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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assess the opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile site, app or both?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revenue options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding ad networks

Ad networks are really simple to understand.

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

All of this happens in just a few milliseconds.

Getting paid

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile advertising networks

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

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

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

InMobi

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

Google AdMob

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

Google AdSense

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

Amobee

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

BuzzCity

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

Hunt

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

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

Filtering adverts

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

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

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

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

NFR

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

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

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

House adverts

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

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

Mediating networks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of the major mediation platforms:

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

Mobile ad formats

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

Rich media

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

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

Interstitial

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

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

How much money can a content company make?

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

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

Let’s make the following assumptions:

Every page on the site has 1 advert.

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

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

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

Pages X Fill Rate X CTR X CPC = Earning.

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

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

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

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

How much are other content providers making?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One region, many markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deciphering mobile behaviours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GSMA notes:

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

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

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

Further Implications

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

4G and Video

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

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

Managing technological divides

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media literacy

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

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

No other company is even close to Google. The survey saw Facebook take second place, having captured 13 percent of worldwide mobile ad revenue in the two years since it began running mobile ads. That means that these two companies alone capture just shy of 70 percent of all mobile ad revenue.

In countries like Bangladesh, Senegal, South Africa, Ghana and Indonesia, a report last year by mobile browser maker Opera found for a majority of internet users in those countries that mobile is the only way people access the internet. Smartphones and simpler mobile phones with internet access might be the primary way that your audience is accessing your website, which is something easily confirmed by looking at your digital statistics packages.

Also statistics show that mobile audiences are younger audiences, and this is just another example of how digital platforms allow you to reach different demographics, rather than simply shifting your current audiences.

Initially, the opportunity to earn revenue from mobile advertising seemed even less than internet advertising, which has seen rates plummet over the past few years. However, as we have seen with the desktop internet, major players have been earning vast sums of money. The challenge for news organisations is that they haven’t enjoyed the same dominance in digital that they enjoyed in print and still in enjoy in broadcasting.

The major internet players are already aggressively growing their mobile advertising revenue and news organisations cannot afford to wait to pursue their own mobile revenue strategies.

Building a staged strategy

The first step is to make sure that you are doing your best to serve mobile audiences. Fortunately, making your sites mobile friendly is now easier than ever with mobile themes and plug-ins for popular platforms such as WordPress and many development frameworks that allow you to create mobile and tablet editions for your sites.

In terms of monetising mobile audiences, while eMarketer looked at global mobile advertising revenue, most news organisations do not operate globally and must instead focus on their local or regional market. You will want to first evaluate where both your consumers and your advertising markets are in terms of mobile adoption. If your consumers have already flocked to mobile but your advertisers are still reluctant, initially, you’ll need a low-cost solution but one that scales as the opportunity grows.

Start with mobile ad networks  – Just as ad networks can help you get a start in paying for the costs of your initial internet efforts, there are mobile ad networks specifically designed to help you begin monetising your mobile audience. mobiThinking has an up-to-date guide to ad networks and a guide on how to choose an ad network, including a list of ad networks by region and country. One key thing they note is that no one mobile network is dominant.

Just as with your traditional internet advertising, you’ll want to develop premium advertising options as quickly as possible. Ad networks can help you with that and as the digital advertising network matures it is rapidly developing premium options and strategies across all forms of digital advertising including mobile.

When you’re developing your mobile site, you’ll want to make sure that you can easily integrate ad networks and standard mobile ad formats.

Explore local advertising opportunities – For local media, there are unique opportunities. Google has found that about 50 percent of all mobile search is local, and that means that often your audience is looking for nearby businesses or services. Local media already have the sales relationships with local businesses, and this can be a great competitive advantage. You’ll want to explore what options mobile allows for targeted local advertising.

With the rapid rise of mobile, advertisers and marketers see a huge opportunity, which means that there is a lot of money pouring into innovation in this space. For instance, in Malaysia, telecommunications provider Maxis has launched a mobile deals service targeted at 15 shopping destinations that will send subscribers to their myDeal service offers when they are shopping. The service doesn’t require an internet connection but instead relies on determining the location of the customer based on mobile phone masts (cell towers). The deals are delivered by SMS.

Tablets offer unique revenue opportunities – When thinking about mobile content and revenue strategies, it is also important to consider tablets, especially phablets – large screen smartphones – such as Samsung Galaxy Note or Asus FonePad. These devices are competitively priced when compared to smartphones and an absolute steal with compared with laptops or large-screen tablets. For emerging markets, this is the perfect option for someone who doesn’t want or simply doesn’t want to pay for both a smartphone and a laptop.

Tablets or phablets open up all kinds of opportunities if they are popular in your market. For one, numerous studies show that tablet owners engage with content almost as heavily as print readers. That’s definitely something to remember when pitching to advertisers.

Of course, advertising in not the only source of revenue to consider. As we noted in our April Digital Briefing, Folha in Brazil introduced a paid-content strategy that charged for tablet and mobile app access. In most markets, tablets are initially bought by affluent members of your audience, and this type of strategy allows you to add a new revenue stream from those who can afford to pay for your content. Note that less than six months after Folha started charging for their tablet and mobile apps, they also added a metered paywall for their website.

Launch a mobile division – As your mobile market grows and the commercial opportunity will support it, larger organisations should consider launching a mobile division to create mobile products and generate mobile sales. The Media Briefing in the UK recently profiled how Norwegian publisher VG has done just that and is on track to dramatically increase the group’s mobile revenue. Norway is a very advanced digital market, but in major emerging markets, mobile use may quickly catch up with developed markets in ways that the traditional internet won’t for years to come.

This staged strategy will help you grow are your market and your organisation develops. However, no matter the size of your organisation or the state of your mobile market, it is an opportunity that news organisations cannot choose to ignore. The major internet players are moving aggressively to dominate in mobile just as they have with the desktop internet, and news organisations must make sure that they do not wait until Google and Facebook come to dominate your mobile market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explosive growth in the next five years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean for news organisations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile

Report: 40 percent of mobile ad clicks are fraud or accidents

Uh oh – we’ve covered the challenges facing news organisations and social networks looking to monetise their growing mobile audiences, and now a report from TradeMob says that of the people who do click on mobile ads, 40 percent of those clicks were either fraud or accidents. It’s one of the reasons that mobile advertising is lagging behind online ads.

Android winning the battle against Apple’s iOS in Southeast Asia

Ericsson ConsumerLab looks at which mobile OS is winning the smartphone wars in Southeast Asia. Not surprisingly, the huge number of Android devices is outpacing Apple’s iPhone. Apple has a strong position in Singapore, Australia and Vietnam. However, Android trounces Apple in New Zealand and Malaysia. Nokia’s Symbian still has a pretty strong presence in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Alvin Yap Talks about Monetizing the Feature Phone Industry [INTERVIEW]

The CEO of the mobile gaming company TMG talks about how they are earning revenue not just from smartphone owners but also those who own more basic feature phones. He offers great insight into making money using premium content on basic phones in countries like Indonesia. The interview has some great lessons on earning money from mobile not just in southeast Asia but in markets around the world.

Social media

Hootsuite Now Available in Indonesian (Bahasa)

Hootsuite is one of many social media dashboards applications that allow you to manage your social media presence across many services and accounts. Like many of these dashboard tools, it not only works on your desktop computer but also has apps for the iPhone and iPad and also for devices running Android and for Blackberry smartphones.

While Hootsuite operates in a crowded market, it is one of the best social media dashboards available, especially seeing as a number of similar tools have either lost their edge, such as Tweetdeck, which has really floundered since its purchase by Twitter. Here at the Knowledge Bridge, we use Hootsuite to share our favourite links and let you know when we publish some on Twitter, LinkedIn and our Facebook fan page. Hootsuite has free and premium options. The premium options allow you to add more accounts and provide you with more metrics on how your content is being shared. It allows you access to different languages, including the recently announced Bahasa to help journalists in Indonesia keep up with their social media mad audiences.

Digital Advertising and Television

Report from US figures show that Online advertising could surpass TV by 2017

New innovations, such as mobile advertising and increased use of online video, contribute significantly to the sharp growth of online advertising. The proliferation of online radio services, including Pandora and Spotify, will also bolster online sales at the expense of terrestrial radio.

Billy Hulkower, senior analyst for technology and media at Mintel, says:

Print media has lost the most to online media in terms of ad purchases, but the demographic element of people who are not DVRing their commercials and skipping them has tended for years to be lower-income and older households. If you’re advertising a luxury product, it already hasn’t made sense for a long time to have a large TV budget.

He sees two reasons why advertisers haven’t made the move from TV to online. Check out the interview to find out what those two reasons are.

Newspaper groups look to video for new revenue opportunities.  

NYTimes.com gets a revamped video player

Video is likely to play a pivotal part in the New York Times’ transition from a traditional print-based business into a modern, multi-platform publication. The NYT’s bigger focus on video gears up to position itself as a broader media content provider. With the new video product, viewers can thoroughly engage with videos, explore vast archives and perhaps discover content they were not expecting to find. Audience engagement is a new focus of modern journalism. Yet over the course of the half of 2012, digital advertising revenue still only accounts for a quarter of that print advertising revenue. The New York Times parent group saw revenues of $2.3 billion in 2011. Whether the video archives and channels will increase its online publication’s subscription is still open to questions.

Wall Street Journal rolls out video network powered by smartphone

The Journal’s online video effort until now focused on WSJ Live’s TV-news-style video segments with anchors and on-screen graphics. WorldStream complements that with simple, short video reports. Raju Narisetti, WSJ Digital Network’s Managing Editor said the thinking behind WorldStream is that audiences crave multimedia and have an appetite for instantaneous “raw” video, not just highly produced TV-like formats. And advertisers “are willing to pay premiums” to reach that audience via video ads.

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

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

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

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

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

Kaguda told technology news website Techzim:

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

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

Hackathons rising in popularity

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

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

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

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

How to host your own hackathon

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

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

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

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

When planning your own hackathon:

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

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

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

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

Mobile websites a must

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

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

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

Revenue opportunities from the mobile web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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