The Newsonomics of Spotified News Subscriptions

Ken Doctor reporting:

Can you make digital subscriptions sing?

In a first-of-its-kind partnership with streaming music leader Spotify, The Times of London has brought a whole new meaning to the subscription bundle — even as the wider media world dissects the mega Comcast buy of Time Warner Cable and the impact of that on cord-cutting, bundling, and unbundling (“The newsonomics of Comcast’s deal and our digital wallets”).
In that leap, we see pioneering thinking about a news company’s relationship with its readers, one that tries to blow life into the much-talked-about notion of membership in the digital age.
It’s a straightforward offer, launched February 9. Pay £6 a week (or $10) for The Times/Sunday Times “Digital Pack,” commit to a year, and you get full across-all-platform access to The Times — plus a full year of Spotify Premium. Spotify, the Europe-dominating streaming-music giant (as U.S.-based Pandora now stretches itself into Australia and New Zealand), just revised its own pricing at year’s end. Its premium offer now provides customers ad-free listening and the abilities to download music and listen offline at a price of £9.99/$9.99...http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/the-newsonomics-of-comcasts-deal-and-our-digital-wallets/

Four lessons from the world of mobile gaming to get people to pay for news

theMediaBriefing reporting:
I've spent a lot of time contemplating paid content strategies and alternative revenue streams for digital news operations, so when I recently attended the Mobile Games Forum, it felt like catching a glimpse into a parallel universe aeons ahead in terms of user monetisation.
While news publishers are starting to turn to paywalls and move away from an almost complete reliance on advertising, game publishers are already creating experiences that attract millions of paying users and, according to Shai Drori of Appsfire who spoke at the event, "most revenue for mobile games is coming from in-app purchases, not advertising."..
...

1) Payment can come in many forms

When it comes to in-app purchases, games usually employ a credits system which disassociates the cost of a purchase within the game from the real currency value of that purchase (ie. if a magic wand costs 15 credits and you can buy a bundle of 70 credits for $4, how much does the magic wand cost? Who cares, just buy it already, it's shiny!)...
..

2) How to charge for personalisation

In free-to-play mobile games, there are many types of in-app purchases publishers employ (here's a whole list of the in-app purchases available in Angry Birds Go), and often the purchases either enhance the gameplay in some way, or let players customise their identities in the game (or both)....

3) There are premium uses for user data

One of the other benefits of Ruzzle's premium upgrade is access to player statistics and ranking. Tracking a player's activity in a game and frequently sharing indications of their progress in the form of scores and statistics are essential elements of most gaming experiences.
However, this premium use of user data is still a very foreign concept for most news sites. Publishers are increasingly tracking the usage habits of their digital readers, however this is generally consulted on the aggregate level, and very rarely shared with users....

4) Focus on the cross-over experience

Another common topic during the "user acquisition" panels at the Mobile Gaming Forum was the cross-over experience. Alex Dale, CMO of King, which publishes the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga game, explained in an interview with Pocket Gamer:

With Bubble Witch Saga and Candy Crush Saga we are providing a single game experience across multiple devices...Your progress in the game, your social graph and your virtual goods will be synchronised. Our development philosophy is very much cross-platform.

What's commonplace for the gaming world is only just now starting to be seen in a handful of news apps – if you can start a game on your desktop and finish it on your phone, why can't you start an article at work and pick up where right you left off on your mobile during your commute, then finish it on your tablet when you get home?...
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/garrett-goodman-four-lessons-news-mobile-gaming-app-purchases

Social or search...this obsession with traffic ignores the complexity of turning readers into revenue

theMediaBfiefing reporting:
Amid all the debate about whether or not social is overtaking search as the most important source of traffic for media brands, many have lost sight of a key issue: Search and social are two vital and often complementary methods of getting people to read content - but the way you monetise those people varies massively.
...

What's a reader worth, and why?

There are a number of questions a media brand should be asking about each person who visits its site, including:
-- Direct revenue: Will this person pay for my content?
-- Partner revenue: Will this person buy something else through me or one of my partners via my site?
-- Better targeting: Will this person give me more data to enhance my marketing efforts, or those of my clients?
-- More valuable target: Is this person, because they are more engaged, more valuable to my advertising clients?
There's a compelling argument that in answering many of these questions, media brands will start valuing social more. On Google, a media brand is just one purveyor of information among many. But with social media, be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn, there are more complex relationships between publisher and reader at play. ...
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/no-social-traffic-hasn-t-overtaken-search-but-that-doesn-t-mean-it-isn-t-becoming-more-important

How digital weighs up against print for UK magazine circulations

journalism.co.uk reporting: The Audit Bureau for Circulation (ABC) has released the first ever combined print and digital figures for UK consumer magazines in 2013, based on the average number of sales for a digital edition of each issue.

The IPC Media title What's On TV ranked highest with a combined total circulation of 1,051,129, of which 1,571 were digital editions. Slimming World Magazine placed second with a combined circulation of 458,517 with 7,739 digital editions, while Glamour magazine placed third with a combined total of just over 415,000, supported by 4,778 digital editions.

In a press release accompanying the announcement, managing director of IPC advertising, Charlie Meredith, said: "We continue to expand and look for new ways to engage with our audiences and ensure that our brands are everywhere our consumers need and want them to be."

In terms of purely digital editions, ABC confirmed tech title T3 as the most widely read consumer magazine in terms of UK digital editions in 2013, with a reported figure of 22,319 average digital editions sold per issue, a year-on-year increase of exactly 100 per cent.

In previous reports, ABC had recorded the separate interactive editions and PDF 'page-turner' editions of each T3 issue under different metrics. This is the first report in which the figures have been combined.

The continental Europe edition of the Economist recorded the second highest number of digital edition sales, with just over 17,000, an increase of 47 percent from December 2012.
...The two titles to see the biggest year-on-year increase were motoring magazines from Haymarket Consumer Media.

Classic & Sports Car, which had seen its average digital sales drop to just 50 at the end of 2012, saw a year-on-year increase of over 2,000 per cent to 1,213.

Autosport, which had previously reported an average of only 134 digital sales per issue, recorded an average of 2,150 for 2013, an increase of 1,500 per cent.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-digital-weighs-up-against-print-for-uk-magazine-circulations/s2/a555858/

Are Teens Really Unfriending Facebook?

eMarketer reporting:

A brand is in a tricky position when it has no place to go but down. Given its must-have status among US teens in recent years—eMarketer estimates 95.9% of social networkers ages 12 to 17 used Facebook in 2013—that’s the position Facebook finds itself in, according to a new eMarketer report, “US Teens: Sizing Up the Selfie-Expressive Generation.”
And there are indications it’s vulnerable to a downturn—including an acknowledgement in Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call that it suffered a quarter-to-quarter dip in daily usage by younger US teens.
A rising number of options may be dispersing teen activity across a broader social landscape. A November 2013 item in The Futures Company’s online Monitor Minute newsletter caught this theme: “We expect this fragmentation to continue as teens test and adopt new social upstarts.” While noting that Facebook “is still huge among teens and 20-somethings,” it added that “the way some are using it has changed from an all-encompassing, one-stop shop to a quick check-in before moving on to explore their other social networks.”
It’s not so much that Facebook is losing teens as that it’s losing the exclusive power to define what social networking means for them. 
See statistics at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Teens-Really-Unfriending-Facebook/1010598/2

Visual content-based apps on the rise—but Facebook is still No. 1

A brand is in a tricky position when it has no place to go but down. Given its must-have status among US teens in recent years—eMarketer estimates 95.9% of social networkers ages 12 to 17 used Facebook in 2013—that’s the position Facebook finds itself in, according to a new eMarketer report, “US Teens: Sizing Up the Selfie-Expressive Generation.”
And there are indications it’s vulnerable to a downturn—including an acknowledgement in Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call that it suffered a quarter-to-quarter dip in daily usage by younger US teens.

A rising number of options may be dispersing teen activity across a broader social landscape. A November 2013 item in The Futures Company’s online Monitor Minute newsletter caught this theme: “We expect this fragmentation to continue as teens test and adopt new social upstarts.” While noting that Facebook “is still huge among teens and 20-somethings,” it added that “the way some are using it has changed from an all-encompassing, one-stop shop to a quick check-in before moving on to explore their other social networks.”
It’s not so much that Facebook is losing teens as that it’s losing the exclusive power to define what social networking means for them.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Teens-Really-Unfriending-Facebook/1010598#gTIjKEft80X2IuyG.99

Visual content-based apps on the rise—but Facebook is still No. 1

A brand is in a tricky position when it has no place to go but down. Given its must-have status among US teens in recent years—eMarketer estimates 95.9% of social networkers ages 12 to 17 used Facebook in 2013—that’s the position Facebook finds itself in, according to a new eMarketer report, “US Teens: Sizing Up the Selfie-Expressive Generation.”
And there are indications it’s vulnerable to a downturn—including an acknowledgement in Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call that it suffered a quarter-to-quarter dip in daily usage by younger US teens.

A rising number of options may be dispersing teen activity across a broader social landscape. A November 2013 item in The Futures Company’s online Monitor Minute newsletter caught this theme: “We expect this fragmentation to continue as teens test and adopt new social upstarts.” While noting that Facebook “is still huge among teens and 20-somethings,” it added that “the way some are using it has changed from an all-encompassing, one-stop shop to a quick check-in before moving on to explore their other social networks.”
It’s not so much that Facebook is losing teens as that it’s losing the exclusive power to define what social networking means for them.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Teens-Really-Unfriending-Facebook/1010598#gTIjKEft80X2IuyG.99

Visual content-based apps on the rise—but Facebook is still No. 1

A brand is in a tricky position when it has no place to go but down. Given its must-have status among US teens in recent years—eMarketer estimates 95.9% of social networkers ages 12 to 17 used Facebook in 2013—that’s the position Facebook finds itself in, according to a new eMarketer report, “US Teens: Sizing Up the Selfie-Expressive Generation.”
And there are indications it’s vulnerable to a downturn—including an acknowledgement in Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call that it suffered a quarter-to-quarter dip in daily usage by younger US teens.

A rising number of options may be dispersing teen activity across a broader social landscape. A November 2013 item in The Futures Company’s online Monitor Minute newsletter caught this theme: “We expect this fragmentation to continue as teens test and adopt new social upstarts.” While noting that Facebook “is still huge among teens and 20-somethings,” it added that “the way some are using it has changed from an all-encompassing, one-stop shop to a quick check-in before moving on to explore their other social networks.”
It’s not so much that Facebook is losing teens as that it’s losing the exclusive power to define what social networking means for them.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Teens-Really-Unfriending-Facebook/1010598#gTIjKEft80X2IuyG.99

Why It's So Hard to Measure Online Readership

The Atlantic reporting:

Name a metric, any metric, for measuring audience attention, and there is (a) a reason why it's useful; (b) a reason why it's worthless; and (c) a way for digital media companies to corrupt it.

Page views (e.g.: clicks) used to be the most common currency of online attention, only to be replaced by unique visitors (e.g.: readers). But in the viral age, "readers" doesn't mean what it used to mean. If you were a newspaper in the 1980s, readers = subscribers who receive your bundle of paper each morning. In a bookmarked-site world, readers meant Web visitors who drop by a few days a month at most. But in the viral age, readers can mean 1 million Facebook users who see some sensational headline, clicked it, and scurried away, having no recollection of what URL hosted the article, and never visit the site again.

Reader used to be a person. Now it's a spectrum. There are dedicated readers on one end, Tsetse-fly-brained Facebook browsers on the other, and fully engaged one-time readers in the middle. Surely they shouldn't count equally to an advertiser seeking an consistently engaged and knowable audience.

That's why some digital companies are trying to the Internet less like a newspaper and more like TV. YouTube now measures “Time Watched." Medium counts “Total Time Reading." Chartbeat tracks “Average Engaged Time.” And now Upworthy—the viral firehose of the Web—announced that it's developed a new metric. "Attention minutes" seeks to measure time spent watching or reading an Upworthy page, by studying "length of time a browser tab has been open, how long a video player has been running, and the movement of the mouse on screen," according to Nieman Lab.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-its-so-hard-to-measure-online-readership/283658/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-9ea68ad783-31701933 

Pew surveys of audience habits suggest perilous future for news

PEW reporting:
News organizations have been confronting the problem of a shrinking audience for more than a decade, but trends strongly suggest that these difficulties may only worsen over time. Today’s younger and middle-aged audience seems unlikely to ever match the avid news interest of the generations they will replace, even as they enthusiastically transition to the Internet as their principal source of news.
Pew Research longitudinal surveys find that Gen Xers (33-47 years old) and Millennials (18-31 years old), who spent less time than older people following the news at the outset of their adulthood, have so far shown little indication that that they will become heavier news consumers as they age.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/225139/pew-surveys-of-audience-habits-suggest-perilous-future-for-news/

Paywalls are not a cure-all: Evidence from Gannett

Nieman Lab reporting:
The invaluable Rick Edmonds has a useful analysis of Gannett’s latest earnings and comes away with some disquieting findings. Key among them:

Circulation revenues were up for the year (1.1 percent) but down for the fourth quarter (-1.6 percent) compared to the same period in 2012. CEO Gracia Martore explained in a conference call to analysts that the company has now “cycled through” the lucrative introduction of paywalls together with bundled print + digital subscriptions at its 80 community newspapers.
This raises the concern that capturing revenue from new digital subscribers and pairing “all access” print/digital bundles with a big price increase could be a one-time revenue event. Gannett not only failed to continue gaining circulation revenue at the end of the last year, it lost a little, as these subscriptions came up for renewal.
Gannett does have a strategy to get the figure headed back up this year, said Martore and Bob Dickey, head of community publishing. The company has begun including a section of USA Today news as an enhancement at four of its papers and plans to roll that out to most of the rest in 2014. By the middle of the year, Martore said, the expanded content could provide the rationale for another round of price increases.
But even if further improvement is not forthcoming, Gannett counts the paywall initiative as a success. Martore said the company had made good its promise that the move would increase operating income by $100 million.

...So yes, it’s better to have $100 million than not to have $100 million. (The paywall skeptics, I think, generally don’t wrestle with this — that’s real money, and I don’t think there’s strong evidence that paywalls in the main have substantively limited newspapers’ ability to launch other innovations or engage with its audience.) But it is not a long-term “solution,” in any sense, to the real problem: the continuing decay of the print-centric business model that newspapers were built on.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/paywalls-are-not-a-cure-all-evidence-from-gannett/

NBC News puts more emphasis on original digital video in its relaunch of NBCNews.com

Nieman Lab reporting:
Television networks are good at producing video for broadcast. They haven’t always proven good at producing video for the web and mobile devices. What works on a big screen at 6:30 p.m. isn’t the same as what works on an iPhone.
NBC News is expanding its efforts in the original digital video arena and trying to bridge that divide. “We wanted to build a site that doesn’t feel like TV content chopped up for the web, but born for the digital age,” said NBC News president Deborah Turness on a conference call on Tuesday.
The network relaunched its website today with the goal of merging its television programming more fluidly with digital production, while simultaneously creating content for a digital-only audience. Design updates are meant to give the site a cleaner, more elegant feel and encourage what NBCNews.com executive editor Greg Gittrich called “continuous consumption.” (It also looks like a site designed for small screens first: It’s responsive, it features tablet-friendly large tap targets, and it asks you to navigate via the increasingly ubiquitous hamburger button, even on desktop. Even though NBCNews.com is now separate from MSNBC.com, you can detect some shared design DNA.) In addition, a new NBC app will launch this week, running off the same API as the website, allowing for what developers hope will be a more seamless user experience.


http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/nbc-news-puts-more-emphasis-on-original-digital-video-in-its-relaunch-of-nbcnews-com/

Few Facebook Users Share Daily, Survey Says

WSJ reporting:

A new Pew Research survey on Facebook 's users, released 10 years after the social network's founding, sheds new light on how relationships are changing in the age of social media.

While there are more people than ever using Facebook, only a small percentage of users are sharing details about their lives every day.

Of Facebook's more than 1.2 billion users, only 10% update their status daily, while only 4% update it more than once a day, according to the Pew survey. About 15% of users comment on photos more than once a day.

The survey suggests that a significant portion of Facebook is a one-way conversation buoyed by Internet voyeurs who relish the ability to document their lives with their friends or the public.

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=7111470846498759958