Mobile news consumption is picking up very fast

The changes are a revolution: Almost one in three visits to Norwegian media products are now from mobile platforms.

For two years I have been recording how users choose the different digital platforms of Norway’s biggest newspaper: Aftenposten.

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The dramatic changes over the last 24 months are indeed a revolution.

People are moving from PCs to mobile platforms at increasing speed. It is only a matter of time before smartphones and tablets will outperform the PC as the major platform for media consumption in Norway.

With 1,3 million unique visitors to its web site every week in a country of 4,5 million there is no reason to believe that the numbers from Aftenposten are not representative for the media market in Norway as a whole.

So let us compare which platforms people used to consume the news from Aftenposten in January 2012 with the same month two years ago.

PC versus mobile platforms

Some conclusions

• Visits from mobile platforms have increased from 3,7 % of the total in January 2010 to 30,5 % in January 2012 (23,9 % mobile phones, 6,6 % iPad).
• Two years ago there were 26 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones.  Last month there were only 2,3 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones and tablets.
• So far there are no signs that the new traffic from mobile phones and tablets have cannibalized the traffic from PCs.  Instead the mobile visits are coming on top of the visits already from PCs.
• iPad is picking up quickly – and made a jump during the Christmas holiday. Almost seven per cent of the total visits to Aftenposten’s products now come from the iPad.

Android picking up market shares quickly

There are also interesting developments in what type of mobile phones people use to access the news site:

• Apple’s IOS has stayed the biggest mobile operating system ever since this statistics started two years ago. But in January 2010 IOS was barely bigger than Nokia’s Symbian operating system.
• Since then Symbian have almost disappeared completely and instead Android phones are starting to pick up market shares at increasing speed.
• Last month IOS was 53,6 % of the mobile visits, while 34,5 % used Android phones. The gap between the two is decreasing every month.
• Especially the Android-based  Samsung Galaxy gt-i9100 seems to gain popularity quickly in the Norwegian market. From December 2011 to January 2012 the number of visits from iPhones actually decreased by 3,7 per cent, while the number of visits from Samsung Galaxy phones increased with 15,1 %.  No wonder which phone was under the Christmas trees!

Apple is tempting authors with an easy-to-publish book platform. But as an author I would be stupid to take their offer.

I have for the last couple of years worked on a book about Cambodia. As a former Asia correspondent for the largest Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, I have had a particular interest in the Far East. Among all the Asia countries Cambodia has intrigued me the most, especially how extremely friendly people are despite the brutal and violent political history of the country.

I have almost finished a manuscript describing how the brutal political history of the South East Asia country has influenced the life of even young Khmers born after the Pol Pot year. Now I face the question of how I should publish the book after the last few pages have been written.

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As a paper book primarily?  I could. And that is also what I planned.  But the highly regulated – and very small – Norwegian book market  make my income on this option marginal. I may get some recognition, of course, but with such a niche topic as contemporary Cambodia there is no way I will make even close to my normal salary in royalties for selling the book.

Should I forget about being published in the print format – and instead focus only on the ebook market, then?  I may not get more income, but format and its possibilities are exciting and the book might end up getting a bigger audience. It sounds like a good idea, except that ebooks have not really taken off in the small Norwegian market, one reason being that the big publishing houses pretty much have cooperated in making sure ebooks have not been a big success so far.

Now Apple offers its iBooks Author App – promising that everyone can make amazing multi-touch ebooks for iPad.

It sounds exciting!  I would love to take my manuscript, mix it with some of my best photographs from Cambodia and design an amazing book, hopefully both giving a great reading and visual experience at the same time. And the iPad is a great platform to read books (except in daylight, that is).

But I will not do it.

Because there is a catch.

It is hidden in the terms of use:

 If your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or
service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

It stinks!

So Apple wants me to spend months writing a manuscript, taking photographs and putting it all into a coherent story. Then I will spend a few hours (remember it is SO EASY!), maybe days if I am really getting into it, creating a great ebook using their tool. In return they want more or less full ownership of my work!

I can accept that I will give Apple 30 % of my income selling the ebook through their iBooks app. Afterall I only get to keep about 15 % when I publish a paperbook through a Norwegian publishing house.

But give me even one reason why I should accept that Apple limits my chances of distributing my work on other platforms than the ones controlled by them?

For me it is the opposite way around: If I choose the ebook route I want my work to be published on all available platforms there is. There are three reasons for that:

• It maximizes my profit. People use different platforms and I want as wide distribution as possible.
• Many people today use several devices during the day to access the same content. That’s why I love the Kindle platform for books. Many times I have found myself starting reading the book on the Kindle ereader, then continuing on the Kindle app on iPad before I read on in a bar at night on my Android-powered smartphone. It all syncronizes perferctly across devices and platforms.
• I want to learn as much as possible about how people use my content. There is little learning in only publishing on one device

For more on the license agreement I recommend you to read Ed Bott in ZD Net:  Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement.  For a wider perspective I recommmend Thomas Baekdal: Lies, Damned Lies and Ebooks.

As I look at it Apple is basically providing me with two things:

• An easy-to-use production tool for iBook.
• A distribution platform for selling the book through iPad and iBook.

The production tool is supposedly free (provided that I have a Mac, which I do not have). But in fact they are charging me an extremely high price by trying to take full ownership of my work.  I don’t know of any other seller of a production tool using this business model.  Do you?

For the distribution platform I am asked to pay 30 % of the revenue.  This is a fairly common business model for selling goods and services.

So what do I do?

For sure: Although I would love to, I don’t dare to use the new Author App from Apple. I have spent so much time struggling over my manuscript – and I have still weeks to go. There is no way I will risk the right to do whatever I want with my own content just for the right to use a convenient – and I am sure also very elegant – production tool.

So I will look for other ways to make elegant ebooks. It may take me some more hours, and the end-result may not be as perfect. But I will be in control myself. And I will hopefully reach more readers, not only on Apple’s devices.

In the meantime I will not be surprised if Apple provides a “broader” and more author-friendly interpretation of the terms of use.

I think they have to. I am not the only author around.

What is your opinion?

Looking for ways to make users pay for digital content, many editors consistently make a wrong assumption: That stories from the printed newspaper have higher value than the web stories.

I have read it numerous times: Interviews with chief editors who present the fact that a story was printed in the newspaper as the very definition of users’ willingness to pay for the same story in a digital version.

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I think the assumption in most cases is wrong.  That a story has been printed in the newspaper has little bearing in itself on whether there is a willingness to pay for that particular content in digital form.

One big challenge of introducing user payment for digital content is to decide which content is premium and which content should be free.

Making this decision is very hard – as it goes to the very core of defining what type of journalism constitute real value to the readers.

The easy way out is to say as many chief editors do: The content from the printed paper is premium, the online content is free.

And why shouldn’t we think like that? People have after all through decades shown that they are willing to pay for the content in the printed paper. Therefore the argument is convenient: Let us make the same content available to them online for a charge, and they will be willing to pay.

Wrong!

But as a result of this way of thinking, most attempts at asking users to pay for digital content, for instance on iPad, so far are more or less replicas of the printed paper.

It is time to end this way of thinking.

In the long run the distinction between premium and free content cannot be defined by what has been found worthy of being printed in the newspaper. One reason is that much of the value of a printed newspaper is in how content has been packaged and put together for that specific format. As the content is being split up on digital platforms, the value proposition changes and different rules apply.

Therefore we need to find a new way of distinguishing between premium and free content – and that distinction can no longer be defined by platforms, but by the distinctive qualities in the content itself.

Why is this? Because when studying their own content in depth and trying to make readers pay online, many editors will find the following to be true:

• Parts of the content in the printed newspaper looses its value when disaggregated from the print package and presented in a digital version
• Parts of the content that has been produced “free” for the web site actually provides great value for readers – and in fact have the potential to be treated as premium content instead of free.

This being said, it is easy to understand that many news organizations have chosen a replica of their printed product as the first attempt at making users pay.  The strategy in fact makes sense – at this stage. After all readers have a clear picture of what product a newspaper is – and may be willing to pay for the convenience of receiving it in a different format. Also most newspapers are organized primarily with the printed paper as the main output.

But now is the time to move on. Premium content should be defined across platforms – and with qualities that makes it truly unique no matter where it is published. At the same time we need to take into consideration also the other factors influencing people’s willingness to pay.

Among media companies not just choosing the replica model we basically see three ways of distinguishing between premium and free content:

• The meter model – allows free access to a specific number of articles per month and starts charging after the level has been reached. This is the model used by The New York Times, which reportedly now has more than 300.000 subscribers. The meter model does not try to distinguish as much between which content is premium and which content is free. Rather the underlying assumption is that all content is premium, but that readers can get some of it for free anyway.
• The freemium model – defines some types of content as free and other as premium, depending on topics or qualities. This is for instance the model used by Wall Street Journal, Hamburger Abendblatt and the highly successful Swedish news site Aftonbladet.
• The paywall – charging for all content, no matter where it is published. This is basically the strategy of The Times in London. A

This discussion is primarily based on the freemium model. What are some of the qualities that could define premium content in this model?

It of course depends on the brand in question and how it is positioned in its market.

But I think many editors will find that they need to develop new content formats to succeed with user payment. This is necessary to make sure the content is sufficiently unique, deep, engaging, useful or entertaining to make readers think they cannot be without it.

Some of the questions that need to be answered:

• Is the content truly unique? Can you find more or less the same other places – or is this really the only place to get this type of content and quality? Is the content in a format that makes it unique?
• Is the content useful? Are readers being helped in achieving their personal goals, like getting in better shape or improving their finances? Will readers feel they will be better off in their life with the content?
• Is it engaging people?  In today’s world of social media only content that engage people have real value.
• Is it convenient to get to the content if you are willing to pay?  Is in fact being a paying customer much easier that to be a freeloader? Is the media company making it so convenient for readers that it is just “too damned easy to pay”?
• Is the payoff clear?  Do you immediately understand what extra value paying for the content gives you?  Is is deep enough? Entertaining enough? Or just another copy of what you will find on any other web site?

Newspaper readership will continue to drop in most markets in the years to come. As this happens, defining premium content in terms of whether it has been printed on paper or not will become increasingly less relevant.

We need a new definition.

So how, then, should we define premium content in the future? What are your thoughts?

Few other analysts give as comprehensive and solid analysis of current Internet trends as Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. Here is her latest presentation of mobile and other digital trends.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

I always try to bookmark the presentations of Mary Meeker, as I find myself going back to them again and again. And what is a better way of bookmarking a great presentation than to blog about it?

Mary Meeker used to work for Morgan Stanley. Her annual presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit continues to draw a lot of attention.  The presentation inserted above is from this year’s summit.

A few points that I have noted:

• The top global players are still mostly US companies with a couple of Chinese services as the only exceptions
• Still China now has almost twice as many Internet users as USA. And half of them been added during the last four years.
• Smartphone usage is exploding  - but still has tremendous potential for further growth
• iPad is growing at much faster rate after launch than iPhone did
• Social media is moving mobile big time: 55 % of Twitter usage and 33 % of Facebook usage is now from mobile platforms
• The next “big thing” is online sound
• Mobile commerce is finally lifting off
• There is a big discrepancy between the time spent on different media and where advertising dollars are spent. For instance: 8 % of media time in the USA is spent on mobile, while only 0,5 % of the advertising budgets
• In hardware tablets and smartphones outshipped PCs in Q4 of 2010

Related articles

• Mary Meeker’s 2011 Web 2.0 Summit Presentation (readwriteweb.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)
• Mary Meeker’s state of the Internet report (digitaltrends.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)

Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten published nude pictures of the national hero Fridtjof Nansen. That was too much for Facebook – and references to the photos were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Facsimile of Aftenposten October 15th, 2011

No nudity, please!, asks Facebook. And photos from 1929 of the Norwegian national hero Fridtjof Nansen were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page, which has almost 70.000 fans. In addition the newspaper received a warning that its Facebook page might be removed if new violations of Facebook’s policy were discovered.

Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, which is the company owning Aftenposten.

The clash between Facebook and Aftenposten raises some interesting principal questions, especially to what extent it is fair that Facebook restricts what a media company (or any other company or person for that matter) publishes on its Facebook page.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was a Norwegian national hero, well known both for his Arctic expeditions as well as his work to help refugees after the first world war.

Aftenposten tells the story of how Nansen at the age of 67 fell in love with the 30 year younger journalist Brenda Ueland, an American feminist and journalist.

In a new book letters Nansen wrote to Ueland are published, including nude photos Nansen took of himself and sent to his love hoping that whe would returns photos of herself without clothes.

Aftenposten published two of the photos in its article about the book – and also shared the link to the article to the 70.000 friends on its Facebook page. The article received a number of reactions from readers.

The link to the controversial article was shared on Aftenposten's Facebook page

And then Facebook stepped in.

Within a few hours the link had been removed by Facebook from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Aftenposten also received a message warning that this photo was violating Facebook’s regulations, and that Aftenposten would risk being thrown out of Facebook if more violations were discovered.

“This message is a warning. Further violations may lead to your account being closed. Please read carefully through the declaration of duties and rights, and refrain from publishing offensive content in the future”, Facebook wrote.

Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Hilde Haugsgjerd, argues that Nansen is one of Norway’s biggest national heroes, and that it is known that he had relationships to many women. “Now there is a book on the market with this as the main topic, and we found it in order to cover this editorially”, she says to her own news site.

The photos in question are all from 1929.

So what do you think? Is it OK that Facebook censors this type of content? Or should the social network give media organizations some flexibility to decide for themselves what is proper content to be published under its bran?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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In 2011 it is no longer possible to be a top professional journalist without  mastering social media. Here are five reasons why news organizations need to care about the new trends.

Social media is starting to become an integrated part of the work of many news organizations.  Yet many editors and journalists still struggle to see why they should put a lot of effort into understanding the dynamics of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

• Read also: Social networking tips for mainstream media

I gave a speech this week for the annual conference of the European Alliance of News Agencies in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for the presentation I compiled this list of five key reasons why social media should matter to news companies:

1. Distribute the content

Social media is all about sharing – and sharing drives traffic. As such Facebook and Twitter can be powerful channels for distributing content.

There are two main reasons for that:

• People tend to trust tips from their friends more than others. Stories shared on Facebook and Twitter therefore have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• People spend much more time on social network sites than on other sites. According to Facebook, the site’s 800 million users spend on average 15 hours per month on the site. By making their content available on these sites, media organizations make it easy for people to share their stories.

Source: Comscore

2. Create engagement

Content without engagement has no – or at least low – value.

Good content creates engagement, emotions and reactions. And social media provides excellent tools to create such engagement.

Most news sites will find that content that creates engagement will have a longer average length of the user sessions. People spend more time on the content and they will move on to more of the other content of the site as well.

The big social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube, provide efficient tools to create engagement and they also provide lots of information about who actually engages with your content. And THAT is valuable information most news organizations would struggle to find on their own.

Journalism used to be a one-way process. Editors selected the news and presented the same stories to a large audience, confident that no other could reach the same audience.

This premise has changed. Today everyone can create a mass communication channel. Journalists do no longer have a monopoly of distributing information.

This fact changes journalism. And it changes people’s expecations of the journalists. It also mean that journalism hasbeen redefined. It is no longe a one-way street. Instead modern journalism is a continueous stream of two-way communication.

3. Pick up news fast

When big news events occur there are no better place to keep track during the first hours than in social media.

In fact social media is a great tool for professional journalists to pick up news. And this seems to be done in at least three different ways:

• Big and live news events. In these situations journalists should immediately start monitoring Twitter to pick up any news from eyewitnesses or other sources. News will typically be distributed in social media first – and then in the traditional media.
• When social media becomes part of the news event itself. We see this happen more and more often, for instance in the uprising in Libya or in the terror attack in Norway. How people use social media during the events – and what role this plays – becomes an important element of the story to be told.
• Monitoring social media for particular areas of interest. This is the everyday use of social media in an editorial organization. Most journalists have an area of expertise. They should systematically monitor what is being said about that area – including the messages from important sources – in social media.

The Twitter photo of the airplane that landed in Hudson River in New York became an iconic symbol of news reporting in the age of Twitter

4. Dialogue with readers

Social media forces us to change our way of thinking – from journalism being a “one-way-communication” to looking at our profession as a two-way dialogue.

Social media is all about sharing – and dialogue. Unfortunately many editors don’t seem to realize this. They look at social media primarily as a  place to distribute content – and don’t reflect on the fact that people want them to share and communicate as well.

In fact sharing is the core of social media. And there is no way we can succeed with a social media strategy if we do not start to share

For editors there are many benefits in starting to talk to readers through social media.

Take the Facebook page of Aftenposten – Norway’s largest newspaper - as an example.  It now has 67.000 followers. Aftenposten has been quite skilled in using the Facebook page not only to distribute content, but to ask for the advice from readers in covering specific stories. For the editorial staff this has turned out to be extremely useful.  (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten)

5. Build brand value

This is the more overriding reason: How a news company uses social media influences the brand value of the company.

During the meeting of European news agencies I was asked which business opportunities I saw in social media.

I am not sure that is the right focus. At least business models are not the first we should look for. But doing things right in social media is an efficient tool to build brand value over time.

And high brand value always creates business opportunities.

How you dialogue with your readers in social media can strongly influence the perception of your brand – for better or worse. Your task therefore should be to establish brand missionaries,  people who will do anything to promote your brand among their friends and acquaintances.

Summing up

It is in fact becoming more or less impossible to be a professional journalist today without an active attitude towards social media. Yes, Facebook and media brands are to some extent competitors, at least when it comes to catching people’s attention. Yet, social media and traditional media organizations are in position to collaborate much more than before – to the benefit of both parties.

Media companies hope to build solid revenue streams by betting on user payment on mobile platforms. But a look at Apple’s top grossing lists for iPhone and iPad sends a warning signal.

I was involved in launching a paid recipe app for iPhone in the Norwegian market at couple of weeks ago -and that made me follow closely the top grossing lists for iPhone and iPad.

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Apple provides three different top charts for apps: Top free apps, Top paid apps and Top grossing. While the first two rank how many apps are downloaded, the third ranks how much money the apps bring in at any time. The top apps on this list may not necessarily be the ones downloaded the most, but they still succeed in bringing in money for the developers.

What types of apps dominate the top grossing list?

To find out I went through the top 25 grossing lists for both iPhone and iPad in the Norwegian market as they were ranked in the evening on Sunday, June 12th. All apps were assigned to one of four categories:

• Usefulness. Apps that primarily help people perform a specific task
• Entertainment. Primarily games.
• Media/content. Apps that primarily are designed for consumption of news or other types of media content.
• Social. Apps that primarily are built on people connecting to each other

Top grossing iPhone apps

Not a single app on the top 25 grossing list for iPhone apps was a media app. In fact you would not find a media app among the next 25 apps on the list either.

Two of the 25 apps were categorized as “social”.

However, the two dominating categories were “Entertainment” (13 apps) and “Usefulness” (10 apps).

I noted another interesting aspect: Only one of the ten most grossing iPhone apps were priced “normally”.  That was the Hipstamatic app priced at NOK 11 (USD 2). All the rest at the top 10 carried either an extremely high price tag (4 navigation apps priced at USD 75 and above) or were free (games apps that made money on in-app purchases).

Almost all the rest of the top 25 list followed the same pattern: Either they were userpaid apps helping people achieve a specific task, like finding the owner of a car or creating music, or they were free or almost-free games apps.

Conclusion so far: To succeed in bringing in money on iPhone apps you should either try to be extremely useful or succeed in creating compelling entertainment for your users.

Here is the top grossing list for iPhone apps:

[table id=2 /]

[easyembed field="Linebreak"]

Top grossing iPad apps

The top grossing list for iPad apps in the Norwegian shows a slightly different pattern, yet more or less the same conclusions can be drawn.

12 of the top 25 grossing apps are within the “Usefulness” category, while 11 belong to “Entertainment”. Also for iPad we see some highly priced navigation apps quite high on the list. In the “Entertainment” category the main difference from the iPhone market was that only very few of the top grossing apps were free.

Two apps in the “Media/content” category made it to the top 25 grossing list.

The first was already in the third place on the list:  ”Lillesøster”, a children’s book specially designed for the iPad format and with a price tag of 5 USD.

On ninth place was Aftenposten, the news app from Norway’s largest newspaper. (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten).

Aftenposten’s news app is free to download and could also be used for free for the first weeks after it was launched on March 31st. This has led about 40.000 people to download the app. However, since June 7th Aftenposten has required users to pay. Access is available only as a subscription and can be bought both from within App Store and from Aftenposten’s web site. There are also bundled products which include the iPad subscription. These can only be bought from Aftenposten’s web site.

It is obviously too early to say how Aftenposten’s iPad app will rank on the top grossing list in the long term. The ranking is also complicated by the fact that parts of Aftenposten’s income on the app is not reflected in App Store’s grossing list.

Conclusion for iPad: To succeed in bringing in money on iPad apps your chances seem to be much higher if you bet on meeting people’s need for usefulness or entertainment. But looking further down the top grossing list media/content apps seem to do much better on iPad than on iPhone.

Here is the top grossing list for iPad apps:

[table id=3 /]

[easyembed field="Linebreak"]

What does this mean for media companies?

Is it hopeless to charge for media content on iPhone and iPad?  Of course not. But the top grossing lists give some clear hints to what in particular drive people to pay on these new platforms. Publishers are smart to study this to see if some of the elements can be introduced in news apps as well. For instance: How do you use your media product to help people achieve their goals? What can you do to make it really useful in people’s life? Is there any way to gamify the news experience – or to use in-app purchases creatively?

The Apple’s top grossing lists for Norway will, however, not give the full picture of how media apps will do when it comes to user payment:

• Few media companies have so far tried user payment extensively. Aftenposten is the first major news company in Norway to put its iPad app behind a paywall.
• Many media companies have so far kept most or all of their user paid revenues out of App Store. Typically the users will pay for the product at the media company’s web site – and then get access for free on iPad by entering login information. As we all know, Apple is now tightening the rules for how this can be done, but so far most revenues on media apps have been kept outside the App Store statistics.

One in five Norwegians now consume media content on mobile platforms on a daily basis. Changes happen so fast that media companies struggle to keep up.

Hardly before has the media industry seen changes in user patterns take place as fast as during the last year. And this time we are not talking about how people are abandoning the printed newspaper (they still are), but how mobile media consumption is exploding.

TNS Gallup, a major market research company, just published its latest data about how Norwegians use media content on mobile platforms.

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Norway is a country of almost five million people. Yes, it is a small country. Yet Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are technologically advanced – and the population is generally considered to be early adopters of new technology. Because of this, changes in media habits in these countries should be of interest to media companies in other countries in the Western world as well.

The latest report from TNS Gallup shows how quickly Norwegians now are adopting mobile phones as a platform for consuming media content.

In the first quarter of 2011 19,3 % of Norwegians – or one in five – consumed media content daily on mobile platforms. That is twice as many as one year ago.

Here is a graphical presentation of the changes in use of mobile media content during the last few years.

For media companies still struggling to come to grips with users moving from the printed newspaper to the web this poses a new challenge. It may seem like readers’ habits are changing faster than many media companies are able to adapt.

The transformation from PCs to mobile platforms is driven by two forces:

The smartphone. Media habits changed almost overnight with the introduction of iPhone. Suddenly people started using their mobile phones to surf the web.

• The iPad – and other tablets. iPad is opening up new user situations for media content.

I looked at how these changes play out with Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten (disclaimer: I work for Media Norway, the owner company of Aftenposten).

In April one in six visits to Aftenposten’s digital products were on mobile platforms.

One in six!

Or 16,3 % to be more specific. 12,4 % on mobile phones and 3,9 % on iPad.

The percentage is up from 3,7 % in the beginning of 2010.

I don’t have access to data for the other Norwegian media houses, but I am pretty sure the trend is similar.

It is a dramatic shift in just one year – and the revolution is bound to continue. This means that media houses have to hurry up to develop great mobile versions of their content. In Norway most large media companies already have quite good mobile versions. However, very few are able to make significant revenues yet on the mobile platforms.

More than anything, though, the platform shifts offer new opportunities for media companies to create compelling products for new user situations. We can already observe very specific user patterns throughout the day on the different devices:

• News content on PCs is consumed throughout the whole day, without any clear peak. In fact the usage is at its highest while people are at work.
• iPad is a sofa device. The usage peak is from 6 to 11 PM at night.
• The mobile phone usage pattern has a big peak early in the morning and another one in the late afternoon as people commute home from work.  But the most intense usage is from 11 PM to midnight. All of a sudden media companies are finding themself in people’s beds!

The usage of Aftenposten.no on PC, iPad and mobile phones have very different patterns throughout the day

So what does this mean?

First of all: Media companies have an unprecedented chance to reach their users throughout the day and in whatever situation they might be.

The challenge now is to develop smart cross-platform media products that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and at whatever device the users choose to consume the content.

GUEST BLOG POST: Developers from Poland create an easy Do-It-Yourself tool for publishers to prepare tablet apps on their own.

Rafal Oracz from Spoti.pl explains their HTML5 tool for publishers

By Marek Miller, guest blogger:  Marek Miller is the regional consultant of Innovation Media Consulting for Poland and Eastern Europe. You can read a number of his coverages of different INMA and WAN events on Forum4Editors.com. He also blogs in Polish on www.em-jak-media.blogspot.com.

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While the tablet market is still quite an unknown territory to many publishers, all they agree upon is the need of experimenting. And experimenting in this area is not easy. There are a number of questions still to be answered before newsmedia companies will actually be able to estimate real growth possibilities.

Those questions are, for example:
- how many tablets are really used in my country? (only estimates are possible)
- will Apple change its regulations again?
- should we focus on iPad only, and how will the market of other tablets develop?
- will people really enjoy one’s content on tablets?
- what kind of business model should be implemented and why the hell do we need to pay the share?

Waiting for these questions to be answered is suicidal. When you look only 12 months back, you will notice there is not a month to be wasted if you want to innovate and protect your place in the tablet market without making the same mistakes as the publishing industry did some years ago with the rise of the internet. And because tablets are here to stay, you need to experiment on as many levels as your budget allows.

Until recently there were basically two possibilities for publishers in the Polish market that wanted to make products for tablets. The first, as probably many publishers around the globe do, was to outsource this service, hire a professional consultant who would guide the editorial offices through the process of filling a prepared application with the content. This is the most expensive possibility when publishers develop a native app specifically designed for their own needs and with no similar apps in the market.

The second option is white label applications. There are companies around Poland offering the same kind of application for different publishers. They can be customized to (some) needs, but the core difference between those are usually colours, graphics, and maybe the order of the sections. Those applications look similar to one another, yet still are a bit expensive (somewhat mid-market price).

For about one month so far, a new tool has been available on the Polish market. The tool called Spoti Kreator uses HTML-5 technology, and makes applications available on diverse platforms: not only on iPad, but on all existing Android platforms as well.

Spoti is a simple do-it-yourself tool, where publishers can insert their content: text, images, videos and audio. They have about 30 different layouts of the application pages at their disposal. The entire code of the publication is open for the user, so when he is a developer with a basic HTML knowledge, he will be able to build his own layouts as well. Someexamples of how a page within the application can look like are listed on the picture below.

Spoti Kreator lets you choose many different layout templates for each page in the app

The process of creating the application is very easy and intuitive, and is done online. First you have to pick a template for your publication. Then you choose how your table of content should look like. Next comes the articles, which of course are linked with the table of content. Each article can be shown in one of 30 layouts. They can be either articles or galleries or simple pictures or videos or infographics. After choosing “publish” you will be able to enjoy your tablet application.

Spoti Kreator, just like all other tools, has its pros and cons. The great advantage is definitely its price. For now, creation of a single application costs about 125 Euros, but the developers of Spoti say they are considering an offer that would allow publishers to use their tool as much as they wish within a certain amount of time (weekly, monthly, we’ll see).

Due to the fact it is based on HTML-5 technology, the application is not distributed via AppStore or Android Market. Instead the final version of the application built in Spoti is given in the form of a link you can save on your tablet’s home screen.

Another advantage is the time needed for such work. In a 3 hour trial I managed to turn a 24 page publication (text and pictures) into the fully operational application. You can view it by opening the following link from your tablet: http://spoti.pl/e-dokument/5810/Raport (the publication is in Polish). It may not look astonishing, but given the fact it took me three hours only to prepare it makes me consider Spoti an interesting tool.

Apps built in Spoti Editor can be both sold or distributed for free, whereas in both situations the user can sell his own advertisements within the app.

Despite the fact that Spoti Editor is no longer in the development stage, it is still going to be improved. So far the applications work only when the device is online. At first this can be treated as a huge disadvantage, but being able to use different Wi-fi zones around the country or simply 3G connection, the user can actually be satisfied he does not have to wait for 200-300 MB to be downloaded.

Despite that fact, the developers of Spoti work on the possibility to allow users to download entire publication to their tablets. When they manage to do so, the publications will have to be distributed through AppStore or Android Market, what again has its pros and cons. Luckily, Spoti Editor’s users will have a choice whether they want the publication to be downloadable or to be accessed online only.

The idea of this post is not to promote Spoti Editor as the ideal tool for publishers. It is however a tool that allows publishers to experiment with applications, their content, learn about their readers and users, and to do this all without risking their entire budget.

Spoti Editor is so far available in only in Poland (one of the biggest media monthlies in Poland – “Press” has already chosen Spoti tool as their solution). Again, the developers are interested in expanding outside of Poland, so the english version of Spoti Editor can be expected soon.

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This is just one example of a company trying to build tools to help publishers use HTML5 to distribute their content. Do you know of other interesting examples? Let us know in the comments field.

It is used in lots of board rooms these days – as an expression of the danger newspaper companies are in. But in fact the executives would be wiser to ban the word. What word? Read on.

Publishers' worry about print revenues may harm their potential in developing good business models for digital media

I have heard it used so many times in different media contexts. We are afraid of it and try to avoid the effect of it. It is a word that makes media executives sleep less at night.

It is called “cannibalization”.

Yes, we would love to build new digital revenue streams. We dream about how users will pay tons of money for our excellent and unique content. But it better not have any harmful effect on print revenues!

So the thinking goes.

To put it in another way: Digital revenues are fine as long as they do not “cannibalize” print revenues!

This line of thought influences product development, pricing strategy, marketing and editorial workflows in many media companies.

It is a dangerous way of thinking.

In fact the word “cannibalization” should be banned in media companies. Using it will only cause harm to media’s chances of surviving the massive digital transformation we are witnessing.

Did you hear me?

Ban the word “cannibalization”!

Yes, I really mean it.  Don’t allow the executives or other employees to even use it!

Why should the word be banned?

Let us start with the basic statement that I keep repeating here at BetaTales:

What can become digital, will be come digital.

Now, then: What does this mean?

It means at least two things:

• Print newspapers will at some stage be extint. We can argue about when it will happen, but the trend is very clear
• This being said, the major strategic challenge for media companies is not how to save print revenues, but how to build a successful business model for digital content

Why should using the word “cannibalization” be a problem?

Because even using the word implies a mental context that will in fact be counter-productive in producing the efficient future business models of digital media.

Let me ask you a question, all CEOs of media companies:

What do you think is the most strategic important issue to focus on for the next five year?

• Saving as much as you can of your print revenue?
• Or: Building digital revenues as fast as you can?

I have already given you my answer: You need to have full mental focus on buiding future digital business models.

I know many of you will answer that you will be able to balance both.

I don’t believe you.

In fact I think many media executives still underestimate the major challenges facing our industry. They think they can transform a business model of the past to the digital future. If that is the way you think, managing “cannibalization” makes a lot of sense.

But they will be proven wrong.

Instead I believe the winners will be those who have been liberated from their past business models. They focus primarily on how they can build a digital future, and less on how to save the print business a few more years.

I am not saying that media companies should ignore the print business, which is still the biggest revenue stream. Continue to develop the product, increase quality, lower costs and make distribution more efficient! The printed paper will be an important platform for media content for many years still.

But do not let considerations for the print product limit product development in the digital area!

Stop worrying about cannibalization!

Instead you should set your digital products free to compete in their own markets – without considerations for effects on the printed products.

There is an interesting success story to study within the media group I work for myself: Schibsted Media Group.  More than ten years ago visionaries within the corporation realized that classified ads inevitably would move from print to online.

Instead of saying that all efforts should be put into protecting the lucrative print ad revenues, they suggested to start a new company that would try to be the leading digital market place for classified ads.

A company – finn.no – was indeed started in March 2000. It set out to be the market leader in online classified ads in Norway. Prices were only a portion of prices in the newspaper. The newspapers were instructed to market the new online classified ads brand.

It is no secret that there was a lot of discussion within Schibsted about this strategy. Yet it proved to be one of the big success stories.  Finn has for years operated with an extremely high profit margin, driven by its position as market leader in online classifieds. And how did Finn become market leader? By aggresively seeing the opportunity early, before the market had developed and matured.

Today Schibsted is No. 3 globally in online classified ads, according to Businessweek. That’s not bad for a company from a small Scandinavian country.

Market dynamics in the news business are different from the classified ads – and the same rules may not necessarily apply. Yet the main lesson is the same: Make sure to focus on what will be the future!

Many media companies try to offer print and digital products in bundled subscriptions. That may very well be a smart strategy, provided that it is done in a way that will lead to a future business model for the digital media. But if the main purpose is to slow down the fall in newspaper readership without any clear plan for the digital future, such a strategy probably will fail.

I believe the mental focus in the organization is extremely important for media companies that are in the middle of a radical digital transformation.

The losers will be those who put all their energy into slowing down the digital transformation and saving the past. The winners will adapt a digital-first strategy to rush forward to build a new, smart and sustainable digital business model.

I don’t think you can win by doing both.

Therefore: Start by banning the word “cannibalization” in your company.