Articles by: "Jacob L. Nelson—Doctoral Student, Northwestern University"

The rise of mobile among digital news audiences has been swift and relentless, and in just the past half year has gone from being neck-and-neck with desktop audiences to nearly 50% greater. How has mobile been able to surge ahead so quickly, and what are the implications for digital media economics as audiences shift?

To better understand the audience dynamics in today’s digital news environment, I conducted an analysis of leading digital news properties along with Andrew Lipsman, comScore VP of Marketing & Insights. We pulled together a selection of 25 leading news publishers, which ran the gamut from traditional print publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post to digital-first news entities like Buzzfeed and Vox, and computed their average audience and engagement metrics across desktop and mobile, app and mobile web.

As the above graph shows, the average number of desktop unique visitors to news sites was moving more or less in tandem with the average number of mobile unique visitors until late 2014. At that point there began to be a noticeable divergence in the two curves. As mobile unique visitors continued to quickly rise, desktop unique visitors softened. These opposing trends have continued on through June, indicating that more and more people are choosing to get the news on smartphones and tablets rather than on desktop.

Is Mobile Now Cannibalizing Desktop in the News Category?
The question arises whether it’s fair to suggest that mobile may finally be cannibalizing desktop. But first, some good news: on balance, news audiences are growing overall because the huge gains in mobile audience are substantially outweighing any softening on desktop. So in theory, this should be a boon to the digital news business because bigger audiences should translate into more ad or subscription dollars.

But the economics are not that simple. If mobile ad CPMs are, on average, lower than desktop ad CPMs the potential for cannibalization is real.

What is actually happening in terms of content audiences and engagement? The metrics below suggest that cannibalization might indeed be happening. When we looked at the six-month period beginning December 2014, which marked the start of the trend divergence, desktop news experienced a 13% drop in average audience while mobile news jumped 14% during that span. We also observed a 5% drop in desktop news engagement while mobile engagement jumped 21%.

Mobile is picking up the slack for desktop, and then some. And while desktop is in no real risk of cratering, it’s clear that audience growth today is coming from mobile and that digital news organizations should be pointing their strategy in the direction of that opportunity. This begs another important question as to what is the best path for mobile growth: apps or mobile web?

Apps vs. Mobile Web: Which Matters More to News Publishers?When a news consumer reads a New York Times article on their phone, are they more likely to do so via the newspaper’s app or on the mobile web, and which access method drives more overall consumption of content? The answer is while the mobile web is a much more important driver of audience, apps have a disproportionately high impact on engagement.

The graph above shows that an overwhelming majority – 93% – of these news publishers’ mobile audiences come from the mobile web rather than from an app. This is likely because many people get their news fix by way of social referral, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. This has the positive benefit of expanding news brands out to new audiences, but many of these “drive-by” visitors are more promiscuous with their news consumption. Loyalty is generally not their forte.

On the other hand, while apps comprise an average of just 6% of the 25 news properties’ mobile audiences, they account for nearly half (45%) of the time that audience spends with those properties. So although news apps may not be the most popular access method, their audience is clearly engaged in a way that the mobile web audience is not.

Someone who absently scrolls through their newsfeed on their phone and opens an interesting story only to close it moments later, might also open the New York Times app and spend a considerable amount of time cycling through each section. How they arrive at that content matters, and how they feel about that brand before engaging with the content determines how much time they’re likely to spend with it. “The mobile browser on a smartphone is a point of convenience,” Dow Jones’ chief innovation officer said recently. The app, on the other hand, “is the place where you discover engagement.”

But – and this is a big but – it’s not enough for a publisher to simply get their app on someone’s phone. The app must also occupy that hallowed real estate – often the homescreen – where users are more likely to engage with it. This is easier said than done. However, there are many clever strategies out there that publishers have yet to employ or even yet to discover.

Jacob L. Nelson (@JNelz) is a doctoral student in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology, and Society program and spent the summer working as an intern at comScore. A former journalist, his research looks at news consumption and media metrics.

Perspectives | Revenue

Accounting for Attention Minutes as a Currency

May 11, 2015 Jacob L. Nelson—Doctoral Student, Northwestern University

Time-based metrics are of considerable interest to online publishers. There seems little doubt that “attention minutes,” in one form or another, will be a tool used by both marketers and media. DCN has identified many of these possibilities. But it’s far from clear whether these metrics will, or should, displace more conventional measures of audience size. To consider the strengths and weaknesses of time-based metrics as currencies, we explored the relationship between the time people spend with websites and the popularity of those sites.

Do attention and popularity measure different things?
There is a long-standing law of consumer behavior called “Double Jeopardy” (DJ). It stipulates that popular offerings enjoy more consumer loyalty than unpopular offerings. DJ in television has meant that channels with high ratings have higher levels of time spent and repeat viewing. The only meaningful exception has been the “small-but-loyal” audiences of foreign language channels. So on the web, it’s possible that the most popular sites (as measured by UVs) also rack up the most attention minutes. If popularity and time spent are highly correlated, either metric would produce the same winners and losers.

To see if that’s true, we used comScore data to test the correlations among several metrics. We looked at three-month aggregates from October to December 2014 across 1,067 news sites. The time-spent measures, which included “average minutes per visit,” “average minutes per page,” and “average minutes per visitor,” were highly correlated.

However, there were only weak correlations between time spent and audience size. You can get a sense of this in the chart below. Most outlets with small-but-loyal audiences were, like TV, non-English sites. So there were no DJ effects. More importantly, it seems that time-based metrics are tapping into something quite different from popularity. So which is better suited to be a currency?

What do attention minutes tell us about content?
DCN and several others have suggested that attention minutes might be a good measure of audience engagement and quality. As such, attention minutes could be useful for developing content – which, in turn, could build audience loyalty. But currencies typically reflect the needs of advertisers. Do time-based metrics offer advertisers something of value that they can’t get from measures of popularity?

Source: comScore Media Metrix Key Measures Report, October – December 2014

At a minimum, attention minutes can help authenticate exposure to an ad, serving as an extension of viewability standards. Beyond that, it’s harder to see why an advertiser would put a premium on the audiences’ engagement with a publisher’s content. One possibility is that an ad becomes more effective when it’s surrounded by content that has truly engaged readers. But here, the evidence is mixed. There’s some indication that the benefits of engagement in content bleed over to advertising. For example, a 2012 comScore report concluded that content engagement is more strongly correlated with advertising effectiveness than clicks or total impressions. Additionally, a 2009 experiment found that user engagement and advertising effectiveness are positively associated. On the other hand, consistent definitions of engagement are elusive. What’s more, a 2013 Nielsen report suggests that it’s the medium, rather than the content, that most greatly affects advertising efficacy.

If advertisers are convinced that engaging content benefits their ads, premium publishers might be able to profit from that association. But programmatic buying is gaining ground in online advertising, and that potentially divorces ad placement from its surrounding content (though the number of private marketplaces is growing). Some advertisers don’t care about content apart from its ability to deliver the attention of prospective customers. It’s the characteristics of the people being delivered that are likely to matter most for any currency.

What do attention minutes tell us about visitors?
Advertisers typically use metrics to describe and target audiences. Historically that’s been age and gender, but with all the digital exhaust users leave behind, it now seems the sky’s the limit. You could identify those users who are engaged by time spent measures, then add them to the targeting mix. But it could backfire. Our findings indicated that individuals who spent large amounts of time on news sites tended to be heavy web users. In other words, they spend a lot of time online. In a world that’s driven by programmatic buying, the heaviest users are the easiest for advertisers to reach. The laws of supply demand suggest they’ll be of less value to advertisers. And this just might turn the A in attention minutes into a scarlet letter.

James G. Webster is a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He’s the author of The Marketplace of Attention and Ratings Analysis: Audience Measurement and Analytics.

Jacob L. Nelson is a doctoral student in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology, and Society program. A former journalist, his research looks at news consumption and media metrics.