The longest article today — “THE END OF APPS AS WE KNOW THEM” — is a great one.
The NYT loves native, not so much programmatic (Digiday)
As The Times’ readership goes mobile, the publication will phase out display ads in favor of native advertising.
“Display has real value, but it feels transitional, specifically when you’re talking about a smartphone-centric world. Advertisements are going to have to be in-stream and intrinsically attractive enough to engage readers,” CEO Mark Thompson said.
“We need to generalize [having our journalists engage readers],” Thompson said. “We need to make sure that it’s not a handful of stars but part of the workflow.”
Publishers cool on outsourcing community to Facebook (Digiday)
To turn the tide, some publishers are reinvesting in their own tech in an effort to build stronger communities on their sites.
“It’s really important to maintain some sort of ownership on those conversations,” said John Longbottom, editor at the English magazine Kerrang! “As great as Facebook is, we need to keep people on the site to bring in more revenue. That’s the black and white of it.”
Barber said that one of the issues with many current commenting systems is that they don’t give readers the sense that their contributions are important and have long-term value. If publishers don’t signal to readers that their comments matter, then readers aren’t going to leave good comments — or comment at all.
Inside Discovery’s digital video journey (Digiday)
“We made a strategic decision early on to invest in original programming rather than attempt to aggregate a staggering scale,” as YouTube multi-channel networks typically do, DDN general manager Colin Decker told Digiday. “If there’s one thing that the founder of Discovery understood, it’s building an audience over time and building a brand.”
“We are always looking for expansion opportunities,” said Decker. “We want our content to be wherever the audience is.”
“The more you own, the bigger cut you take, the better the business model works,” said Paul Kontonis, executive director of the Global Online Video Association.
How video at Vice News engages younger audiences (Journalism UK)
The number of subscribers to the Vice News YouTube Channel passed the one million mark earlier this month, and the media outlet announced plans to expand its news service to seven countries on 17 October.
Vice News launched back in March in reaction to the interest in the “hardcore longform documentary” Vice was already producing, and its YouTube videos have been viewed over 150 million times since.
THE END OF APPS AS WE KNOW THEM (Intercom)
(Very long but worth the read.)
The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent apps, that need to be opened to experience them, is making less and less sense. The idea that these apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience, is making more and more sense.
In a world of many different screens and devices, content needs to be broken down into atomic units so that it can work agnostic of the screen size or technology platform.
We’ve moved pretty quickly from notifications as signposts, to containers (cards) that include content, and actions on that content.
The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself.
I really believe screens of apps won’t exist in a few years, other than buried deep in the device UI as a secondary navigation.
If a publishing company, for example the New York Times, can push content to cards, and those cards can be seen in many different third party places (with revenue sharing agreements) why bother having a website at all? It’s just a huge overhead.
A new problem emerging is an overwhelming volume of notifications. Things will need to be ranked, which will make them more manageable. It’s also a better experience, apps maximising their usefulness in a quick lightweight fashion rather than dominating your attention in a slow heavyweight app-oriented experience.
We’re talking about designing content that may appear on an incomprehensible number of devices and in an incomprehensible number of situations. This will need new design principles, new ways of thinking about researching context.
Worldwide Subscription Video-On-Demand To Grow Nearly 30% In Revenue In 2014 (MediaPost)
Survey: Publishers embracing shift to time-based metrics (Capital)
Of the 25 members who participated in Digital Content Next’s survey, 80 percent said they are already using time-based metrics, and 20 percent said they plan to in the future, 16 percent within the next six months. Among the publishers who gave their feedback were NBCUniversal, Condé Nast, Time Inc., The New York Times, Gannett Co., and ESPN.
Within the small sample set, 60 percent of respondents said they are considering using time-based metrics to appraise the value of and sell ad units. One company is already testing time-based transactions, two will begin testing the method before the end of 2014, and two other before the end of 2015.
Smartphone-Toting Millennials Fuel Demand for Mobile-Optimized Sites (eMarketer)
Among US millennial smartphone users polled, nearly 90% said their phones never left their side—both night and day—and 80% admitted they instantly reached for them right when they woke up.
How UK publishers are rethinking audience measurement (Digiday)
As the publishing industry redefines its business, it’s important it can bring clarity to advertisers about the relationships news providers have with their users.
The Daily Scroll is a roundup of my favorite media articles, Monday to Thursday. All excerpts are copied and pasted. I encourage you to click on the links.
Social Meditation 