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Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of March 22, 2018

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives

We need design that is faster and design that is slower

During a recent conversation with David Sleight, Design Director at ProPublica, I found myself realizing and saying “we need design that is faster and design that is slower.”

Who are we and what is this thing called design?

When I say “we,” I mean our whole industry, when I say “our whole industry,” I mean design, and when I say “design,” I mean: web design and development; digital product design; digital user experience design; digital user interface design; digital interaction design; “mobile” design (which is the same thing as web design and development); graphic design as part of UX, UI, interactive, digital, and web design; publishing and editorial design; and other design practices specifically empowered by the internet and digital technology and built largely around reading and interacting with words on screens.

A mouthful, isn’t it? Some people mean all the above when they say “UX.” I generally mean all the above when I say “design” and call myself a designer.

I exclude from the category, for this specific discussion, tactile, conversational, and passive design powered by the internet of things. Not because those practices are uninteresting or unimportant — on the contrary, they are fascinating, exciting, and fraught with critical ethical questions — but because they are not specifically screen- and reading-driven. And it’s our screen- and reading-driven design that needs a reset.

Our whole industry, as I’ve just defined it, needs design that is faster for people who are trying to get things done, for they are our customers and should not be burdened by our institutional surrenders. We need design that is slower for people who are trying to comprehend, for they are our only chance of saving the world.

This porridge is too fast

Derek Powazek’s {fray} (1996) was an early site that practiced art direction on the web.

Our news and information sites have succeeded so well, they are failing. We’ve designed them to be quickly scannable — at a glance, I take in the headline, the key visual, and the lead paragraph. But today’s news is anything but simple. The truth cannot be reduced to visual sound bytes. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place.

As a society, we’ve replaced thinking with slogans, listening with wall-building. Our best news publications are doing a better and better job of reporting beyond headlines — getting down to the details that really matter. But we designers have so trained readers to scan and move on — Pacmans scarfing dopamine hits — that they no longer have the instinct to sit back and take their time with what they’re reading.

Our news designs must work to slow down the reader, engage her more deeply, encourage her to lean back and absorb. The good news is, we’ve long had the tools to do it: typography and whitespace.

Imagine that! Typography and whitespace can encourage thoughtful reading.

Larger type — type that actually encourages the reader to sit back in her chair — plus radically uncluttered interfaces and (when budget permits and the story merits it) art direction are the way to do it. Derek Powazek’s late lamented {fray} (1996 — remnant here) and Lance Arthur’s Glassdog were the first sites to do real art direction on the web. Jason Santa Maria’s personal site was a later, brilliant exponent of art direction on the web. (See “Previous/Embarrassing Editions.”)

You can see these techniques working in the recent designs of The Washington Post (but not its homepage), The New York Times (but not its homepage), ProPublica, Slate, Smashing Magazine, and Vox — with inspiration from predecessors including the Readability application, Medium, and A List Apart.

To a great extent, the ability of news publications to pursue slow design depends on their ability to finance themselves without overly relying on race-to-the-bottom advertising. Not all periodicals can free themselves of this dependency.

On the flip side of the news experience, which must be savored and digested slowly, comes the challenge of our corporate and organizational sites, which must become faster — not just technically, but (even more importantly) in terms of their content’s comprehensibility.

In the beginning, there was shovelware

As the once-vital blogosphere recedes from the equation, and as traditional periodical publications struggle to retain solvency and relevancy (and wrestle with readability), the web becomes the turf of stores like Amazon, powerful networks like Facebook, and traditional corporate brochureware. It’s this brochureware that most needs fixing—most needs to be designed to be faster.

In the 1990s, disgruntled computer buyers coined the word “shovelware” to refer to the second-rate games, fonts, and software that came pre-bundled with many PCs. It wasn’t stuff you had to have, carefully curated by software wizards who cared for you — it was garbage presented as value. Early web designers, including your present author, soon used “shovelware” to refer to the reams of corporate copy that got thoughtlessly dumped into the first corporate sites. The corporate overlords thought of the stuff as content. The readers didn’t think of it at all.

Getting easier to publish and harder to communicate

So we spent years preaching that the web was not print, finding ways to design words on screens so they could be scanned and used. We learned to inventory our old content and develop the will and the sales ability to toss the dross. Only content stringently designed to satisfy both customer and business needs would be permitted onto our excellent corporate websites. At least, that was how we did it when it came time for a major redesign (and only when astute stakeholders permitted it).

But most of the time, and constantly between redesigns, junk still got shoveled into our websites. We even made it easier for the shovelers. We developed CMS systems and gave everyone in the organization the power to use them. It was easier for us to let people publish the stuff their little group cared about than to stop and ask what mattered to the customer. And it was also easier for the organization, as it enabled warring fiefdoms to avoid difficult meetings.

It was easier. But not better.

And the CMS systems multiplied, and the web-savvy middle managers were fruitful, and the corporate site was filled with documents nobody but those who posted them ever read. And the corporate site sucked. It sucked harder than it had even in the earliest shovelware days of the 1990s. It sucked deeper and wider and more frequently and with better algorithms. For all our talk of user journeys and mental models, most corporate sites are mostly pretty garbage.

Shhh! Don’t tell the client. They still owe us a payment.

Ethan Marcotte’s 2010 article, “Responsive Web Design” not only changed web layout, it pointed the way to more meaningful content.

 

Beyond pretty garbage

Gerry McGovern’s “Top Tasks” method showed how to prioritize the information the customer seeks over the darlings of Management. Ethan Marcotte’s responsive web design and Luke Wroblewski’s mobile-first strategies pointed the way to restoring the focus on what’s most essential. There’s no room for pretty garbage on the small screen. Now, before it’s too late, we must fulfill the promise those visionaries and others have shared with us. If we want to save our brochure sites, we must make them not just faster, but relevant faster.

Designing with the content performance quotient (CPQ) in mind is how we will take the next step. We’ll ruthlessly prune the inessential, cut our sitemaps down to size, slash our bloated pathways, removing page after unloved page, until there’s nothing left but near-neural pathways from the user to the information she seeks.

In short, we will sculpt the design, presentation, and amount of content in our brochure sites with the same scalpel we take to the shopping carts in our e-commerce sites.

Evaluating speed or relevancy for your site’s content

How can we tell which sites should be faster, and which should be slower? It’s easy. If the content is delivered for the good of the general public, the presentation must facilitate slow, careful reading. If it’s designed to promote our business or help a customer get an answer to her question, it must be designed for speed of relevancy.

A conversation with David Sleight – The Big Web Show № 171.

I’ll continue to explore both these themes in future articles . My thanks to ProPublica’s David Sleight for the remarkable conversation that helped give birth to this piece. David is a web designer, creative director, and leader at the intersection of publishing and digital technology. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces “investigative journalism with moral force.” To hear the complete conversation, don your headphones and listen to Episode № 171: Art Directing the News — with ProPublica Design Director David Sleight on The Big Web Show.

Jeffrey Zeldman is an entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster, and speaker on web design. He is the founder of A List Apart Magazine and the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and the co-founder of A Book Apart and the design conference An Event Apart. He also co-hosts The Big Web Show, a podcast about the web and online publishing.

This post originally appeared on Medium. It has been reprinted with the author’s permission.

Advertising | Perspectives | Policy

Why the IAB GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework is a non-starter for publishers

The most significant opportunity in more than a decade to steer value towards our members is playing out now in Europe.

It is DCN’s role to help shape the future of the digital ecosystem to bend towards the interests of trusted content companies while your team focuses on the day-to-day operations. We work every day to do this and to raise the bar of trust with both advertisers and consumers.  Unlike other parts of the web media industry, we’re fortunate these efforts often align.  That is, by increasing trust for consumers and advertisers, the brands of DCN will prosper in the long-term. We are starting to see the pendulum swing in our favor – both in consumer subscriptions and the trust and transparency of the advertising market – and are working hard to accelerate it.

Since DCN exclusively represents content companies, we occasionally have a different point of view from other parts of the media ecosystem including intermediaries (e.g. ad tech companies, Google, Facebook). The business model of these intermediaries has for many years relied on harvesting the data generated from advertiser and consumer relationships with our members’ websites and apps. Right now, there is significant debate over how to best participate in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and what the effects of the roll-out of will be.  The rules of GDPR, which set a new bar for consumer privacy, were finalized years ago and since that time have inspired a rich amount of misinformation, disagreement and fear, only increasing as the GDPR enforcement date of May 25, 2018 approaches.

The IAB and IAB Europe, which are charged with representing a much broader set of stakeholders including hundreds of ad tech companies, Google, Facebook, Oath, and many others with significant intermediary interests, has released its plan to handle the GDPR roll-out.  The IAB framework, which was submitted for industry commenting, was clearly designed by ad tech companies and included endorsement from 23 ad tech companies and, most notably, zero publishers.

The IAB GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework should be considered a non-starter by all publishers as it fails on several levels and requires significant changes.

Details will be discussed in other forums but can be summarized as it:

  1. relies on cookies which are unreliable in many experiences;
  2. pushes all liability to the publisher without providing any control over the CMPs, SSPs, DSPs, exchanges and how they use this data;
  3. outsources the consent relationship with the user to a “Consent Manager Provider” (CMP) operated by an IAB-friendly;
  4. does not leverage the direct relationship between a publisher and its audience to manage consent and store it persistently in the browser (e.g. DNT);
  5. fails to reduce friction for users giving consent for purposes most important to publishers and most acceptable to users;
  6. unintentionally creates more friction with your audience for editorial and product features for the sake of protecting ad tech vendors.

Thus, it will most likely enable a practical use case where global consent is enacted to protect the status quo of maximum behaviorally-targeted advertising and unbridled data collection. In other words, their goal is to use “free” services to encourage users to click, “Turn All On” and opt back into the status quo.

Please reach out to us directly and make certain your business leaders and partners understand there are serious flaws with the IAB Consent Framework.  We strongly urge publishers to hold off signing up with the 23 companies (and Google and Facebook behind the scenes) to support the framework in its current form.

Once again, there is a window here in which publishers can rebuild consumer and advertiser trust. The most significant advertisers in the world are aligned with us on this as they begin to see their pursuit of truly one-to-one advertising across the wider web as economically and legally challenging.  GDPR will create opportunity for audience selection based on cohorts and context which is a significant risk to Google and Facebook. GDPR moves advertisers away from their current buying habits supported by the myth they can simply harvest demand through microtargeting personal data. Creating new demand through context and true relevance is the sweet spot of trust and true publishers.

And where there is significant risk to Facebook and Google and opportunity for growing consumer trust, you will come out ahead.

Advertising | Perspectives

Will the tracker always get through?

(Note: I work for Mozilla. None of this is secret. None of this is Mozilla policy. Not speaking for Mozilla here.)

A big objection to tracking protection is the idea that the tracker will always get through. Some people suggest that as browsers give users more ability to control how their personal information gets leaked across sites, things won’t get better for users, because third-party tracking will just keep up. On this view, today’s easy-to-block third-party cookies will be replaced by techniques such as passive fingerprinting where it’s hard to tell if the browser is succeeding at protecting the user or not, and users will be stuck in the same place they are now, or worse.

I doubt this is the case because we’re playing a more complex game than just trackers vs. users. The game has at least five sides, and some of the fastest-moving players with the best understanding of the game are the ad fraud hackers. Right now ad fraud is losing in some areas where they had been winning, and the resulting shift in ad fraud is likely to shift the risks and rewards of tracking techniques.

Data center ad fraud

Fraudbots, running in data centers, visit legit sites (with third-party ads and trackers) to pick up a realistic set of third-party cookies to make them look like high-value users. Then the bots visit dedicated fraudulent “cash out” sites (whose operators have the same third-party ads and trackers) to generate valuable ad impressions for those sites.

If you wonder why so many sites made a big deal out of “pivot to video” but can’t remember watching a video ad, this is why. Fraudbots are patient enough to get profiled as, say, a car buyer, and watch those big-money ads. And the money is good enough to motivate fraud hackers to make good bots, usually based on real browser code. When a fraudbot network gets caught and blocked from high-value ads, it gets recycled for lower and lower value forms of advertising. By the time you see traffic for sale on fraud boards, those bots are probably only getting past just enough third-party anti-fraud services to be worth running.

This version of ad fraud has minimal impact on real users. Real users don’t go to fraud sites, and fraudbots do their thing in data centers and don’t touch users’ systems. The companies that pay for it are legit publishers, who not only have to serve pages to fraudbots—remember, a bot needs to visit enough legit sites to look like a real user—but also end up competing with ad fraud for ad revenue. Ad fraud has only really been a problem for legit publishers. The adtech business is fine with it, since they make more money from fraud than the fraud hackers do, and the advertisers are fine with it because fraud is priced in, so they pay the fraud-adjusted price even for real impressions.

What’s new for ad fraud

So what’s changing? More fraudbots in data centers are getting caught, just because the adtech firms have mostly been shamed into filtering out the embarassingly obvious traffic from IP addresses that everyone can tell probably don’t have a human user on them. So where is fraud going now? More fraud is likely to move to a place where a bot can look more realistic but probably not stay up as long—your computer or mobile device. Expect ad fraud concealed within web pages, as a payload for malware, and of course in lots and lots of cheesy native mobile apps. Ad fraud makes way more money than cryptocurrency mining, using less CPU and battery.

So the bad news is that you’re going to have to reformat your uncle’s computer a lot this year, because more client-side fraud is coming. Data center IPs don’t get by the ad networks as well as they once did, so ad fraud is getting personal. The good news, is, hey, you know all that big, scary passive fingerprinting that’s supposed to become the harder-to-beat replacement for the third-party cookie? Client-side fraud has to beat it in order to get paid, so they’ll beat it. As a bonus, client-side bots are way better at attribution fraud (where a fraudulent ad gets credit for a real sale) than data center bots.

Users don’t have to get protected from every possible tracking technique in order to shift the web advertising game from a hacking contest to a reputation contest. It often helps simply to shift the advertiser’s ROI from negative-externality advertising below the ROI of positive-externality advertising.

Advertisers have two possible responses to ad fraud: either try to out-hack it, or join the “flight to quality” and cut back on trying to follow big-money users to low-reputation sites in the first place. Hard-to-detect client-side bots, by making creepy fingerprinting techniques less trustworthy, tend to increase the uncertainty of the hacking option and make flight to quality relatively more attractive.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of March 15, 2018

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives

SXSW pushes back against tech

The SXSW Interactive festival has expanded beyond its tech-centric past to include panels and discussions on politics, journalism, food, and other cultural conversations of the moment. But among these hot topics is, of course, technology and its influence on the future of these other sectors. From grasping the blockchain to pushing back against tech giants, the festival, in many ways, is media Twitter come to life. (Remember that SXSW brought Twitter to life after the show in 2007.)

But this year certain trends stood out more than others. The show was dominated by politics and ideas – which trumped gadgets and apps. Here are some key takeaways and themes from this year’s festival:

Pushback on Technology

It’s been over a year since the 2016 election, but technology’s role in its outcome, the resulting fallout, and the rise of misinformation and social media warfare has given tech a black eye. Top that off with the outsize influence platforms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are having over our lives. Those topics and conversations dominated SXSW panels this year.

The back and forth between Facebook director of product Alex Hardiman and CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter during a panel on Facebook and publishers delved deeply into the tricky territory publishers find themselves in, especially with Facebook’s recent algorithmic changes that prioritize friends and family over news outlets. Hardiman, for one, admitted that Facebook has flattened news. However, he insisted that Facebook is not a publisher, much to the chagrin of tech and news experts like Kara Swisher and Christiane Amanpour, who cried foul to these claims during another panel.

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s much talked-about appearance included a depressing take on artificial intelligence: “The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads,” he said. “If humanity decides that digital super-intelligence is the right move, we should do so very carefully.”

One thing is certain: No longer are we simply enthralled at the latest gadget or the future of tech. Just as the media and tech beat has changed for the journalists who cover them, so too have festivals like SXSW that present the myriad of ways media and technology are intersecting and changing our world.

Hollywood Makes a Scene

When the most-talked about marketing ploy at SXSW is an HBO show come to life, that proves that the convergence of Hollywood and technology is complete. The real-life replica of HBO’s show “Westworld” makes the case for investment in experiential marketing to drive brand attention. Certainly, SXSW attendees will recall the show when it returns for a second season. And with the way the news cycle seems never-ending, brands and shows that draw attention to themselves outside the digital world and in the real world can elicit interest and help ensure audiences won’t scroll past them.

To further reinforce Hollywood’s SXSW impact, look no further than the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Ready Player One.” Set in a dystopian future where the characters spend their lives inside a virtual reality system. SXSW is certainly a fitting festival to premiere a movie of this kind. But with the avalanche of shows like “Westworld” and “Black Mirror” that deal with these topics, the movie premiere is simply one of the ways we can see tech’s imprint on our culture.

The Voice Battle Continues

Google Home or Amazon Echo? It’s a huge question among those testing the digital voice assistants revolutionizing the future of search and the mainstreaming of a “smart home.” Amazon may have an initial leg up with Echo over Google and Apple’s HomePod — Alexa hit the market first — but Google is playing catch-up with massive marketing splashes at CES and now SXSW.

The tech giant turned a house in Austin into a huge advertisement for Google Home by connecting everything from blinds to appliances to Google Assistant, and showing people how such a Google home could function. A sign in front of the house, “Make Google Do It,” reinforced the concepts behind the gadgets, which included a sock-sorting robot.

But the battle for the voice is very much at the center of a smart home. With voice technology continuing to evolve (and the stiff competition against Amazon in this market), Google is also testing custom voice commands and working with third-party publishers to keep users engaged. Magazine publisher Hearst, for example, is partnering with Google to support subscriptions that can offer news alerts and daily “wisdom” in whatever areas a user prefers.

This sounds a lot nicer than Alexa laughing at you (a recent tech glitch). But it’s safe to say that Google and Amazon are in a tough battle in this department. And Apple is knocking at the door, which will push all the companies to do better.

SXSW Gets Political

From Russian trolls hacking Facebook to YouTube’s war with misinformation and Trump’s tweets, technology is now tightly intertwined with political life. And the presence of politicians at SXSW and conversations about news and politics were inescapable.

There was Mark Warner, U.S. Senator from Virginia, on “Hacking our Democracy and Discourse.” Discussions on policy and regulation with “Tech Under Trump.” Another panel on curtailing patent trolls, patent regulation, and U.S. Supreme Court cases that are bringing reform. And let’s not forget former presidential nominee and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders — endearing to many for his grouchy take on trends, but who has now made his first appearance at SXSW, in a conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper. And Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked on the tendency among journalists to still not give Trump supporters credit for knowing what they were doing when voting the president in.

Then there’s the begrudging and critical look at the news cycle and national reckoning over #MeToo. Christiane Amanpour made it clear that the battles she thought she won in the ’90s are still taking place today — like continuing to be the only woman in the room. Amanpour boiled the situation down: “We are at peril and at risk if we don’t know the difference between truth and lies…Truth and lies are the only thing that separates us from democracy and dictatorship.”

It was the perfect underscore for the New York Times’ recent marketing campaign, also present at SXSW. Over social hour and drinks at the bar, attendees could leave with a Times button defining our era: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.” And at SXSW, the importance of truth, politics and ideas seemed to drown out the newest apps and tech gadgets.

Perspectives

How to maximize the value of your digital publishing properties

A veritable bonanza of market developments – ranging from pedestrian pricing pressure to international political drama – have conspired to cause the “‘pendulum’ of power in global media to [finally] swing away from Google and Facebook” and “signal that their domination of global media is not guaranteed”. Though by no means a fait accompli, the digital media landscape could very well be undergoing a significant change during this first half of 2018. And the net result could mean that the “duopoly” – Google and Facebook – could be vulnerable to eroding market share for the first time in nearly a decade. Here’s a list of issues that competitors need to attend to in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

Speed

The Google algorithm rewards websites that download quickly – on both desktop and mobile devices – with favorable results placements. This is a constant challenge for publishers that try to cram as many advertisements as possible into a finite amount of real estate. Finding the correct balance is more art than science, and requires constant monitoring and tweaking to maintain the proper balance.

Action Items: Ensure your website is housed in a formidable hosting environment, and configured to run as fast and smoothly as possible.

Keywords

While driving reporters and editors crazy, savvy keyword strategies are the linchpin to healthy inbound traffic volume and exposure to new audiences. Publishers are well-served by building teams that combine data-intensive digital marketing analysts with writers who understand audience needs. This is straightforward in concept, but exceedingly difficult in practice.

Action Items: Formalize a keyword strategy – which could include hundreds of keywords if you’re a midsize or large publication – and make its governance and evolution part of someone’s job description.

Amplification

By now, we all know the value of “viral” content – i.e., the rare but impactful piece of prose (or image, meme, or video clip) that strikes a chord and makes its way around the internet at warp speed, registering hundreds of thousands or even millions of “shares”. Less celebrated, however, is the regular amplification of content by means of a coordinated effort that transforms a typical content asset into one that has meaningful engagement and marketplace impact.

Action Items: Make sure your publication’s content is easy to share, effectively promoted and re-purposed; and make use of your employees’ digital footprints to promote and disseminate content.

Old School Tactics

Considering the mind-blowing pace at which digital tactics take hold, proliferate, and sometimes fizzle –- remember MySpace, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Tumblr, etc.? – it’s easy to forget about the staying power and effectiveness of some of the *old school* tactics. Using the principle of relativity, remember that tactics involving email newsletters, LinkedIn (especially with B2B), and Bing (a Microsoft property that continues to grow steadily, if not remarkably), are the closest things that resemble sure bets in the digital ecosystem.

Action Items: Audit your properties’ promotional tactics, and make sure they incorporate proven (but admittedly, less sexy) initiatives that target audiences use regularly. Note: this may even include things like direct postal mail; given the massive drop-off in DM efforts, it’s easier to stand out as unique through the channel now as a result.

Relentlessly Cross-Promote

One of the most impactful metrics in digital success is “domain authority”, which is generally understood to be the relative value of what the internet (i.e., Google and Bing) assigns to a specific domain URL. For example, one measurement company rates IBM.com and NYTimes.com as scoring in the 95+ range (on a scale of 1-100), which makes sense, considering the value of the brands, and the level of effort they both put into maintaining successful websites.

Action Items: Multi-property publishing outfits can help their titles maximize domain authority through strategic cross-promotion, since a significant criteria in the algorithm is “inbound links”.

Since the category’s inception two decades ago, the digital advertising marketplace has mostly confounded traditional publishers. Only a handful of organizations have been able to incorporate online channels into their operations without residual upheaval and near-debilitating transformation. Far more organizations failed at managing the evolution, and shuttered. For those that survived, there are signs that new opportunities may soon become apparent, and preparing for a market turn would be prudent.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a management consultant at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based advisory firm specializing in digital strategy consulting and media audits.

Research

73% of site visitors get there via mobile. Here’s your guided tour through the mobile landscape.

There’s a good chance that you have a cell phone within arm’s reach right now, maybe in a pocket, next to you on your desk, or even in your hand as you read this post.

Even so, when you imagine a reader interacting with your site, do you tend to picture a person browsing on a laptop or do you see a commuter reading on her phone? Getting a clearer picture of how readers discover content via devices starts with checking in with the data.

As recently as 2013, peak daily mobile usage only accounted for 20% of traffic. Parse.ly network data shows that on average over 65% of traffic to publisher and brand sites in 2017 was “pure mobile.” Now, at the beginning of 2018, mobile and tablets drive 73% of traffic to our network.

With the mobile audience growing faster and bigger than ever before, it’s essential to understand the media habits unique to those readers. Here’s what the data suggests about people’s habits when it comes to when, where, and why we’re on our phones.

When: Desktop during workdays, mobile all the time

The times that people are more likely to browse on mobile vs. desktop vary. Desktop still has a weekday cadence (following peoples’ work schedules), whereas mobile is “all day every day,” including some morning and night-time peaks. People also tend to use tablets on weekends.

We also consistently see a drop-off in desktop traffic between 5:00 pm and 5:30 pm in every local timezone in the U.S.. Of course, this makes sense because many people head home from work around 5:00 pm.

Desktop ended 2017 at only 25% of total traffic across all our publishers, and kicked off 2018 at only 23% of traffic. This does vary quite a bit on a publisher-by-publisher basis. For example, some international publishers are almost all mobile traffic, and some subscription or workday reads lean desktop. However, overall, it’s a safe bet that mobile and tablet have firmly overtaken desktop for “casual” news reading.

Where: Five big movers of mobile traffic in 2017

When you break down the services or referrers that drove mobile growth in 2017, five bigs ones stand out. People are discovering content on mobile devices via:

1. Plain old Google Search

Google experimented a lot with highlighting premium publishers in their mobile search experiences, and unifying Google Search with Google News, which drove more traffic back to publishers’ sites.

Traffic from Google AMP increased by 87% in 2017. Not only that, but making AMP available to other platforms contributed to mobile growth. AMP drove 3% of visitors to our network by way of non-Google platforms, including Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

2. Google’s non-search connected services

These services include Google Now and Google Play Newsstand, mostly on Android. Though these services did not grow the most out of the five listed here, the absolute number of visits delivered was substantial, and contributed to Google overtaking Facebook as a primary source of traffic. AMP and Android platform dominance propelled Google’s shift from news search to content discovery.

3. Flipboard

Flipboard was the big independent (read: not Google or Facebook) traffic source growth story of 2017. Especially in the latter half of the year, as they launched their formal partnerships with major publishers, Flipboard grew over 300% over the year in mobile.

4. Twitter

Twitter and Flipboard are now sending similar levels of mobile visits to publisher sites. Twitter has reinvested in news partnerships, mobile speed, and their mobile apps. Notable changes to the app include the shift to the 280 character limit, AMP embeds, and algorithm changes.

5. Instagram

Instagram also cracked our top-10 list for traffic sources overall for publishers, driven by the platform’s move this year to allow linking to external web-based content from Instagram stories. With the copycat stories feature, Instagram ultimately took the wind out of Snapchat’s sails.

Why: We feel the need, the need for speed on mobile

Speed heavily factors into why people are browsing the way they do on mobile.

With people using their phones everywhere—in transit, waiting in line, you name it—it’s likely that they’ll be off wifi and on a network. The speedier the network connection, the better the experience. This resonates with a finding from a recent Pew Research survey: half of Americans say an unlimited cell data plan would help them get information to make decisions.

People also trust content that loads quickly, according to the  American Press Institute:

“A majority of digital news consumers report it is very important to them that ads not interfere with the news (63 percent); that the site or app loads fast (63 percent); that the content works well on their mobile phones (60 percent).” — American Press Institute

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flipboard, and others were right, we think, to focus so aggressively on mobile page speed improvements. For example, Google recently re-emphasized the fact that their search algorithms would penalize slow sites on mobile.

It’s worth noting that just because people want content to load quickly, that doesn’t mean they want to move on from content quickly. Long-form articles get more than twice the engaged time of short-form articles on cellphones, according to a 2016 study from Pew Research.

Keeping up with the pace of mobile growth

With the fast growth of mobile, and especially now that Facebook referrals are declining, building direct mobile channels allows publishers to meet readers where they are.

People still spend a lot of time checking email, and having a “daily read” newsletter is a great way to drive traffic to your mobile site, without requiring a native iOS or Android app strategy. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, 41% of email opens happen on mobile devices, exceeding the amount of opens on both desktop and tablets. If you can’t build your own app, integrate your content into users’ habitual engagement with their email app.

However, it’s also important to keep in mind that readers are less likely to click through on mobile. Campaign Monitor reports, “As more people consume email on mobile devices, the standard for compelling content is higher than ever.”

As mobile grows, checking back in with the data helps ensure that you’re connecting with readers when and where they are on mobile, and delivering content that resonates with them.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of March 8, 2018

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives | Revenue

Numbers don’t lie. But Google continues to obfuscate

People ask me why I think the “duopoly” conversation resonated so profoundly when DCN began to use the term in 2015. I think it’s because publishers had long-sensed something was wrong with the widely proliferated and utterly misleading growth stats of digital advertising. They were ready for someone to call b.s. and start open conversations about it because many weren’t seeing the purported “growth.”

I’ve been told that executives at Google and Facebook dismiss the term duopoly as a marketing gimmick invented by publishers to go after the two companies. They are dead wrong. This discussion didn’t surface in some public relations brainstorming meeting. Sure, it’s useful if you can describe an entire marketplace in one word. But at the end of the day, the duopoly label resulted from simple number crunching, the results of which challenged conventional wisdom on who was actually benefiting from the growth in digital advertising. Perhaps now is a good time to dig deeper and take a closer look at some Google math.

Google’s battle with transparency

A whopping 50% of the US Digital Advertising Market is recorded as a single line in Google’s financials, deftly titled “Google Properties Revenues.” This single line includes advertising on Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Shopping and more and will surpass $100 billion this year – a number larger than the entire US digital advertising market. Let that sink in for a moment and then consider the fact that we hardly know anything else about it.

While fledging and century-old publishers live and die in the millions of revenues, Google doesn’t even specifically disclose revenues for its flagship growth site, YouTube. Their video business, which seeks to compete with broadcast television, is widely estimated to have revenues approaching $10 billion — a number larger than more than half of the companies in the S&P 500. Last week Bloomberg reported that the SEC had taken issue with Google’s lack of transparency but was sent packing after Google made the astounding claim that YouTube revenues aren’t important enough to hit their CEO’s desk. Say what now?

There is also near zero transparency in how this revenue is shared with the ecosystem. In the case of major cable companies, we know very clearly how much they pay each year, measured in the tens of billions, to the programmers who create valued news and entertainment for their services. This is helpful information, and revenue. Transparency is a hallmark of a healthy ecosystem.  On the other hand, we have no idea how much Google spends on news and entertainment because they bury this programming expense in multiple places. In terms of YouTube, we’re left to run our own analysis and we only know the members of DCN see less than $100 million of the billions that YouTube is raking in.

Where have all the billions gone?

We also know that Google is using billions in cash to shore up its monopolies. Google invests heavily to secure the default position over any browser that competes with its “free” web browser, Chrome, including Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. It subsidizes its lock on a majority of mobile devices through its “free” operating system, Android. We also know that billions go toward populating the long-tail of the web with Google’s AdSense text links. Once again, all of this undisclosed money is lumped together and buried in a few lines of Google’s financials. This leaves everyone in the dark while making it easy for Google to spin its way around those who question it – in Washington and in the press.

Heck, we even learned that Google pays off ad blockers to whitelist its own ads. But once again: We don’t know how much. This is a distasteful situation considering the leadership position Google has chosen in the future of solutions for ad blocking. Google is literally blocking publishers’ ads while paying an undisclosed amount to have its own ads whitelisted. Say what now?

Numbers don’t lie. The simple, irrefutable (and unacceptable) fact is that the digital advertising landscape is more lopsided in favor of two companies than we’ve seen in any previous media market. This is especially striking when you recognize that neither of these companies contributes directly to the creation of the news and entertainment they so richly capitalize upon. They profit solely by directing and mining attention across the valuable assets others create. Please note I haven’t used the term Alphabet once here. To publishers, their layered corporate structure isn’t anything more than Google fighting tooth and nail to avoid disclosures.  If Google and Facebook want to be seen as benefactors to the media world — or better yet, become honest, trustworthy partners in it — they’re going to need to provide a level of transparency that they’ve quite clearly avoided.

Innovation

Do you need a head of apps?

Mobile journalism sounds like a great idea for cash-strapped media outlets. Get your journalists to use smartphones to shoot and edit video and photos, and save a bundle versus the cost of DSLRs and pro camcorders.

It sounds simple enough. But newsrooms that are getting on the “mojo” bandwagon have learned the hard way that asking journalists to find and use tools to create mobile content on their own can be a quality control nightmare.

Most consumer video editing apps reduce the size of a video file on export. Some give it a squeeze on import as well, meaning the finished video is fine for social platforms but useless for television. Some audio editing apps will export MP3s, but charge extra for broadcast-standard .WAV files.

A Very British Approach

The BBC recommends third-party apps to its journalists, and even creates apps to help its reporters file directly into the broadcaster’s servers.

So, what’s an editor to do? Well, one way is to appoint someone to curate your apps. At the BBC, where smartphones are increasingly used to create content for linear, on-demand and social platforms, there is a “Mobile Apps” team, which includes a group of IOS developers.

They’ve developed an in-house video recording app that shoots at 25fps (a requirement in PAL-system countries like the UK) rather than the standard 30fps, and which can file video recordings direct to the BBC’s news ingest system. The team also curates an internal-facing BBC Apps Store, where journalists can download bespoke BBC and recommended third-party apps.

The BBC’s internal training department also employs mobile journalism trainers like Marc Blank-Settle and Deirdre Mulcahy who teach reporters how to use a smartphone for radio, photography and video storytelling, and how to use the apps best suited to their jobs. In mid-2017, the BBC published some of that learning during a ‘Mojo Week’ at the BBC Academy.

That being said, the BBC is a huge news outlet with 8,000 journalists, who are also free to try out new apps to find ones that work for them.

Going Dutch

The Dutch broadcaster Omrop Fryslân is a much smaller operation than the BBC, and its in-house mobile trainer Wytse Vellinga has a high level of control over the apps and phones the reporters use to make TV, radio, online and social content.

Every journalist is required to learn to use their phone to create content for all three platforms, and to use a curated list of apps that give the best results. They receive two days’ training and follow-up support.

“If you do not standardize, people tend to get lost in what they can do with their phones,” Mr Vellinga says. “There are just too many different apps out there that claim to deliver quality results – but those results will vary too much for use in a newsroom.”

The Irish Way

A combination of the above two approaches is in place at Irish broadcaster RTÉ, where smartphones are also used across all platforms – radio, TV, online and social. Many journalists at RTÉ use smartphones some of the time, but the broadcaster also has a small team of mobile journalists who shoot and edit on mobile and publish to online and social first, and then, if appropriate, repurposed for television.

The team is led by video journalist Philip Bromwell, who says reporters across the organization are encouraged to use apps designed with reporters in mind – Filmic Pro for shooting, and Luma Fusion for editing – and to adopt consistent styles in their choice of fonts and supers.

“This content could include anything from a reporter taking a still photograph for an online article, to a journalist shooting and editing an entire story on their phone,” he says.

Having an in-house ‘mojo’ team means any RTÉ reporter can get immediate, job-specific guidance from a colleague on which app to use – Bromwell says his team has experimented with more than 50 and narrowed day-to-day use down to “a handful” – and the wider newsroom has a small group of experts to advise on file formats and workflows.

“That said, I also encourage colleagues or trainees to explore and ‘play’ with apps themselves,” Bromwell says. “Mobile journalism is still evolving – none of us has all the answers yet!”

So, while the proliferation of accessible and affordable mobile content creation tools abound, it is important that you set standards for the content. Experimentation is essential, but so are leadership and quality results.

Corinne Podger is a digital journalism educator and consultant for media outlets, NGOs and businesses. She is a specialist trainer in smartphone storytelling for television, radio, online and social media, and has taught more than 2500 journalists and communicators to use smartphones for TV and social video, radio, podcasts and photography.

She has worked as a trainer with BBC Media Action, Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Financial Times, Fairfax Media, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Konrad Adenaeur Stiftung and supported learning for journalists from over 30 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Australasia.

Corinne has also lectured on mobile journalism at universities and colleges in Australia, Europe and the United States, and speaks regularly at journalism conferences.

She runs bespoke consultancies and individual workshops on request. To contact Corinne, click here.

Innovation

Cross device targeting: 3 ways publishers can benefit today

The growth in mobile content consumption has been a boon for media companies. That’s partly because users spending more time with their content – whether they’re watching video interviews during their commute, waiting in line at the grocery store, or even second-screening at home. And this should mean more potential ad revenue.

However, the ongoing challenge has been identifying those users as they jump from device to device for advertisers. Cross-device targeting solves this problem, by helping publishers effectively aggregate, understand and then monetize their audiences.

This technology uses a combination of data sets, signals and device-specific information to identify relationships between disparate devices and tie them together. For publishers, there are three specific ways this can directly impact their bottom line:

Increased App Revenue

Users are spending far more time with tablet and smartphone apps. But those apps are not inexpensive to build or maintain. By layering audience data into their app inventory, a weather site, for example can command higher in-app CPMs by offering a more precise audience to advertisers. Adding in additional audience targeting also often leads to increased sell-through rates, reducing the overall “cost” of developing great mobile content while increasing revenue.

Better Campaign Performance

Publishers can also harness cross-device intelligence to optimize advertisers’ campaigns, potentially leading to greater retention and bigger buys. The device graph can be used to improve a campaign by delivering sequential messaging across screens.

For example, consider a news site with loyal readers who visit their site multiple times with different devices. Cross-device intelligence can help ensure that their readers don’t see the same ad too many times. Rather, the news site can use cross-device targeting to serve readers a series of sequential ads that vary based on the device they’re using – such as a 15-second video for a mobile user – and then a longer, 30-second video when they’re on the desktop. Ultimately, this means a better brand experience with consistent (but not annoying) messaging.

Content Customization

But beyond generating revenue, cross-device intelligence can also lead to better user experiences overall.

A financial services site, for example, could see that a particular group of users only consumes content related to choosing the right credit card – and not any of the articles about saving for retirement or stock performance. By matching these users to specific devices through the device graph, the site could prioritize credit card content when those users returned and accessed the site, no matter the device.

Customizing content in this way can help increase time spent on site and boost return visits, two key metrics in terms of user engagement.

What’s Next?

Ultimately, cross-device technology can help publishers better satisfy both users and advertisers, maximizing revenue-generation opportunities at a time when this is critical. But there remains a lot of room for improvement when it comes to cross platform measurement.

In an ideal world, publishers would have instant access into measurement across the whole market to really understand the dynamics between TV and digital, but we aren’t quite there yet. For marketers creating cross-platform campaigns, measuring how many ads each customer has been exposed, regardless of media, is the next challenge that remains to be solved.

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