunction with the event.

Batsell said events like this were difficult to analyse in terms of success. While it was good for the community, the commercial outcome was more difficult to assess, and Batsell said that in cases like this, being clear about the opportunity costs were key in helping news organisations decide whether this was the best use of their resources.

WBEZ radio Chicago

WBEZ is a public radio station in Chicago. Public broadcasting in the US is supported through a mix of listener contributions, corporate sponsorships and some public funding. Like most public radio stations in the US, WBEZ broadcasts a mix of news, discussion programmes, music and cultural programmes. They have an eclectic range of events, which they believe appeals to their listener members such as themed movie nights or Chicago chef competitions. WBEZ says that the goal of their events is to create a memorable experience that people associate with WBEZ.

While it was again difficult to quantify the success of these events, WBEZ did have some indication that events were playing a part in maintaining their member support. Over the past five years, the number of contributing members had gone down, but the amount of contribution per member had risen. Public radio stations solicit contributions and new members on-air in what they call pledge drives, and they have been able to reduce the number of pledge drive days by 30 percent despite the lower number of members. “Events are a piece of that, but it’s not the only part,” Batsell said.

While success might be difficult to quantify in every instance, Batsell believes that events can be a key alternative revenue stream for news organisations. He said, “I think that every news organisation needs to explore because the opportunities are there.”

Here is the presentation that Batsell gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism:

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?

This is all the more challenging in smaller, less digitally developed markets. To achieve sustainable digital growth, news organisations – particularly in these smaller markets – will have to creatively develop a range of revenue streams to start generating financial returns from their digital efforts.

BRICS driving digital development

One of the challenges for the digital transition for news organisations is that it is happening at different rates in different countries and can even vary widely within countries. Digital media and digital markets in the urban centres of major emerging economies may look very similar to North America and Western Europe, but in the early stages of the digital transition, digital opportunities look much different.

As Orlando Alvarez, Creative Director in Publicidad Comercial Lowe El Salvador, points out in another Knowledge Bridge article, in the smaller markets of Latin America where digital is not well developed, advertising agencies struggle to make digital campaigns pay as budgets are smaller and dedicated digital budgets are usually non-existent. This is what news organisations experience in smaller markets around the world.

Alvarez highlighted how the major economies in Latin America – Mexico, Argentina and Brazil – are driving digital growth in the region, and he highlighted how the digital market is very different in smaller economies.

The same could be said in Africa, where major economies such as South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria have digital market dynamics completely different to most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of international coverage of African digital development focuses on Kenya and South Africa. As a report into the contribution of the internet to the South African economy said, South Africa is thought to have the largest internet economy in Africa. But even in South Africa, the report found that internet advertising was fourth out of five categories in terms of contribution to the South African economy. Digital advertising only accounted for 1.5 bn Rand compared to 29.2 bn Rand for internet access.

In Asia, the massive economies of China and India flatter the digital advertising growth figures. In Russia, while internet growth is booming across regions, it still lags well behind St Petersburg and Moscow.

Creative solutions for sustainability

This requires news organisations in smaller, less digitally developed markets to think creatively about how they identify digital opportunities and how they grow their business to support those efforts.

Keep costs low – One simple answer to this conundrum is simply to keep costs low. One of the reasons why digital media is so disruptive is that distribution costs are so much lower than other media such as print. As we highlighted in our recent Digital Briefing looking at content-management systems, it’s always a good idea to focus on lightweight, flexible and low-cost solutions.

Develop niche products – As Alvarez said, most digital-only media outlets have survived by focusing on “very defined target audiences”. Niche products, whether digital or print, have a place in most markets, regardless of their stage of digital development and disruption.

As Michael Chalhoub, the founder of Gulf Sports Media said at the recent World Newspaper Congress, “Print is not dead, neither in our market nor in the world, it is just being redefined: there is a huge demand for niche products.” Sports, entertainment and lifestyle sites or special publications can be very popular not only with audiences but also advertisers.

Develop digital ‘tools’ – In developing markets with publicly available data, Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein recommends that news organisations think beyond stories and develop digital tools. While this might sound counterintuitive because most people assume that the costs would be too high to support in a developing digital market, Arenstein highlighted the StarHealth tool created by The Star in Kenya. The searchable database allows readers to see if a doctor has been convicted of malpractice. The project cost less than $500 and took one developer four days to build with the assistance of two journalists.

Arenstein told editors at the World Editors Forum, “These are tools that people start to use beyond news. They also make people come back to these sites, and this eventually helps to generate revenues.”

Develop digital services and other revenue streams – As we discussed at the MDIF Media Forum last December, one area where many MDIF clients and other news organisations around the world are finding success in building revenue streams is by offering a range of new services. These might be digital marketing, community management or website and app development. As Alvarez said, 95 percent of digital advertising revenue in the smaller markets of Latin America comes from work around community management and website and app design.

The benefit of offering such services for news organisations is that they can develop their digital capacity while offsetting costs by selling it more widely, domestically or even as it grows, internationally.

Events can also be another way to build revenue to support digital efforts if sufficient sponsorship can be attracted. MDIF client Malaysiakini hosts digital marketing events, some meant to educate and attract advertisers and other larger events to earn revenue from ticket sales and sponsorship.

In April, more than 20 representatives of Latin American and Spanish online journalism organisations gathered in Austin, USA, for the Iberoamerican Colloquium on Digital Media. The principal question on the table was: what is the path to sustainability?

As if finding the answer isn’t hard enough, the meeting revealed that some online news organizations have a very different understanding of what “sustainability’” means than others.

Many – such as La Nation from Argentina and O Estado from Brazil—  are part of larger legacy news organizations.

With most of their overheads and much of their content production covered by the parent company, relatively few ads cover many of the remaining costs. Additionally, a strong online presence serves as a way to promote the print brand.

But there is also a new generation of start-ups without financial backing from a parent company, outlets inspired by the same motivations that have fueled organizations like US national investigative reporting group ProPublica and the Texas Tribune – namely, a passion for investigative reporting, frustration with the limitations of the existing news media, and excitement over the new possibilities of digital platforms.

The participants in Austin demonstrated an impressive range of content, with strong offerings in human rights reporting, such as La Silla Vacia in Colombia, as well as scientific research such as Spain’s Materia and the arts, such as Argentina’s Revista Anfibia.

Many of the start-ups were fruits of a bold initiative by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) over a decade ago. OSF funded a number of young journalists around the world to create digital alternatives to the traditional news media in their countries, and several have made a mark. Plaza Publica in Guatemala and El Faro in El Salvador have added a range of perspectives that outlets in their societies previously lacked. During the recent controversial trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, Plaza Publica ran a detailed  interview with U.S. investigative journalist Allan Nairn, an eye-witness to war crimes committed in the Rios Montt era.  El Faro has run hard-hitting articles on Salvadoran gangs and drug trafficking.

Over their first decade, Plaza Publica, El Faro, and their counterparts concentrated on building out their reporting capacity and constructing their digital platforms, in the belief that philanthropy would provide their core funding. But now the ground is shifting. With grants for independent media becoming harder to find, the message is clear: philanthropic support may not go away entirely, but it’s an excellent time to seek new sources of revenue. The search for business models is on.

An informal survey of Austin’s field of journalism start-ups (many of them leaders in their markets) confirmed that none cover their operating costs without external sources of support. In the early days, strong hope was placed in digital advertising, but now there is no suggestion that digital advertising alone could support a serious journalism site. Digital advertising pays a minute fraction of print rates, and it is continuing to favour non-journalism web and mobile platforms. Furthermore,  advertisers are often scared off by the investigative content the Latin American initiatives were founded to report.

Many of the digital start-ups get around the limitations of international grants though accessing  other forms of direct and indirect support. Plaza Publica is based at the Universidad Rafael Landivar, a Jesuit institution, which covers most of its overheads. Revista Anfibia has a similar arrangement with the Universidad de San Martin, a state institution in Argentina. Chilean site Ciper was launched with the support of the national media conglomerate Copesa. The shared experiences of the group suggested that if a start-up wishes to launch as and remain a news-only operation, it may have to seek supplements to philanthropic support and partnerships with local institutions.

All of these, of course, may come with strings attached.  But the broader discussion in the news industry is coming to the conclusion that the era of news as a “commodity” business is waning. The old models of charging for content, through paywalls plus advertising, appears to be working for some institutions, but these tend to serve affluent audiences who will pay a premium for content and offer an attractive demographic for luxury brands. This approach has little to do with the mission or the audiences of the Latin American start-ups.

The services model for sustainability

So what’s the alternative to the “commodity” model?  There is mounting evidence that independent online news will be evolving into a service industry, to market digital skills and training and to help to organize communities. The Austin group reported that they were involved in a range of experiments to develop new revenue streams, many of them promising.  With the help of Kevin Davis from Investigative News Network, these approaches were categorized as:

• direct, which markets online content in various ways;
• indirect, which generates revenue through advertising and philanthropic support;  and
• ancillary, which produces income through training, events, merchandising, and services.

So far, it appears that no single approach can be identified as a magic solution; once again, it appears to be a question of an evolving mix, heavily influenced by local factors such as political environment, market conditions and competition.

The new marketplace will press online platforms to find their audiences, listen to their needs and attend to them as a community.  With luck, they may find that they can support their news production through fine-tuning an array of services in combination with (or in place of) advertising.

In Chile, Mi Voz has benefited from the creation of study centres to teach digital skills, while Brazil’s Observatorio da Imprensa has implemented journalism training programs.

Mexican start-up seeks revenue in the ‘mix’

Only one organisation in Austin was described as a free-standing digital organisation, and – not coincidentally – it was the only one that expects to turn a profit in the foreseeable future.  This was Mexico’s Animal Politico.

Notably, Animal Politico was launched in 2009 as a for-profit, digital-first project, starting life as a Twitter news service; founder Daniel Eilemberg that he explored the possibility of  philanthropic support, but abandoned the idea. The project has since expanded into a website and an array of services, including marketing digital advertising expertise and events.

It does not purport to be a “pure” news site; Animal Politico includes entertainment as well as hard news, and has experimented with many forms of audience engagement. It has emphasised social media since the start, and engages its youthful demographic through talk shows on popular rock stations in Mexico City. It has kept its overheads low and built a growing advertising base by engaging a young urban audience. Animal Politico was early to experiment with mobile platforms and Facebook ads, and, as of June 2013, has 476,000 Facebook “likes”. Animal Politico now receives over a million unique visits a month and expects to go into the black within a year.

Animal Politico has benefited from the restrained nature of its competition in the Mexican media market, in which corruption, government controls and gang violence have stifled traditional reporting. But it has also been shaped by the unrelenting pressure of the market to adjust “the mix”. For those who question the advantages to entering the field as a “digital-first”, market-driven project, Animal Politico is providing a compelling test of the theory.

No Signs of a Newspaper Crisis in Asia and Latin America by Statista

In the past five years, print circulation and advertising continued to grow in Asia and Latin America while falling dramatically in most other parts of the world, with Eastern Europe suffering most, according to the 2013 World Press Trends report by WAN-IFRA.

In some ways, little has changed in the past year. Newspapers, both in print and in digital form, continue to enjoy unprecedented readership, with more than half of the world’s adult population reading content from newspapers. However, with advertising revenue declining over the last five years by 23.3 percent in North America and Western Europe, by 24.9 percent in Australia and New Zealand and by a dramatic 30.2 percent in Eastern Europe, the industry is still under pressure.

As with last year’s report, WAN-IFRA found that engagement remains a challenge. However, the study has found some rays of hope and successful strategies that are beginning to show promise in generating revenues both from digital circulation and also from new non-traditional revenue sources.

Competing for digital attention

Newspapers continue to enjoy large audiences digitally. However, while newspapers find that digital platforms have increased their readership, the engagement they enjoy is low compared to internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

The report found:

While more than half of the digital population visit newspaper websites, newspapers are a small part of total internet consumption, representing only 7 per cent of visits, only 1.3 per cent of time spent, and only 0.9 per cent of total pages visited.

To put this in perspective, Nielsen in the US found in 2010 that internet users were spending 40 times more time on Facebook than any news site. They spent 8 to 12 minutes a month on local newspaper websites, but they spent on average seven hours a month on Facebook.

Finding new revenue in the digital age

While the challenges have changed little in the past year, newspapers are finding ways to generate revenue to offset the declines in advertising.

Develop paid content strategies – With the success of the New York Times in implementing their paid content strategy, the report said that almost half of the newspapers in the United States have rolled out paid content plans of their own. The strategies vary. “Forty per cent are using a metered model, one-third charge for premium content, 17 per cent require payment for any access, and 10 per cent use some other model.”

Subscriptions are performing better than single copy sales, and the report also found that “The packaging of print/digital subscriptions is becoming increasingly successful.”

News organisations around the world are trying this bundling strategy, including Folha in Brazil, and the newspaper has signed up 45,000 digital subscribers in the first year of operation of their paid content strategy.

In our overview of Latin American paid content strategies in April, we found a number of different approaches including metered and hard paywalls, bundled print and digital subscriptions, digital kiosks similar to Apple’s Newsstand service and also platform based options in which publications charged for access to tablet editions.

While proving an important source of revenue to help offset the decline in advertising in some regions, PricewaterhouseCoopers found that paid content may not be enough to totally offset the declines in advertising.

AdAge quoted Greg Boyer, managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ entertainment, media & communications practice as saying:

There are some very positive signs about the resilience of the industry, but a lot of that lost revenue won’t necessarily come back.

Look to tablets to match print engagement – Audiences are increasingly turning to mobile, and while advertising revenue on mobile lags, research found “news engagement via tablet, as measured by time spent with news content, is equal to that of the printed newspaper”. With higher levels of engagement, there is the promise that advertising revenue could be higher on tablets than on the web.

Develop non-traditional revenue streams – Non-traditional revenue streams have been a bright spot for some newspapers  and offer one possible template for news organisations looking to develop new revenue streams elsewhere. The report found:

In the United States, 27 per cent of newspaper company revenues now come from non-traditional sources: 11 per cent from digital, 8 per cent from new revenue from other sources (service to clients in addition to advertising), and 8 per cent from non-publishing revenue (e-commerce).

Developing these services before traditional revenue streams start to drop may provide insulation from digital shocks. What new revenue streams are you pursuing? Have some proven more successful than others? Let us know in the comments.

Leverage print dominance to fuel the digital transition – All but a handful of newspapers in North America and western Europe failed to leverage the powerful position they had in print to ensure their digital, multi-platform future. But according to Frédéric Filloux, the general manager of for digital operations at Les Echos Groupe in France, news groups in Latin America and Asia are succeeding where their developed counterparts failed. Writing on his popular blog, Monday Note, Filloux said:

At a much faster pace than in the West, Latin America and Asia publishers take advantage of their relatively healthy print business to accelerate the online transition. These many simultaneous changes involve spectacular newsroom transformations where the notion of publication gives way to massive information factories equally producing print, web and mobile content. In these new structures, journalists, multimedia producers, developers (a Costa-Rican daily has one computer wizard for five journalists…) are blended together.

They have achieved this by rethinking newsroom organisation and management. Of course, key to this conversion is not simply to rethink the newsroom organisation but also to rethink sales strategies and techniques. The digital transition is just as much a transition in business and advertising as it is a shift in editorial thinking.

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

Internet tipping point in major emerging markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile and tablet growth is booming

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

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

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

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

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

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

Is mobile growth translating into mobile revenue?

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

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

Source: Copyright © 2013 by Kleiner Perkins

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

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