The overall structure of the journalism industry over the past years has heavily shifted to favor mobile devices as news outlets. The mobile format provides journalism with a large consumer base; average daily use of mobile phones in the U.S. has increased over the past few years to 177 minutes, superseding the average 168 minutes Americans spend watching TV per day, according to the slideshow presentation “Dial ‘M’ for Mobile Revenue.” Social media platform Facebook earns 70 percent of its revenue from its 500 million mobile users, the presentation reports.
The profitability of mobile news is staggering, as only five percent of total global adspend is produced from mobile internet, the presentation reports. In order for mobile to remain a successful format, journalism industry leaders need to examine current financial concerns and consider alternative methods of generating revenue from mobile news.
Nearly half of all digital news traffic comes from mobile, but mobile news generates less than 10 percent of digital revenue. Apps are a main facet of mobile, and media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal offer paid apps; however, people only spend three percent of their time using news apps, as opposed to the 32 percent of time spent using gaming apps. This poses a major burden on the overall industry, as fewer and fewer consumers are paying for news apps. And even if people decide to pay for apps, users will delete half of all downloaded apps after three months, the presentation reports.
The intersection of social media and journalism is also a huge factor in gaining readership and getting mobile users. Many social media platforms are finding themselves interconnected and almost competing with the news industry; Facebook controls social traffic of news articles, Snapchat incorporates content from different media outlets on its Discovery feature and YouTube provides mainstream and crowdsourced news, among other platforms. Revenue can be produced from social media platforms often through advertisements in the form of an editorial, otherwise known as native ads. Native ads are key for the success of mobile news, as they have a high yield of revenue and reconnect consumers with advertisers in a direct manner.
As industry leaders struggle to generate revenue from mobile, they must focus on the quality and uniqueness of the content their product produces and analytics to gain insights on viewer traffic; analytics platforms and software provide useful information about how many people are reading articles, what time they are consuming them and others. From there, leaders can find consumer patterns and behaviors to increase overall news consumption, the presentation reports.
Ultimately, they are left with maximizing either mobile apps or social media to generate revenue. While apps provide a lot of revenue and overall engage users better, leaders will need to spend big money in marketing and acquisition costs to ensure there is a strong access to the product, the presentation says. If leaders decide to focus on social media, they will generate news traffic from search and social and generate a more transparent, tech-savvy product.
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