Student journalist/entrepreneurs offer tips to improve newspapers' WAP functionality

June 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

Editor’s note: In the Annenberg-Marshall-Viterbi News Entrepreneur Fellowship Program students from three USC colleges collaborated to invent the future of news. Last month, three teams (each including students from USC Annenberg School of Journalism, USC Marshall School of Business, and USC Viterbi School of Engineering) devised and pitched economically viable mobile news ideas to executives from Los Angeles-area news organizations.

This week and next, the teams will present a summary of their recommendations here on OJR: Part I

USC Annenberg journalism student Dominique Fong was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile strategies for the Los Angeles Times. Other students on this team: Vibhor Mathur (USC Viterbi School of Engineering), Jason Choi (Viterbi)

Overview

Our mobile strategy recommendations for the Los Angeles Times are grounded in the “3 Ps” best practices identified by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in a report on the trend of more participatory behaviors in the way that people consume news: participation, portability and personalization. The challenge of increasing revenue within existing corporate restraints led us to consider a fourth “P,” partnership, to more efficiently accomplish innovation across multiple digital platforms while increasing revenue potential.

Participation

Because millions of mobile users already turn to the Times to stay informed and fill idle moments, the organization should seek to maximize user engagement (and, consequently, brand affinity) among existing users while also attracting new ones. Implementing four new features would advance this agenda. Expanded integration of social media by adding a multipurpose widget (like Slate.com’s right column on its website) to a mobile app or WAP would allow users to engage with content over their networks without having to leave the Times site. Another idea is a thumb up/thumb down rating option, like the Daily Beast, which lets users immediately voice their opinion about what articles are most newsworthy with the incentive that more popular content is given higher standing on the home page. Third is a save option, giving readers an incentive to revisit content and advertising in the Times app. Fourth is empowering audiences to upload content directly to the newspaper, similar to CNN’s iReport but more immediate and intuitive (using the existing website photo-sharing mechanism and possibly through a partnership with Foursquare).

Portability

The intrinsic portability of mobile phones is a strong argument to exploit geolocation, a feature within an app to track and mark a user’s location. To prevent privacy infringement, organizations should offer users the option to decline permission for detecting their location. The Times can offer targeted newsfeeds, such as alerts for bomb scares, news according to neighborhood from the mapping project, and selective, exclusive restaurant reviews from the dining and calendar section databases. Geolocation can also improve advertising campaigns by triggering ad displays relevant to a user’s specific location.

Personalization

Segmentation of audiences based on user behavior and preferences will add value to advertising packages by allowing customers to more precisely target specific user groups. Brief opt-in surveys regarding user demographics, consumption behaviors and content preferences would facilitate targeted advertising campaigns while allowing users to partially customize their content experience. In addition to global ads, the Times would also be able to facilitate more precise customer to audience interaction through localized banners or interactive ads (including “click to call,” “where to buy,” and “save for later” options) that change according to the user’s characteristics, habits and location. The advantages of interactive ads, of particular importance to tablets, are exemplified by an ad for cameras in a Sports Illustrated iPad app.

Another easily implementable segmentation option would be to enable mobile device detection on apps and the mobile site. When an app detects that it is displaying Times content on a feature phone, ads for “upgrade to iPhone” or for phone-specific games and ringtones could appear. Click-through rates have been successful for the Helsinki Sanomat, which uses Starcut, the same WAP site developer as the Times.

Partnerships

In order to move quickly, the Times should consider partnering with third party mobile ad networks that offer premium and geolocated ads, or look into licensing technology from those networks. Adlocal provides detailed metrics and real-time revenue counts as well as geolocation compatibility, as do competitors such as Acuity Mobile, AppLoop, AdInfuse and Yowza (an iPhone app that offers geo-aware coupons). Collaborative agreements with existing premium advertisers could guarantee revenue from creation of an iPad app, as Chase collaborated with The New York Times. Instead of following trends, strategic partnerships with key existing customers and leading technology firms could position the Times to advance both innovation and revenue growth, better serving audiences and customers.

Los Angeles Times WAP site with more interactive features:

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Student journalist/entrepreneurs look at mobile tablet strategies for newspapers

June 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Editor’s note: In the Annenberg-Marshall-Viterbi News Entrepreneur Fellowship Program students from three USC colleges collaborated to invent the future of news. Last month, three teams (each including students from USC Annenberg School of Journalism, USC Marshall School of Business, and USC Viterbi School of Engineering) devised and pitched economically viable mobile news ideas to executives from Los Angeles-area news organizations.

This week and next, the teams will present a summary of their recommendations here on OJR.

USC Annenberg journalism student Rebecca Lett was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile tablet strategies for the Orange County Register. Other students on this team: Kevin Lu (USC Annenberg), Drew Prickett (USC Marshall school of business), and Saravanan Rangaraju (USC Viterbi school of engineering).

The Orange County Register hadn’t foreseen the downfall of print journalism with the rise of the Internet. Ian Hamilton, the Register’s technology reporter, Sonya Smith, social and mobile leader, and Claus Enevoldsen, director of interactive marketing, had anxiously explained the Register’s position as a print news organization in hopes that we, two Annenberg students, one Marshall student and one Viterbi student, could develop a new strategy that potentially could save their business.

We put ourselves in their shoes. Print journalism, the path they had passionately chosen for themselves years ago, would never be the primary source of news again. Online publications, being free with cheap advertising, could not become a substantial source of revenue as they are.

After a decade of canceled print subscriptions in favor of reading more up to date content for free on the Internet, would people be willing to pay for online content? And more specifically, would people pay for mobile news applications on their phones and tablets (e.g. the iPad)?

In our presentation, we reconfirmed what the Register had been silently telling themselves all along – mobile is here to stay. We encouraged the Register to be early adopters and to incorporate advanced tablet strategy into their working mobile strategy.

According to our research, the tablet will be very popular in Orange County as early as next year, which means the hefty investment is likely to be worth it in the long run.

As a team, we first decided that the Register had four main sources of providing news content: print, online, mobile and tablet (in order from oldest to newest). We then determined the audience affected by these different sources to be readers, advertisers and the Register itself.

We researched, debated and consulted readers, advertisers and experts to confidently assert that journalism was moving from print towards the tablet.

From the Register’s perspective, the tablet holds the most potential for generating the most revenue. Readers are willing to pay for subscriptions because tablets deliver the most current and personalized content. Advertisements can be different sizes, different media, extremely high quality, QR coded and geo-location based, which will enable the Register to charge substantially more than they do online.

From the advertisers’ perspective, the tablet has the ability to direct ads to specific audiences, to receive and track responses to ads and to display high-quality, instantly effective ads. In other words, tablet advertising will be worth the price.

And from the readers’ perspective, the tablet will become the most convenient multimedia tool in the future. A reader can e-mail, watch TV shows and movies, listen to music, read and interact through social media in one place. It’s the improved webpage that people will pay for because it provides the intimacy of a traditional newspaper, modern sleekness, and the ability to interact with content and to share content through e-mail and social media.

The fact that there is proven future for news organizations in the tablet is a hard for print monopolies to digest, however it is a fact that must be accepted in order for news organizations to stay up to pace with technology.

I know I am speaking for my whole team when I say this experience was as eye opening to us as it was for the news organizations. And personally, my hesitations about the declining field of journalism were transformed into anticipation for the rise of an exciting, mobilized journalism.

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What does Apple's new mobile iAd format mean for news publishers?

April 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Is Apple’s new iAd system a game-changer for the business of mobile application development?

With Steve Jobs’ announcement at yesterday’s press preview of the new iPhone OS 4.0, Apple’s now in the ad network business. Like Google before it, Apple is opening the advertising market to a new group that didn’t have easy, direct access to it before – in this case, mobile application developers.

Sure, many current apps are ad-supported: Just cruise through the iPhone app store and look at how many apps come in two versions – a paid one and an ad-supported “free” or “lite” version. But by integrating an ad service system with the iPhone’s operating system, which will now support multi-tasking, Apple’s new iAds have the potential for offering a far superior user experience than current “click-away” ads.

We’ll have to see iAds in a live environment before the publishing industry will learn if the iAd’s improved functionality leads to better click-through rates among iPhone application users. Thanks to a generation of lousy ads for lousy products, many consumers have been conditioned to hate ads, and either to ignore them or ignore applications or publications that place them too obtrusively within their content.

Functionality is nice. The ability to stay within the application while viewing an expanded ad is helpful both to readers and to publishers. But, ultimately, that functionality doesn’t matter to someone who never clicks or selects an ad.

Apple will need to find a way, working with its app developer partners, to improve click-through rates on ad-supported apps, if app publishers are to see any significant increase in revenue from iAds.

Publishers currently making significant income from app sales will want to keep an eye on how popular iAds become, too. If the public accepts the iAd format, expect to see a rush of publishers abandon “pay” applications in favor of offering iAd-supported free ones, ultimately pressuring other publications to drop (or eliminate) their application prices, as well.

One of the great utilities that Google has provided its AdSense publishers is access to Google’s eye-tracking research showing the “hot spots” within various common webpage designs, to guide page designers on the most effective place to position banner ads. Apple will need to have similar research in hand, and be willing to share it with developers, to maximize click-through potential for the iAd.

Similarly, Apple will need to develop a sub-community within its developer community, devoted to analyzing ad design. As a news publisher who’s been tracking the click-through performance of hundreds of ads run on my sites over the past few years, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about which elements within ads elicit clicks from my users. That’s information that advertisers and publishers will need to learn from the iAd environment. Apple’s in the best position to facilitate the conversations that will lead to such learning. If it fails to do so, the learning process will take much longer for all involved, damaging the iAd’s potential for success.

Ultimately, though, the iAd will succeed or fail on its content. Is what is being advertised in an iAd something of interest to a particular app’s users, or not?

Google’s brilliance was not in selling text (and, later, banner) ads on publishers’ websites, it was how it did that. Google created an automated process by which “long-tail” advertisers could bid on previously unsold space on “long-tail” publishers’ websites – sites that often did not have well-paying ads before AdSense, due to those publishers’ inability (or lack of knowledge how) to sell ads.

Google extended the advertising market, by matching smaller advertisers with smaller publishers in a way that nevertheless resulted in highly targeted ads. Eventually, bigger players got involved, and now you can find slick, Flash ads from Fortune 100 companies running on one-person blogs, as well as text ads from mom-and-pop stores on the webpages of major traditional news publications.

Apple’s not yet provided the details on how it will sell iAds. Nor has it said if it will enable publishers to sell into the iAd space, as Google’s AdSense partners can do (and very easily, using Google’s AdManager system). Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless earlier this year, giving it a strong head start in luring large advertisers and publishers to the iAd.

But the big money online is not in servicing a few large accounts. It’s in servicing millions of smaller ones. If all iAds do is to provide a slightly better functioning advertising tool for businesses already engaged in mobile advertising, it might provide a nicely improved revenue stream to those companies. But if Apple can find a way to expand the market for mobile advertising the way that Google did on the Web with its text ads, then Apple will transform mobile application publishing, creating a powerful economic incentive for millions of people to start developing their own apps.

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