Mobile Fix: is the Internet really killing newspapers?
This week, Addictive!’s Simon Andrews looks at the future of online news after Google said publishers need to increase engagement with their content – but is that enough to make a profit?
So is the Internet killing newspapers? It’s clear that the business model of newspapers has to change, as the economics change. The Guardian CEO has said his paper can’t survive in the UK and is pressing ahead with the global expansion that should (could) save them.
Google’s Hal Varian makes the point that it’s not the Internet’s fault…
“In the US, newspaper circulation reached its peak in 1972 and it has been all downhill ever since. Experts agree that most of the decline during this period was due to competition from broadcast TV news and cable news, with the internet contributing only in the last few years.”
And he argues that the internet is superior to print:
“The emotional immediacy of TV along with enhanced interactivity, personalised content and the analytic depth of the printed word.”
But the problem for the internet is monetising news – and that has always been a problem – as it was subsidised by classified ads which have moved online. The Google view is that publishers need to increase engagement and therefore spend more time with their content.
This chimes with a really interesting piece by Monday Note on serendipity in news – and how it is less powerful in online as we all have less time and the aggregators are increasingly powerful. They have a good demonstration of how Buzzfeed take a 2,000 word New York Times article and boil it down to just 80 words – with the likelihood that few people click through to read the original.
Ironically the people most likely to resolve this issue – by delivering a customised news feed – are Google. They are using the technology behind Google Now to work out what news stories you really want to see.
If you want to dig deeper into how news works in the UK these days the new OFCOM report is worth a look.
The majority of adults in the UK (90%) say they use at least one of the four main platforms (television, newspapers, radio, online) for news, with an average of 2.1 platforms being used.
Television is by far the most-used platform for news, with 78% of adults saying they use TV as a source of news. Four in ten (40%) use newspapers and just over a third (35%) use radio as a source of news. Almost a third (32%) use the internet for news.
Context
The way that Google want to use context to target news is being used increasingly widely. Google Now is the best known example and we continue to see it as a glimpse of the future. If you haven’t used it yet, it’s a must.
There are lots of other people playing in this space though. This MIT piece looks at Grokr Osito, Donna and others. A more general NYT article also looks at the space and widens the net to include the predictive search and machine learning that Evernote and others are experimenting with.
A new app called Agent – Android only for now – looks like the next generation. It surmises you are driving when it detects you are moving at over 25 miles per hour – and then reads you text messages and replies saying you are driving. If a call comes in at a time when you have a meeting in your calendar it silences the phone. And during set sleeping hours it silences the phone – unless the call is from someone on a list of important contacts. Not sure yet what it does to battery life, but we are trying it out.
Digital advertising
Context is also helpful is in advertising. Knowing where someone is and having an idea of what they are doing is a valuable additional layer for targeting ads.
As cookies become less and less useful the best alternative is a logged-in user. Any data gathered in registration can be used, as can past activity. And their activity on different devices can be used too.
Who can use this new(ish) tool? GAFA. And that’s about it really.
For an individual media owner – or an app – knowledge of people’s behaviour in your domain is useful, but inevitably only valuable in your particular niche. The FT can charge more but that is largely down to their niche being very attractive to a certain type of brands.
For GAFA, combining its huge reach with all the data that a logged in user enables is a big deal. Google and Facebook already dominate digital advertising and that is only going to grow. For Apple and Amazon their huge numbers of logged in users is an asset they are only just starting to use for advertising.
The scale and the depth of data GAFA have make them a natural choice for brands – and lead Martin Sorrell to again say they are essentially media companies. As such, he argues they can’t be trusted to give brands agnostic advice and therefore the role for WPP is enhanced as they can give brands unbiased advice.
But when someone like Facebook can deliver TV type reach (Facebook claim it has double the peak-time audience of US networks) why bother getting your agency to put together a buy across a number of networks where you don’t know how much duplication you are getting or what sort of content your ads are appearing amongst? When Google can give you ways of measuring cross device conversions – focusing on the biggest question in digital; attribution – why rely on your ad agency’s RTB exchange?
Martin Sorrel doesn’t like WPP being described as an advertising business as this makes people think of Don Draper – too much mad men and not enough math men. But the rise of data means that size isn’t as important as it was – with programmatic media buys some smaller agencies think they can do just as well as the big boys.
There is a long way to go in this arms race though. WPP have announced a partnership with a key player in set-top box viewing data. This deal allows WPP to blend TV viewing data with other data sources to better target online campaigns and measure the cross channel campaign reach.
Will more brands go direct to GAFA? We think so. The help they need is less on the media side and more on the creative side – and currently the big agencies don’t take that very seriously. But WPP et al know they have to innovate and are taking data very seriously.
The bottom line though is that most brands are still unsure of the value they get from digital. Adobe research shows that just 9% of marketers agreed with the statement “I know our digital marketing is working”. Whilst comScore data shows that mobile advertising can and does drive brand metrics, too many people still see all this new stuff as gimmicky. We need to demonstrate the effectiveness of digital and its ability to solve business problems.