Riding The Complex Wave Of Mobile Publishing

If you want to know what the future of digital publishing is, a fair starting point would be to look at the online and mobile habits of today’s 15-year-olds.

These constantly connected teens are no longer dual-screening, they are triple-screening and their primary screen of choice is mobile. They are more connected to the Internet than ever, more willing to participate in social and sharing activities and more able to consume rich content at any time and on any device. To them, the role of a TV scheduler – someone who decides when you are allowed to watch a particular piece of content – is completely anachronistic.

The times they are changing, so while the future for TV schedulers might be under a cloud, the future for mobile content is practically sparkling.

Ten years ago, digital readers looking for content had limited options of where to find it, in fact, they really only had one choice: the desktop web. They found their way to a web page filled with content that linked to other web pages filled with content.  With the experience so singular, publishers focussed on building audience share with the hope that one day, the money might follow.

A couple of decades since that desktop model emerged, mobile publishing has exploded. As the number of smartphones owned in the world has recently overtaken PCs, users are enjoying the content convenience that smartphones can offer. If mobile publishing were a person, it would be seven years old and caught between the discovery ages of kindergarten and middle school: growing in confidence but in constant need of minding. Even at just seven years old, however, mobile is already nearing the day when it has a larger audience than desktop and routinely captures 35% to 45% of general news visits in Australia, and more for breaking news.

For example, records were almost broken at The Sydney Morning Herald when on March 8, news of the ill-fated flight MH370 broke online. With 41% of the total digital audience reading about the missing aircraft on a mobile phone and 42% reading about it on a desktop PC, The Sydney Morning Herald was closer than ever to the mobile tipping point.

For publishers all over the world witnessing this mobile migration first-hand, it’s becoming clear that mobile publishing is a completely new proposition with a lot more complexity to execute than desktop.

The growing number of different user experiences as we consume mobile content will force a staggering amount of product choices onto publishers.

The mobile web is just one way to consume content – apps are another.  If you’re asking which one is best for publishing your content, then you are asking the wrong question. Publishers need to fish where the audiences are and get past the either/or debate.

In most cases, the larger content audience will be web, but equally if not more valuable audiences can be found elsewhere. Voice, wearables, predictive, the connected car, web, apps, messaging and geo are just some of the emerging avenues for content discovery. Just because we are busy driving our cars doesn’t mean we can’t consume content. So while it’s not clear exactly how this will play out, expect that content available in cars will rival wearable devices like Google Glass when it comes to the next big platform for mobile content discovery.

The complexity for publishers widens when you consider two contradictory content trends that have emerged: bundling and unbundling. On one side, general news apps have proven very popular with users, but they are content silos, which provide a bundled experience, which means that customer acquisition, search and social become very hard to do. On the other side, The New York Times, Circa and Facebook are unbundling the mobile experience by providing single purpose apps such as NYT Now and Facebook Paper. For publishers looking to build a mobile strategy, it’s not yet clear where we currently are in the content aggregation vs. unbundling cycle or if one trend will become dominant.

How will publishers monetise mobile? Tablets mirror a form that advertisers are already very comfortable with (i.e. newspapers, magazines, books, etc.) but mobile is different and a lot of current mobile ad shapes are transitionary products at best. In the move to mobile there’s still a lot of work to be done in figuring out what are the best formats to capture user attention and tell engaging brand stories.

Publishers also have to consider a new dimension: the reader’s context. Different reading behaviours are emerging based on the reader’s location, time of day and the amount of time they have to give. So in the future when the publisher is creating a story will they need to provide a summarised version for morning reading and then a more detailed view of the same story for later in the day?  What about a more entertaining version of the same story for the evening and then a more interactive version for weekend reading?

Publishers need to adopt a device agnostic strategy but also be aware that device fragmentation will see idiosyncrasies in content consumption based on context.

While mobile presents a host of complexities, none are insurmountable and the large audience migration figures means that mobile may become the single most important platform for publishers and also brands wishing to reach these growing and engaged audiences.