Overview: Media

Pay models are gaining some traction... increased focus on appealing to smaller, but more dedicated, audiences ... 10 to 20 percent of revenues from digital...monetizing mobile of course remains an open question... “Honestly, now, I think there is no business model.” Here are a few interesting case studies

the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers are tackling challenges in the shift to mobile, from design to content to monetization... People may spend most of their mobile screen time on apps, but the vast majority of that time is spent on just five apps. Meantime, publishers that haven’t invested in mobile a…

Some 63% of marketers plan to increase their native advertising budgets this year... The Times launched its "T Brand Studio".. in 2014... has created more than 100 campaigns for more than 50 brands.. generated around $35.7 million. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which only sells native ads, generated revenue of $100 million in 2014, while Media Week estima…

websites that support Chrome push notifications can send out updates that look and feel like regular app updates even if the Chrome browser isn't currently active on an Android device.. it requires an HTML5 feature called a Service Worker ... notifications will work on desktop and on Android, but not on iOS.... it will be up to web developers to …

...people are willing to engage with longer content (i.e., news stories over 1,000 words) on their phones... All of the articles studied here were read on the mobile web, not via apps. Since most apps are designed to deliver a better reading experience, “that could further the time people are willing to commit to longer stories,”... Pew found no s…

The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could....engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to incre…

seen as its answer to the walled garden of Facebook’s Instant Articles... in tests, AMP pages loaded 85 percent faster than regular Web pages... We know faster pages are going to do better in mobile search; why would we not do everything we can do make it faster?”

Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads... an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network... when users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website to load... removes constraints that low-power mobile s…

a phone company, Three, is introducing adblocking across its network.... Mobile advertising is still a very small revenue stream for most publishers, but in many cases it is the only one showing any growth...Unless and until this is killed by the European regulators, it threatens to snuff out the lifeline of mobile advertising for digital publishe…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

we’re seeing early signs that the value of a mobile user is greater than a desktop user... Facebook’s... shift from desktop to mobile has led to much higher engagement and average revenue... exactly the opposite of what everyone predicted. investing millions in rich video experiences... But isn’t a larger screen more immersive than a small mobil…

the new application is to deliver a round-up of curated news stories to readers, meant to be viewed first thing in the morning ... presented on eight different cards... the app’s content is able to be digested fairly quickly. Users can ... clicking a link to view the longer article, but they can also just use Refinery29 This AM to flip through car…

Mobile requires a different set of UI/UX and needs different forms of content and advertising, too. That's easy to write, but very hard to implement, especially if you have a newsroom full of experienced people who have learned their trade with a different paradigm in mind. Media startups like vox.com, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and others... adapt…

full rollout in those markets, and elsewhere in Europe, is slated for “early 2016”.) Upday sounds as if it will be aggregating a variety of editorial content based on contextual signals available via mobile — such as user location and interests. UPDAY will offer Samsung customers access to a range of news content that combines ‘Need to Know’ in…

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

Google and Twitter to help publishers show “instant articles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately... an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it…

These figures need to be compared with other research shows that people seem happy to consume long articles on their mobiles. "Ad Age looked at ... Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger to see how their traffic has changed over the last year and what effect [mobile] has had on the time people spend with each service...." On the one hand we read about the …

"it appears that the FT is adopting a model similar to that of a wire service in its mobile approach, with mobile news being complemented by context, comment, and analysis in the print product, as well as to a certain degree on the web." - “From a news business to a networked business”: The FT pushes its workflows to digital » Nieman Journalism L…

Seems Zuck's taken Filter Bubble criticisms to heart, combining human & machine curation (now where have I heard that before?) to create what Techcrunch calls “content serendipity” (wish I'd coined that one): "Each Section combines stories chosen by Facebook’s human editors and surfaced by the Paper algorithm [from] a publication, blogger, publi…

"You also can't add any site you want, as with a traditional RSS reader. Instead, Facebook has hired a team of content curators to pick stories for you in one of a dozen or so categories ranging from basic news to cute animals." - With Paper, Facebook just blew its own iPhone app out of the water | The Verge

Interesting points emerging from the first two articles I’ve seen about Jason Calacanis’ his new venture, Inside.com.