Vine illustrates how mobile is truly different: If you work in media, your first reaction to hearing about the new Twitter video app Vine was probably something like, “Just six seconds?!!” That’s the maximum length of any video clip you can record and share on the mobile app. When I first read about the new iPhone app, I had the same reaction.
If you work in the media business, six seconds is a ridiculously short amount of time. Why not cap it at 15 seconds? Or 30? But for Twitter and Vine, it’s about designing for a uniquely mobile use case.
That use case is capitalizing on small moments of time. For example, when you’re waiting in a latte line. Open Twitter, scan the last few tweets and pop open a six-second Vine video. The same goes for recording a clip. Quick and easy. It’s attention candy for mobile snackers.
“In 2013, consumers will look to their mobile devices to maximize absolutely every moment,” predicted Trendwatching last month. “Hectic, urban lifestyles mean that no amount of (micro) time will be too fleeting, or activity too absorbing, to cram in more content, connection, consumption or simply more fun.”
“Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger,” explains Vine founder Dom Hofmann. “They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.” He adds that “constraint inspires creativity,” just like Twitter’s 140 character cap. Which for the record, sparked much of the same incredulous reaction as Vine did today.
Vine was created for mobile, not as a media extension into mobile. There’s a big difference between the two, and understanding the distinction is critically important as the media industry grapples with the mobile revolution upon us.
I’ve been on my mobile soapbox lately, urging news organizations to adopt a “mobile first” mindset. Meanwhile, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget says the smarter strategy is “mobile, too.”
“The reality is that we live in a multi-screen world, not a ‘mobile world’ that operates parallel to a ‘desktop world,’” he writes. “For some services, such as news and information, the laptop/desktop screen is still by far the most dominant screen. So abandoning that screen, or designing for another screen first, just doesn’t make sense.”
Blodget’s view is matched by many in the journalism industry, but it misses the larger point. This isn’t about design and distribution as much as it is about disruption.
Rewind to 1996 when newspapers enjoyed fat profit margins, and two startups made their debut on the early Internet. One company all but destroyed newspapers’ biggest revenue driver, and the other ended up generating more advertising revenue — most of it local — than the entire newspaper business combined.
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.
Two big drivers of mobile disruption are geolocation and digital payments. Taken together, they have the capability to disrupt local advertising all over again. The right technology with the right execution will be able to drive nearby consumers into local businesses and anonymously track their actual purchases at scale, closing the loop like never before. No more guessing about ad effectiveness. For local media organizations, that has the potential to destroy your business.
According to eMarketer, Google ended last year with a 56% share of ALL mobile advertising dollars in the US. Earlier in the year, it announced it was taking a “mobile first” approach to product development. Last summer Facebook also revealed a shift to a mobile first strategy. When Marissa Mayer took over the reins at Yahoo, she proclaimed the same thing, gobbling up mobile startups to expedite innovation.
Meanwhile, there’s a new onslaught of “mobile first” and “mobile only” startups spanning communication, news, advertising and services. One of the most notable, Square, is well on its way to reinventing how businesses accept payments. It’s now valued at $3.25 billion.
I don’t know about you, but a “mobile, too” approach worries me when the technology world is investing so deeply in mobile first innovation. Despite experiments with paid content, advertising remains the core source of revenue for journalism — and mobile ad rates are a fraction of the desktop. Media companies are barely a blip on that eMarketer mobile advertising chart.
This isn’t just a threat to ad dollars, but attention, too. Facebook’s mobile footprint is mind-boggling, and Twitter (which began as a mobile company) is making great strides, as well. Just those two organizations alone have changed the landscape of mobile news and information.
Is all this sounding familiar?
This means two things for news organizations. First, now is the time to invest like never before. There’s a narrow window of opportunity to invent — or invest and acquire — disruptive mobile technologies and business models that could eventually sustain, grow or even multiply your revenue. Whatever your company has done in the past, triple it.
Second, a “mobile first” mindset should be adopted organization wide. This doesn’t mean you ignore the desktop, but you prioritize mobile over it — you make mobile the default everything — from setting performance goals to creating new products. Cultural shifts don’t happen overnight, and the clock is ticking. Soon mobile will become the primary way people get their news, and desktop consumption will inevitably drop over time.
“In the next 12–18 months, many news organizations will cross the 50 percent threshold where more users are visiting on phones and tablets than on desktop computers and laptops,” explains Fiona Spruill, editor of emerging platforms at The New York Times. “The numbers speak for themselves.”
At Google, it’s already happening. Desktop searches are now in a steady decline, and the company expects mobile searches will surpass desktop this year.
Imagine being able to rewind to the 1990s and help your news organization make key strategic decisions — and create new habits — that would have helped the business thrive on the Internet. That’s the opportunity we have today with mobile.
A mobile approach to news in New Orleans: I watched the “60 Minutes” profile on the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans paper that recently cut staff and reduced its old-tree edition to three days a week. The story focused on the cutbacks and the complaints, all but avoiding any meaningful discussion about the paper’s digital products or even a single mention of the other fine news organizations in town.
I’ve grown weary of reports like these, which fail to introduce new ideas and merely point the finger back at a dying model. (It was even more apparent when the next segment on “60 Minutes” profiled Ideo, an idea consultancy.) But I thought of an idea, so I thought I’d share:
One of the key points was New Orleans is one of the nation’s least-wired cities, and without a daily paper, this population is not being served. While many have focused on subsidizing broadband access to the city’s poor — unsuccessfully in most cases — I would love to see similar efforts to subsidize smartphone access. This is where news consumption is shifting, and why limit news access within just the home itself?
Imagine, for example, a commercially-sponsored effort (i.e. Pepsi and Verizon) to offer deeply-discounted rates and free, older-model Android smartphones to low income New Orleans residents. These phones would have the Nola.com (Times-Picayune) and WWL’s apps pre-installed. In return, both news organizations offer discounted advertising space for both sponsors to promote the program. Simultaneously, both Nola.com and WWL could apply for grant money to improve their mobile experience, being careful to sustain these older Android editions.
This is just an idea, and I’m not an expert on New Orleans’ digital divide. But looking at it through a mobile lens — instead of a print or broadband issue — may open up some new opportunities.
Most newsrooms know that mobile is growing fast. Everyone can see mobile usage (phones and tablets) creeping up on their desktop numbers. For example, The Guardian recently said mobile visits hit 35%, outpacing desktop at certain hours of the day. A growing handful of media brands — including where I work at Breaking News — have watched mobile soar over desktop in audience. And we’ve all seen the stories about the unprecedented growth of tablets, the fastest-growing product in the history of consumer electronics.
Soon, mobile will be the primary way people get their news.
If that’s really the case, then why isn’t mobile dominating journalists’ discussions on Twitter? Packing sessions at journalism conferences? Sitting at the top of “most popular” story lists on journalism blogs?
I have a few theories:
1. Social media is all the rage
Journalists (including me) love to talk about social media on social media. Just look at all the hubbub around Instagram’s new terms of service over the last few days. Anything social is an extremely popular subject in journalism circles: Twitter techniques, Facebook referrals and Reddit AMAs are grabbing much more mindshare than mobile news experiments, MAU growth (monthly active users) and app store rankings+SEO, arguably among the most important metrics for a news organization outside of revenue.
In fact, Harvard Business Review just went as far to say that media companies are largely wasting their time with social media metrics.
Don’t get me wrong: social media is very important — it’s an increasingly critical referral source, newsgathering tool and marketing vehicle — but it’s a subset of a larger mobile revolution that’s fully underway. And let’s not forget that social platforms are not directly monetizable and compete for audience attention and ad dollars. Growing our own mobile experiences should be the top priority.
2. Social is easy, mobile is not (yet)
I worked in local TV over a decade ago, struggling to convince reporters to adopt the web. Fast-forward to today, and even the most old-school reporters have Twitter accounts. What gives? Social media is easy and convenient for anyone to participate, and metrics like “followers” and “likes” are something most journalists — who battle for reach — immediately grasp. It’s also easy for newsrooms to experiment with social media without much technical effort, especially when drawing on many (mostly free) plug-and-play social tools.
Mobile, however, is hard, and the barrier to experiment is high. App development is downright difficult, requiring longer development cycles, talented designers and engineers — and deeper budgets. “Good mobile developers are hard to find, expensive to hire and demanding to keep,” explains Andrew Locke, who heads up devices for NBC News. New platforms keep emerging, demanding more development attention. And while many hope that HTML5 will be the savior, apps are becoming engrained in the behavior of millions of device users.
This doesn’t mean you need to learn how to code (I can’t). But it means you should strive to learn as much as you can about consumer behavior, mobile design and best practices across news, gaming and utilities. Become a student and soak up as much as you can.
3. Not just a new form factor, mobile is fundamentally new
Back in the newspaper days, websites were primarily regarded as a new distribution channel to extend print reporting to the digital world. However, as newspapers learned, the web is a fundamentally new medium with its own use cases (i.e. search) and business models (i.e. CPC auctions).
Similarly, mobile is not just another form factor, but a completely new medium, from content to monetization. It’s a fundamentally different mindset focused on solving problems in a new context. We can’t just shorten content and shovel it onto phones. Or create a responsive design and say we have a mobile strategy. Or create snazzy retina-loving photos in a tablet app and charge people for it.
“We need to rethink media around informing you in new ways,” explains Jeff Jarvis, who calls mobile a “personal bubble” with an unprecedented ability to know what a user wants. “Advertising? I’m not sure what advertising is,” he adds.
In many ways, mobile is a reset. “By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has,” says Y Combinator’s Paul Graham in a must-read startup manual. What problems should news organizations solve on mobile?
4. Journalists don’t have the data we need
In just about every newsroom on the planet, desktop data comes first and mobile numbers are few and far between. Perhaps you’ll see a couple tidbits about the mobile web, but what’s happening beyond a simple visit? How do downloads correlate with retention? Which dayparts are most popular? How do people interact inside your mobile experiences? Phone vs. tablet? Web vs. app? Do they read articles or bail out after a quick scroll? When and how do they share? What are the most cost-effective marketing tactics to attract loyal users?
We need to conduct more mobile-only research projects and track mobile-only user behavior. We need to put mobile data at the top of our analytics reports. We need to compare ourselves competitively on mobile numbers over desktop.
After all, if journalists can’t see how users are consuming or ignoring our mobile content, then we can’t — and won’t — adapt to the new world.
5. Invest more in mobile and set bold goals
With a few exceptions, newsrooms are under-investing in mobile. If mobile is truly a new frontier, it demands the resources to succeed.
“When the Web was new, many of us went online with creativity and energy,” says Regina McCombs, who teaches mobile at Poynter. “Now, faced with even bigger potential and pitfalls for developing — or losing — our audience, most of us are getting by with as little investment as we can. That’s scary.”
At Breaking News — a quickly-growing mobile startup owned by NBC — we’ve been fortunate enough to have the resources and the freedom to drive mobile innovation. In turn, we’ve focused on creating a mobile-first culture with bold goals that virtually ignore the desktop. We hold ourselves accountable for mobile, and by extension, that’s our team’s priority. From product brainstorming to coverage to success metrics, mobile is the default everything.
As mobile startups pop up everywhere, not investing is not an option. They have the freedom to disrupt. Do you?
6. Mobile can be more of a threat than an opportunity
With the explosion of devices, mobile traffic has been viewed as a bonus, adding to desktop audiences to grow overall reach. If it’s all incremental, why worry about it? But that’s increasingly not the case.
“From board meeting to board meeting, we are seeing a similar pattern. Web is flattish. But mobile is growing like a weed,” explains Fred Wilson, a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures. “There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile.”
As audiences shift to mobile, advertising revenue — mobile CPMs are a fraction of desktop web — will drop by extension, at least in the short term. Recently, I attended a meeting of venture capitalists who agreed that they won’t invest in any mobile startup based solely on mobile advertising for the next two years. That’s why there’s an urgency to experiment with new monetization models against new approaches to news like never before.
Journalists are a deadline-driven bunch. We need to recognize that the desktop cliff is right around the corner.
I don’t have all the answers, but I challenge journalists everywhere to talk less about social media and more about mobile. Immerse yourself in devices. Become a student of the industry. If you’re not getting the data you need in your newsroom, pressure your analytics folks to give it to you. Cozy up to your mobile developers and designers and brainstorm — and try — new ideas. Attend training sessions, like Poynter’s upcoming “mobile first” class. Pressure journalism conferences to add more mobile sessions.
If we don’t, history is due to repeat itself. Nothing less than the future of journalism depends on it.
(Adapted from my presentation to MIT’s Future of Journalism event).
Distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. Strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. You need to master the “download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen” flow and that is a hard one to master.
VC Fred Wilson with some spot-on analysis of the mobile space. Cristina Cordova follows up with a blog post that underlines the value of mobile active users — not downloads. Must-reads for anyone in the mobile business (which will soon make up the vast majority of information consumption.)
