theguardian reporting

News publishers would have stronger rights to demand payment from digital giants such as Google and Facebook in exchange for using their content, under proposed European rules that are designed to shore up the collapsing revenues of traditional media companies.

The measures are part of a series of reforms that the European commission plans to put out to consultation in September. They are designed to strengthen the rights of those who create and invest in original content, from authors and musicians to record labels, broadcasters and publishers.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/eu-proposals-could-see-news-publishers-paid-by-google-and-facebook

The Wall Street Journal is changing up its paywall, offering guest passes and expanded link-sharing on social

Niemanlab reporting: Now the Journal is trying to make its paywall neither stricter nor leakier, but bendier. It’s now testing 24-hour guest passes for non-subscribers, an offer that pops up when readers access a story shared by a subscriber or a Journal staffer. (If you don’t enter your email address, you just get to read the one story.) Down the line, the Journal may also be testing other time increments for the guest passes.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/08/the-wall-street-journal-is-changing-up-its-paywall-offering-guest-passes-and-expanded-link-sharing-on-social/

To combat ad blockers, media companies should shift their business model

INMA reporting:

“Blocking the ad block users from reading your content is not going to work,” Van Rijn said. “If you have good advertising, non-intrusive and native, then people will stop using ad blockers.”

...The conclusion of the discussion was hard but straightforward. Van Rijn wrapped things up with this: “Ad blockers are here to stay, and we have to make advertising a whole lot better.”

Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/to-combat-ad-blockers-media-companies-should-shift-their-business-model#ixzz3pJI4aNgM

Newsonomics: The Financial Times triples its profits and swaps champagne flutes for martini glasses

Ken Doctor reporting:
The FT is a leader in crossing over from print — digital subscribers now make up 70 percent of its paying audience, a number that keeps growing.
...The FT may be 127 years old and roundly and rightfully respected for its journalism. But it doesn’t even break into the top 25 business news websites, as counted by comScore (see chart below). In the U.S. — which became its largest market a few years ago, surpassing the U.K. — FT.com ranks #44, with 804,000 uniques....
“There’s been a lot of internal debate about champagne and martinis,” Ridding said. That’s as in narrowly fluted champagne glasses and wide-brimmed martini. Simply put, the FT’s paywall marketing caught too few potential customers. Widen the top of the glass — or the overused metaphorical top of the funnel of reader acquisition — and more potential subscribers can be snared. Ridding says the FT has tested the $1 full-access-for-a-month approach in several geographic and business sector markets. It likes what it sees and projects a conversion rate of 11 to 29 percent. ...

Welcome to ‘Everyware’ computing

Newsosaur/Ken Doctor reporting
...The phenomenon is known variously as Ambient Computing, Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing or – my personal favorite – Everyware. So, let’s go with that...But ubiquitous computing seems likely to have major impact on the media business, because it will all but eliminate the intermediary relationship that media companies require to build the audiences they traditionally have sold to advertisers. 

Assuming Everyware materializes as envisioned by Silicon Valley’s savants, it spontaneously will deliver targeted information and entertainment, while at the same time enabling marketers to maintain persistent, direct and dynamic one-to-one relationships with individual consumers. 

In that event, what roles will be left to gate-keeping editors and the media companies that employ them? Publishers and broadcasters need to start focusing on this, so here are the trends to watch: 

http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2015/02/welcome-to-everyware-computing.html

Magazines boomed during 2014

New York Post reporting:
It was a banner year for magazines — at least in terms of new titles jumping into the market.
Professor Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, counted 234 magazine launches in 2014 — up 21 percent from the 185 launched a year earlier.
The one-time book-a-zines and annuals added 621 titles, although the book-a-zine craze seems to have slowed down somewhat. It was down by 32 titles from 2013.
...
Husni tagged Dr. Oz The Good Life, which debuted in February, as his Magazine of the Year.
“It was the first magazine since O, the Oprah Magazine, in 2000 that had to go back on press for a second printing of its debut issue,” he said.
The joint venture between Hearst and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon/talk show host, plans to up the rate base to 800,000 next year from its launch rate base of 450,000.
One noticeable trend, Husni said, was the move by pure digital companies to roll out traditional print magazines.
The trend follows companies like Politico, DuJour and All Recipes, digital products all, that launched print titles in 2013.
Net-a-Porter launched Porter magazine with a February/March issue, while the booming apartment rental site, Airbnb, launched its own magazine, called Pineapple, this month.
“I know we live in a digital age, but print is still a powerful medium,” he said. “I think any digital company that is worth anything will be doing print magazines in the next two to three years,” said Husni.
One other reason for print’s staying power, according to publishers, is that there has been relentless downward pressure on the standard banner ads on the digital side, making the relatively stable print ad page prices more attractive. Big publishers are nevertheless doing far fewer big launches...
http://nypost.com/2014/12/31/magazines-boomed-during-2014/ 

Focus on Digital Starts to Pay Off For U.K. Newspaper Brands

AdAge reporting:
Legacy publishers who focus on digital have been offered a glimmer of hope as Rupert Murdoch's The Times and The Sunday Times recently announced a profit for the first time in 13 years.
In the year to June 2014, the two newspapers made $2.7 million profit between them, up from last year's $9.2 million loss. Print circulation went up 4% for the Sunday title, and 1% for the daily version.
No one is claiming that print readership will return to its old levels, but some observers believe that, just as digital starts to pay off, the downward trajectory for print is starting to flatten out. Ed Williams, CEO of Edelman U.K., said at a presentation on 2015 trends, "For traditional media, their toes are just about touching the bottom of what has been two decades of decline. But that doesn't go for everyone: it's all about quality, and it's all about the high end."
The Times newspapers went behind a paywall in 2011, with owner Mr. Murdoch determined to demonstrate that consumers would pay for quality digital content. Since then, the titles have invested in sports rights to drive online traffic, but they have also made significant job cuts.
The Times titles don't need a huge staff to update stories constantly, because online they are more like a digital version of the print product than a rolling news service. Rather than chasing huge audiences, The Times is trying to develop lasting relationships with a smaller number of valuable readers by offering a range of member benefits....http://adage.com/article/global-news/focus-digital-starts-pay-u-k-newspaper-brands/296179/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=d520b51cfb-Need_to_Know_December_17_201412_17_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-d520b51cfb-31701933

How newspapers lost the Millennials

Newsosaur reporting:
The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.” 

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox. 

To delve into the demographic disparity, I pulled the audience data on Mic.Com, which comScore calls the favorite news destination for individuals from the ages of 18 to 34. Although many publishers and editors never may have heard of Mic, comScore says it is visited by a thumping 60% of Millenials. 
,,,In a recent study, researchers at the University of Missouri reported that only 29% of newspaper publishers conducted focus groups prior to putting paywalls around the digital products that most profess to be the future of their franchises.  

Instead of talking with their intended consumers, fully 85% of respondents to the survey said they asked other publishers what they thought about erecting barriers around the content that they had been freely providing for the better part of two decades.  

While paywalls boosted revenues at most newspapers because they were accompanied by stiff increases in print subscription rates, the tactic gave the growing population of digital natives – and non-readers of every other age – the best reason yet for not engaging with newspapers. 

Of course, newspapers were losing Millenials well before they started feverishly erecting paywalls in the last few years. But what if publishers and editors had begun studying the needs and attitudes of the emerging generation from the early days of the Millenium? Could the outcomes have been more positive?  

http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/12/how-newspapers-lost-millenials.html?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=aadbc83941-Need_to_Know_December_12_201412_12_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-aadbc83941-31701933

From BBC to BuzzFeed: lessons in mobile publishing

theguardian reporting:
...
The mobile tipping point happened for the BBC earlier this year. It’s happened for the Guardian, where the mobile traffic accounts for around 60% at weekends. And the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports that more people now access retail sites via mobile than desktop, by a ratio of 52 to 48.
But what does this trend mean for those involved in digital publishing? How does it inform the decisions publishers, editors, journalists and content sellers make? At the Press Gazette’s News on the Move conference earlier this month, five well-known media brands shared some lessons in mobile publishing.
1. Plan for the extended internet day – and week..
2. Think format
That’s format as in layout and format as in genre. “It’s about making [the text] scannable, quite modular,” said Nathalie Malinarich, mobile editor for BBC News
3. Remember, the web still rules

Advertisement

Smartphone and tablet users prefer news websites to news apps. At least that’s what the traffic figures suggest. At the Guardian, 20% of total page views come from the app while some 40% of page views come from mobile users visiting the website. What does this mean? It means you should have a robust business case before embarking on an app project. If you can’t make the case then a responsive, mobile-friendly website is probably the way to go. At least in the short term.
4. Use apps to upsell
5. Don’t forget the role of social media
7. It’s the content, stupid
For Alan Hunter, head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, it’s not principally about device or technology – it’s about the quality of the editorial. “Really great stories are what sell digital products. All our best hits, best dwell time are on the best stories,” Hunter said.” “You can’t put lipstick on a pig and hope it’s going to look good.”
http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2014/oct/30/lessons-mobile-publishing-buzzfeed-bbc?CMP=new_1194
 

The Newsonomics of the New York Times' New Cutbacks

Ken Doctor reporting:
...
The core content and paywall strategy of the Times worked — that’s Paywalls 1.0 — but building on it has been tougher than planned. Today’s move is significant, but it’s one that should be understood carefully.
How much had the Times invested in the new strategy? While it’s impossible to parse the differing kinds of resources the newsroom added over the last three years or so, the amount of them is a number to behold. In 2011, the Times counted 1,189 newsroom employees. At the end of 2013, the number was 1,251, up 5.2 percent. Currently, it counts 1,330, up 11.5 percent from 2011. With 100 to be taken out, the 1,230 number would still be 3.4 percent higher than three years ago. It’s worth highlighting: While the overall number of newspaper editorial staffers has declined across America (down 20,000 jobs, about 30 percent of the total, in seven years), the Times has been bolstering its staff.
....
Let’s look at four of the key questions to pop out of today’s move:

Is this a major business reversal?

No, the Times’ revenue is on a familiar path. If you look at the financials of the first six months of the year, reader revenue is still growing a bit and advertising is basically flat overall. The big bright spot is obscured by that big layoff number: a 16 percent increase in Q3 digital revenue, compared to 3.4 percent up in Q2 and 2.2 percent up in Q1. That’s a big number, and a hopeful one for the future as new executive vice president for ads Meredith Kopit Levien works through her massive overhaul of the Times ad operation.

Is the poor business performance of the new niche products a surprise?

Not really....

What do we learn about investing in news product?

The stock market — no surprise — loved today’s announcement. It was an announcement of business discipline. Call it a pivot, as CEOs like Thompson are wont to, or a sharp unexpected turn when the boulders in the road look larger than Google Maps told you.
We can figure that the 141 increase in staff in the newsroom over last 30 months cost about $12.5 million a year. Take out 100 of those and the Times saves about $9 million a year. That’s a positive financial move. Look at the wider expense context. Newspaper companies have been cutting expenses annually in the low- to mid-single digits for almost a decade now; that’s the only way they can stay profitable since they largely haven’t grown revenue year-over-year since 2005. Last year, the Times was down 2.1 percent in overall expenses, pruning in lots of places while investing in the newsroom and new products. Through the first six months of 2014, though, it’s been up 4.5 percent. Given the flattish revenue performance (more on which below), that number couldn’t hold. The Times’ operating profit for 2013 was $156.1 million, and Thompson’s already said it will be less than that in 2014.
..

What’s the size of the Times’ paying audience?

Consider this. At the end of the last century (1999, to be precise), the Times print paying circulation stood at:

• 1,097,200 daily;
• and 1,682,200 on Sunday.

Today, we see:

• 1,217,201 paying Sunday print readers;
• 680,905 paying daily (Monday-Friday) print readers;
• and those 870,000 digital-only subscribers.

Let’s compare some numbers, then. Adding today’s Sunday print to digital-only, we now get 2.08 million paying readers — or a little more than 300,000 more than the 1999 high-water mark, which was that Sunday print number.
Adding today’s daily print to digital only, we get 1.55 million paying readers, or close to the top print circulation (Sunday’s) of 1999.
http://newsonomics.com/the-newsonomics-of-the-new-york-times-new-cutbacks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newsonomics+%28Newsonomics%29

The Generation Game

InPublishing reports:
New media is now old. This year, the internet celebrates its 45th birthday, while online news in the UK has reached adulthood. Any publishing strategy needs to understand that we are now in a ‘three generations in one’ news industry. There are still the legacy products like 'dead tree' newspapers and analogue broadcast but there is also the content re-versioned for online. Then there are the purely 'digital native' enterprises who sprang up fully formed by the internet. One new trend is that those three generations are increasingly combined in interesting ways.
Last year, I wrote in this magazine that newspapers had all accepted the idea of ‘digital first’. This is the idea that even if you make most revenue out of analogue, you must still re-structure your business according to the priorities of digital production and consumption. It is now the time (overdue in fact) to hire developers, publish on demand and design everything for mobile.
The implication of that strategic shift is that content is now King, Queen and Jack of Hearts. In a world where the consumer can easily access what they want directly or through networks, it is the product not the platform that matters if you want to create a sustainable business. The last twelve months have backed that up in spades.
...
Thinking like natives
Some publishers have tried to create a digital startup culture within their own walls. European publishing giants Sanoma and Axel Springer have literally invited outsiders in on a competitive basis and picked the best for further investment. Even the dear old BBC has created a News Lab to act as a kind of internal innovation consultancy.
...So the dead tree press may still be sacking staff but it is also hiring new people. Digital revenues don’t match the golden days of the analogue advertising past but they are continuing to rise. The Guardian losses are being slashed, while groups like the Telegraph and Mail report profits. Even parts of the local press are getting their heads back above water. But there are two other massive structural trends that should concern UK papers: the new realities of global competition and the power of the platforms.

New Approaches to Paid Digital Content

Reuters Institute reporting:
Richard E, Picard:
There is a growing impetus toward paid digital content in print news providers. Many newspapers are now starting to follow early movers into paid services, with the Sun and Telegraph in UK following the path of the Financial Times and Times. In Germany, Bild became the first large-scale tabloid to require payment, and the majority of large dailies in Canada and Australia now require payments for digital access. News and public affairs magazines are taking a mixed approach, with some pursuing paid strategies and others trying more open ones. News organisations that employ collaborative, networked strategies relying on significant contributions from experts and the public are tending to pursue open or mixed-access approaches.
These differing approaches are representative of distinctive shifts in thinking about digital strategies and a growing sophistication of strategy involving news content.

New strategies for paid content

Four major strategic approaches to the question whether or not consumers should pay have emerged: (1) open sites for which consumers do not pay for access (although many sites have been free for the past two decades, the movement towards paid content is changing this from a default strategy to a deliberate choice designed to serve specific strategic functions), (2) a mixed approach, with some content available without payment and some paid, (3) a soft paywall requiring paid access, but with ability to share stories and limited access for search engines and links, and (4) a hard paywall necessitating paid access but without the ability to share and denial of access for search engines and linkages.
The questions of which approach to use are multifaceted and differential access pricing models are proliferating. Underlying this trend is increasing acceptance of view that the digital platforms provide different value and need to be conceived as different products. Differences in visual and presentational styles, storytelling, and experience are producing varying pay approaches as consumers show a greater willingness to pay for tablet and smartphone news content.
BILDplus, for example, offers three different price packages providing access via web, smartphone, and tablet apps for €4.99 monthly, web, smartphone, tablet apps, and epaper editions for €9.99 monthly, and BILDplus Komplett for €14.99 monthly that includes web, smartphone, tablet apps, epaper editions, and the printed paper.
Elsewhere, digital channels are also being used to offer special content apps and editions. In Spain, El Mundo has introduced an evening app edition and a daily gossip app. O Globo and O Estado de S. Paulo in Brazil have also created special new evening products for tablets and mobiles.
A major emerging strategy is the acquisition of video rights to help drive acceptance of paid tablet and smartphone services. The general press are producing more distinctive video content using their own journalists as well as offering news clips, while tabloids have focused their attention on sports and soap opera highlights.
http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/essays/2014/new-approaches-to-paid-digital-content/

The unbundling experiment: NYT Opinion creates another product on the shelf

themediabriefing reporting:
The New York Times' launch of its fourth new paid-for digital offering today – NYT Opinion – has been coming for a while.
CEO Mark Thompson announced at the FT Digital Media Conference in March the launch of NYT Premier and NYT Now and mentioned a cooking package and a paid opinion product would also be released in the coming weeks.
For some the NYT’s recent approach to its digital subscription offerings represents a clever slicing and dicing of NYT content, answering segmented audiences with segmented products. For others it represents the fact the publisher isn’t innovating as intelligently as it needs to and is finding as many ways to skin the same cat as possible.
NYT Opinion allows access to the “Grey Lady’s” opinion pages alone for $6 a month. That means the variety of digital subscriptions available to would-be readers is as follows:

• $6 /month for NYT Opinion
• $8 /month for NYT Top Stories including the NYT Now app
• $15 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone apps + NYT Now
• $20 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + tablet apps + NYT Now
• $35 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone and tablet apps + NYT Now
• $45 /month for NYTimes.com unlimited access + smartphone and tablet apps + NYT Now + behind-the-scenes look at NYT journalism
• http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/nyt-opinion-digital-product-app-innovation-technology-unbundling 

The newsonomics of NYT Now

Nieman Lab reporting:

...The product is straightforward. It’s mobile-only and, at launch, iPhone-only. On Android, the Times says, “We’re looking at it.” There’s no tablet or web access. As mobile usage surges past 50 percent in some parts of the day and week for the Times and other news companies, NYT Now aims to exploit the compulsive, near-OCD check-in behavior of 2014 life.
The app will be a standard, standalone iPhone app, not part of Apple’s Newsstand, where the Times’ core iOS app lives. Download the app and you get 10 free articles a month — the same way metered access works on the other Times’ digital products. The price is $2 a week or $8 for four weeks.
...
The journalism is NYT Now’s foundation. Importantly, that journalism is both self-referential (which is what we’d expect  of the proud, sometimes haughty, news standard of the Times) and breaking new ground —  encompassing a wider world beyond the Times. So readers of NYT Now will get 30 to 50 Times stories in a given day, with stories appearing and being replaced throughout the 24-hour cycle. That’s roughly 10 to 15 percent of its total number of articles and blog posts it writes daily.
It’s an editor’s product, put together around the clock by an editorial staff of 15 to 20 (in addition to another dozen or so on the business side). Levy is modeling it on the success of New York Today, the blogging-from-the-five-boroughs NYTimes.com section that he developed last spring and which has grown in reader (and publisher) appreciation over time. He and a growing staff have built NYT Now over nine months, starting with the idea of a “need-to-know” mobile product. Think of the content in three parts, each borrowed from New York Today:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-nyt-now/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=1233023689-Need_to_Know_March_28_20143_28_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-1233023689-31701933

Twitter Takes to TV Tie-Ins

eMarketer reporting:

Twitter showed in 2013 that its ad business is growing fast. Even as user growth slowed dramatically, ad revenues and ad engagement metrics ticked up.
Advertisers cite three reasons why they’re increasing spending on Twitter: The social network’s tie-ins with TV, its real-time nature and its willingness to partner closely on creative executions. Other developments that will drive growth this year include improved analytics, more ad offerings for international markets and additional ad products in the direct-response and ecommerce areas, according to a new eMarketer report, “Advertising on Twitter: Unique Opportunities Outweigh Slowing User Growth.” 

Twitter spent much of 2013 solidifying its connections with TV. It launched a new ratings business with Nielsen to measure TV-related conversations on Twitter; created new video ad opportunities with Amplify; and bolstered its association with high-profile TV events such as the Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars.
Twitter’s linkups with television are beneficial to both the TV industry and the social network. TV executives know that many people multitask on mobile devices while watching TV. On-air mentions of Twitter drive conversation about what’s on TV and help keep viewers focused on the television.

 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Twitter-Takes-TV-Tie-Ins/1010717/2

Twitter showed in 2013 that its ad business is growing fast. Even as user growth slowed dramatically, ad revenues and ad engagement metrics ticked up.
Advertisers cite three reasons why they’re increasing spending on Twitter: The social network’s tie-ins with TV, its real-time nature and its willingness to partner closely on creative executions. Other developments that will drive growth this year include improved analytics, more ad offerings for international markets and additional ad products in the direct-response and ecommerce areas, according to a new eMarketer report, “Advertising on Twitter: Unique Opportunities Outweigh Slowing User Growth.”

Twitter spent much of 2013 solidifying its connections with TV. It launched a new ratings business with Nielsen to measure TV-related conversations on Twitter; created new video ad opportunities with Amplify; and bolstered its association with high-profile TV events such as the Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars.
Twitter’s linkups with television are beneficial to both the TV industry and the social network. TV executives know that many people multitask on mobile devices while watching TV. On-air mentions of Twitter drive conversation about what’s on TV and help keep viewers focused on the television.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Twitter-Takes-TV-Tie-Ins/1010717#ZE4HrvWz3bP20iX9.99

The Dutch revolution in journalism: all newspapers behind one paydike

Blendle is a small journalism startup from The Netherlands. Recently, we (two 27-year old founders) got all major newspapers and magazines in the country to start a revolutionary experiment. The Netherlands will be the first country in the world where all articles of all newspapers and all important magazines will be available in one web app, with one pay wall, where users will only have to pay for the articles they read. We think that unbundling of journalism is the Holy Grail in getting young people to pay for journalism again.

Within Blendle, users can see what articles their friends or interesting curators (celebrities, journalists, politicians, radio DJ’s) have shared from the paid sections of today’s newspapers and magazines, and which articles are trending on the platform. The app also enables anyone to share articles from Holland’s best journalists on Facebook and Twitter. No more signing up with different paywalls for every newspaper. Users pay with a single click, and only for the articles they read. New users get €2.50 for free, and can then top up their Blendle wallet.

Until now, it was not possible for Dutch consumers to search for premium content from newspapers and magazines. Blendle is the first paid search engine for newspapers and magazines in the country. If a user wants to follow everything about specific subjects — say, the situation in Crimea, or bitcoins, or their favorite author — they can set email alerts for those words.

Users always pay a price per article (set by the publisher), but are also able to refund their money if they don’t deem the article worthy after reading it (a fair use policy applies). It’s a pretty cool function that greatly increases the amount of money spent on journalism in the beta.https://medium.com/changing-journalism/a2031594e430

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

Mario García: What's cooking with mobile and tablets

WAN IFRA reporting:

....Mario García, the renowned publications designer who recently completed his first digital book, "iPad Design Lab: Storytelling in the Age of the Tablet" (available from the iBookstore for iPad, as well as on Amazon Kindle and Google Books). As part of his faculty affiliate work at the Poynter Institute in the USA, he was part of the key research team for EyeTrack: Tablet, which in 2012 studied how tablet users read and interact with news.
...Can you generalise the challenges facing publishers in satisfying reader demand with their tablet products?
The first challenge is developing a philosophy. While many publishers are declaring the “digital first” banner as their own, it is a long way from declaring it to actually doing it. So the challenge is to see storytelling as the protagonist, then see how stories adapt to the various platforms. That requires a radical change in thinking in the newsroom, and, in most cases, an approach that says: In this organization we write for digital platforms first, then the rest happens organically.
Are you seeing more of a holistic mobile/multimedia strategy, i.e. tablet, mobile, online, print?
Indeed I am. That’s good news. There is near the end of 2013 a greater acceptance that a multi-platform world, the media quartet, as I call it, is the way to go. Let the story develop for each platform, exploring the full potential of each. Let’s not come to the office to plan a “newspaper” – emphasis on “paper.” It is beginning to happen, for which I am very happy.  It is no longer should we do it, it is HOW can we do it, and HOW SOON. Exciting times, indeed, for us storytellers.
What questions would you advise news publishers here to ask mobile/tablet/system providers who are promoting their solutions?

• Ask about the nexus where technology and storytelling meet. Those two are indispensable disciplines that must come together.
• Find out what the best technical solution is for you to manage your content flow in the most expeditious manner. Soak it all up in terms of how other organizations are doing, but, remember, your newspaper is different, and you cannot simply take a model you like and apply it to your situation. You must explore what is possible, then concentrate on how that would work with your specific publication.
• Be ready for change: embrace it, accept it and be ready to implement functions that are based on a rethinking of what you do and how you do it
•  http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2013/09/25/mario-garcia-whats-cooking-with-mobile-and-tablets-0

Mobile offers local media a digital do-over

Ken Doctor reporting:
The good news is that you only have to worry about one tech trend in 2014.  But it’s a doozy. 

The trend is the dramatic shift to mobile computing, a communications revolution rivaling the arrival of the Internet itself. The fast-moving swing to mobile from desktop computing is changing everything from interpersonal communications to news consumption to commerce.  

For newspapers and local broadcasters seeking to recapture some of the audience, revenues and relevance that they lost in the rather inelegant way they stumbled into Internet publishing in the 1990s, the shift to mobile computing represents a rare do-over. 

Because the mobile universe is largely a work in progress, there is time for legacy media companies to create transformational products to delight consumers and attract a host of advertising, subscription and transactional revenues. Local media companies have two advantages as they mobilize for mobile:

1.  They are unrivaled in the local power of their brands, their content-creation capabilities, their ad sales staffs and their ability to market new products through their existing media.
  
2.  Owing to their largely inept responses to the initial emergence of the Internet, publishers and broadcasters know the pain of blundering into a new business paradigm without a deep understanding of the dynamics of the marketplace or a thoughtful strategic plan for capitalizing on opportunities and defending against threats.  

In the interests of preventing history from repeating itself, here’s what everyone needs to know about this disruptive, compulsive new technology platform:
http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/01/mobile-offers-local-media-digital-do.html 

Ken Doctor reporting:
Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in.

The continued decline of print advertising is the very dark cloud hanging over the news industry and the darkening ones looming over the magazine industry. While digital advertising overtook print advertising in 2012 in the U.S. and globally, the accelerated pace of the print to digital movement is clear and fairly unwavering.

The test for 2014: How can publishers mitigate their print losses, pulling from an expanding toolbox of sponsored sections, events packages, custom publishing, and more to minimize as much as possible a near-universal negative number?
Digital advertising separates the pack
Last year, U.S. newspapers were up 4 percent in digital advertising, to a total of 11 percent of revenue. This year’s reports indicate that growth could well be less, closer to flattish, with many publishers struggling near the zero point. Yet some, which we’ll investigate in early 2014, are in double-digits. That’s a combination of executing on some of the ad buzzwords of the time — content marketing, native ads — but also on much less glamorous and written-about work like audience extension and yield optimization.

The test for 2014: With print ads spiraling downward, will the failure to execute on a strong and diversified digital ad strategy doom news organizations to even deeper cuts in staff and product?
...Mobility, mobility, mobility
There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money.

The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years.
http://newsonomics.com/the-newsonomics-of-how-the-news-industry-will-be-tested-in-2014/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newsonomics+%28Newsonomics%29