Putting the business model first: Why making money should be the lifeblood of local

Digital revenue growth for news and information publishers is going in the right direction in the UK. But is it rising fast enough in regional news?

Thinking big but not acting locally

For example, Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) is making serious money online from Mail Online – £8 million in the six months to April 3 – and pushed past the Huffington Post to become the world’s second largest news site with 60 million unique visitors a month. But at the same time digital revenue from its regional Northcliffe division actually dipped two percent.

Guardian.co.uk has more than 50 million users but it stopped its Guardian Local experiment because it was commercially “unsustainable”. TheMediaBriefing’s contributor Ed Oldfield suggested that the scheme may spark other local startups to follow in its wake, but they will need to avoid the same mistakes of failing to innovate enough commercially.

Self-serve ad managing tool Addiply generated only £500 for the three sites over the past year, although there were local advertising opportunities for Guardian Local, including its highly profitable Soulmates dating service and Google Adsense revenue, but not enough. (Read Addiply founder Rick Waghorn’s comment clarifying that £500 figure here)

Could a start-up prevail in local ads?

Are established newspaper publishers putting the content first and the business model second when it comes to online media?

This is where a smaller operator could make a big impact. Media Street Apps, which launched with Kingsroad.co.uk in 2009, was founded by online marketer Jack Rutter and tech specialist Jonathan Lloyd. Their approach was to generate revenue first.

“We’ve started backwards,” says Lloyd “By that I mean we started with the local business owner first and then have added local news content last. I know that seems crazy but it’s enabled us to shape both the Media Street software and our products.”

Focusing on the London street which stretches from Chelsea to Fulham, King’s Road is a community site and carries local news like many other “hyperlocal” start-ups. By choosing a street renowned for clothing boutiques and other independent outlets there was a clear opportunity for person-to-person ad sales. Local businesses that advertise or are listed on the site range from the independent FiFi Wilson boutique to the established King’s Road Sporting Club.

In May, King’s Road joined the Glam Media network – the American digital female-focused ad network. Major brands such as Boots and Net-A-Porter have appeared on the website. However the buck doesn’t just stop at placement ads.

“Our business model is not just built on online advertising; we do video, online marketing, competitions and paid content. Hyperlocal sites should look at these other revenue streams too,” says Lloyd.

Marketing as a service

This is wider trend on small scale. Publishers are beginning to offer more than just simple advertising: trade publisher UBM is offering varied and interesting packages in B2B, and magazine publisher Condé Nast launching its Ideactive client services division, as my colleague Patrick Smith detailed here.

Media Street also has plans to increase SEO for clients and online and affiliate revenues as well as paid events. This will be the first full financial year for the company but and it has a modest target of £60,000 revenues for its financial year end on December 31 2011.

By this time Lloyd hopes to transfer the Media Street model and software across several streets in London starting with Fulham Road.

Herein lies a digital media business model for our times: keep the content local but the operating system universal.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing


Saatchi mobile marketer: Mobile web is better value than apps

We all know that mobile is a rapidly evolving marketplace packed with plenty of sleek shiny gizmos – but it’s all too easy to be dazzled by the newest toy and forget the basics. James Hilton, joint managing director of M&C Saatchi Mobile, says commercial success comes from creative and effective communication – and you don’t need an app to get it.

Just five years ago when the company was founded as the independent agency Inside Mobile, mobile content was a tricky terrain. Phone apps were created in Java and required individual builds which, even after a considerable investment, wouldn’t necessarily run on all handsets.

The irresistible rise of the smartphone

But now smartphones have revolutionised how and when we interact with the web and online-enabled apps. Hilton believes a major shift in perception came from the stability that the Apple store and the iPhone platform provided.

But development costs are high. In order to get a successful uptake there needs to be considerable investment and bug testing. When the app is launched it needs to be closely monitored and promoted carefully to be picked up in the Apple Store or Android Market.

Nevertheless if he had £10,000 to spend on a campaign, he’d opt for a mobile site rather than an app:

“This makes it agnostic of all technology so all users are open to the opportunity. If you are designing for mobile internet then the content needs to be a lot shorter and more snackable.”

The bad old days

Illustrating what can be done without apps – and that people have been doing this stuff intelligently for years – Hilton mentions one of Inside Mobile’s most award-winning campaigns was for Reebok, built around the 2008 NBA basketball playoff final. The campaign combined branded SMS and ringtones while greater context and exclusive content was carried by voice messages and a WAP-enabled microsite.

See it for yourself:

Resistance to viral

Whilst certain things stay the same there is no longer a secret formula for making digital or mobile content go viral. In fact it’s much more difficult to do this now given the number of agencies specifically trying to make their product take off on forums YouTube….

“In 2000 almost everything on the internet was viral. Now we find that our audience has matured and become more sophisticated. We can still provide the touchpoints for viral – allowing sharing of something using social media – but it’s difficult to predict what will work.”

Apps are currently leading the mobile media debate but perhaps this won’t always remain this way – according to Hilton, something very close to all phones around today can access the internet. He anticipates that because of increasing deployment of Google’s Android operating system, there will be some innovative use of HTML 5 on the horizon – and the boundaries between apps and the web will start to blur.

“We’re finding the lines between mobile and digital is blurring. Companies such as M&C Saatchi appreciated that their clients want to move smoothly between different platforms. Mobile is now integrated and at the heart of the business.”

For more vital analysis and case studies on the evolution of mobile media, come to Mobile Media Strategies 2011 on June 14 in London, the second-full-length conference from TheMediaBriefing.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing


Counting the cost and benefits of community managers

The role of community manager has gone from being a social experiment to an integral part of the newsroom. But are they there to teach old hacks new digital tricks or is there now a genuine business imperative and ROI factor in having staff to represent your brand through social media?

Which side are you on?

Kate Day, social media and engagement editor for Telegraph.co.uk, and is about to appoint a community manager, a new role for the title. Although Day admits she spends a lot of time in both marketing and editorial departments the new role will be closely linked to editorial.

She tells me: “We received a lot of applications from journalists, and also social media marketing people. This role is rooted in editorial so we are looking for someone who really understands the newsroom and it's likely that they will be a journalist. The role will involve helping journalists source and develop news stories by making the best use new tools and platforms as well as helping to build a loyal, engaged digital audience.”

As far as Day is concerned, this role is there to not only help journalists do more but also to recommend the best social tools and skills to others. They will be required to have an overview of the industry and what competitors are doing with socially online.

The Telegraph’s community manager will focus largely on Facebook and Twitter but also keep an eye on comments on the site and the My Telegraph blogging platform.

Making it count

Day claims that because the Telegraph’s audience is fragmented across external networks and its own website, it’s no longer possible to generate a single stat to measure success.

“We can measure referral traffic, the number people on Facebook and Twitter amount of time they spend on the site and so on,” says Day. “There’s no single number that represents engagement or revenue return very well.”

Justin Fogarty is online community manager for Ariba a spend management site. He oversees a customer community called Ariba Exchange as well as managing several LinkedIn groups. He maintains that even from a B2B perspective the money is often difficult to trace, at least at first.

He writes on Mashable: “It’s not about ROI or advertising dollars at the beginning. It’s not about messaging and positioning. Customers will come back to a place with a compelling reason for going there in the first place.

“Let the user determine the model, and look at the type of user that you want to attract as the primary driver behind the online presence.”

But surely some companies by now are reaching a point where we can begin to see the money?

Social monetisation manager?

Mashable’s community manager Vadim Lavrusik, who previously worked at the New York Times, says making money is the next logical step for news organisations. He cites a job advert from Cox Media Group, which emphasises the revenue generation aspect of community management. Cox runs 15 broadcast television stations, 85 radio stations and eight daily newspapers. Interestingly, it already has a social media manager, Mathilde Picard, and this is an extra role – another example of how media groups create interaction first before moving to monetisation.

“In some ways, Cox is making a big bet that social media will play a big role in its revenue strategy — at least one big enough to require such a position,” says Lavrusik. “The position is part of a further shift in company strategy to invest in digital.”

The question is: are we ready to take this leap into a focus on not just interaction but revenue in the UK? Social media is about conversation, not pound signs, and brands risk losing credibility by seemingly selling out to advertising and harsh marketing messages.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing


#MobileMedia11: Screen Digest analyst – use mobile as an extra incentive to your audience

This is part of a series of articles ahead of our conference Mobile Media Strategies 2011, taking place on June 14.

If you were to ask Screen Digest senior analyst Ronan de Renesse the best price is for an app, he doesn’t consider the answer for very long: “Free”. Giving apps away is still the most popular app strategy – look how much green there is on this graph of Distimo data from March.

But in an interview with TheMediaBriefing, de Renesse argued that while free is the best entry point for new users, freemium is the most promising business model. Hook your customer in and you can still charge extra for improved functionality.

Here’s our video chat with de Renesse:

Easier with TV?

In the UK, Sky is offering mobile access as part of its premium subscription package. For example, for its iPad app Sky customers paid just £6 extra while non-subscribers paid £35.

News monetisation

In March this year Sky announced that it intends to charge for its Sky News app. Despite showing promise by being a live app rather than edition download, de Renesse is less convinced that this will work.

“The more devices you include the more you reduce the addressable market. So how many people today have a tablet, smartphone, PC and are reading a lot of news as well.”

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing


Can paywalls be sociable? David Cushman on social media in news publishing

Adopting a successful social media strategy doesn’t just mean getting yourself a Facebook page or Twitter profile. Social media is no longer an add-on – it must be at the centre of your business, according to one leading digital interaction expert.

David Cushman, MD of the 90:10 Group, who blogs at Fasterfuture.blogspot.com, told me in a video interview that the biggest mistake publishers can make in this area is adopting a heavy handed “top down” approach. “It is not a channel, it is not a way in which you distribute content … it has to be at the heart of what you do,” he says.

Audit first

Cushman’s mantra is to listen to both your organisation and your audience and keep an open mind. “You have to let your audience inform what you do. Only then will they interested in passing it around,” he says.

Paywalls hinder sharing

Few would deny this stuff is important. But what if your business model isn’t compatible with social sharing? Erecting a paywall, for example, around your content hinders exposure and the building of interpersonal networks. Cushman acknowledges specialist information, delivered well, can lead to a successful paywall model but closed is still not good enough.

The New York Times realised this and sidestepped the paywall model – NYTimes.com readers can view articles discovered through social media, even if you’ve passed your monthly limit. But as we’ve mentioned this approach undermines the paywall entirely.

Almost a quarter of a million people now digitally subscribe to The Financial Times, an increase of 8.1 percent since January 2011. But Cushman is cautious:

“Even they haven’t got it right for me, because they’re not doing it for me. It’s not focused enough and it’s not social.”

Who’s really open?

The Guardian’s call to media and technology bloggers proudly declares that it is an open platform. But as Cushman points out “the only truly open silo is the internet.”

Cushman (who spoke to the Guardian recently) thinks this attitude will encourage people who identify with the brand to contribute. Fundamentally, there has to be some incentive for the blogger to move onto the website. “The people who chose to go on their platform do so with a mission in mind”

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing


From print publishing to mobile: Lessons learned from Condé Nast

When the iPad launched last year few magazine publishers were as prepared as Condé Nast. It leapt out of the blocks announcing plans for mobile incarnations of Wired, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

But all this could be about to change. Senior CN execs are stepping back efforts on iPad editions, following a less-than-impressive financial return from a signficant investment. Ad Age quotes an anonymous Condé Nast publisher who, while keen to point out this is not a reverse of ambition, admitted that creating iPad apps for all publications is no longer the goal.

“They’re not all doing all that well, so why rush to get them all on there?” they say.

So what can we learn from Condé Nast’s experiments?

Apps are fun but costs win out. Research commissioned by Condé last October (via Tom Foremski), involving 100 hours of one-on-one interviews and 5,000 in-app surveys, found that readers commonly spent more time with the electronic version than the print equivalent. Condé concluded:

“Users responded positively to the additional functionality of the iPad. Therefore advertisers that included compelling and unique experiences, that were self-contained and exclusive to the environment, were liked more than those that did not.”

But did they go far enough? Dominic Jacquesson, author of TheMediaBriefing’s report Mobile Strategies for Media Owners, told me today that Condé’s decision to use Adobe’s Publishing Suite to create its apps tied it too much to the print model.

Jacquesson says: “To their credit, they embraced the tablet opportunity early on and firmly. However, in partnering with Adobe, it was clear that they were going to treat tablet apps as print replicas with bells and whistles thrown in – both from an external audience perspective and in terms of internal production processes.”

Condé Nast has adapted to this situation. Special editions, such as location-specific Traveller apps or $0.99 Vogue exclusives have done well.

Cost And Subscription

Leaving aside Condé Nast’s free, mobile-specific applications such as the popular Epicurious, its magazine apps are highly priced. In the UK most editions in iTunes are priced around the £3 mark. Data from analysts at Distimo shows that only 45 percent of iPad apps were in this price bracket from January-December 2010.

It could be that the pricing is too close to newsstand price which doesn’t match up with the expectation of an audience that is used to free web content. However, the launch edition of Wired’s iPad app was $5 – the same as the US magazine cover price – which was welcomed by some overseas mag readers who were paying as much as $14 an issue.

They have kept their app prices too high per issue to entice either new readers to have a peek, or existing readers to switch” says Dominic Jacquesson. “The resulting repeated droop in downloads between issues 1 and 2 for each title they app’ed is definitely a case of ‘I told you so,’ and I fear it will be at least another year before they significantly shift their mobile strategy to a more sustainable footing.”

An appy future ahead?

Despite those early trouble, Condé Nast and constantly re-evaluating their mobile strategy Condé Nast have left room to manoeuvre. For Jacquesson this has meant that it has possibly averted financial collapse.

“The upside for Condé Nast is that its print titles are amongst the best in the magazine sector, with a particular appeal in emerging markets worldwide, and the economic recovery has therefore benefited it earlier than most. So its fears back in 2009 of a structurally permanent advertising collapse have not come to pass…at least, not yet.”

And for the rest of us, we can learn from its mistakes before we implement them.

We’ll be discussing all these issues at TheMediaBriefing’s next brilliant conference Mobile Media Strategies on June 14 in London. Early Bird tickets are available now.

Picture credit: Robert Nelson via Flickr.


Creating A Culture Calendar for Inside The M60

I’ve recently started working with Inside The M60. In addition to being on hand to help with little Wordpress tweaks, I’ve been trying to carve out a little niche for myself.

Obviously, I come from “down the M6” so my local knowledge isn’t great, but I do know my culture. The site editors Louise Bolotin and Nigel Barlow understood the advantages of having a listings section and so let me loose.

Inspired by the work of Wicci which runs through Wordpress, I looked into suitable calendars. I’d previously encouraged Nigel and Louise to get their events into Google Calendar, so it made sense to at least base it there.

After a few false starts I found Google Calendar Events developed by Ross Hanney. I’m really impressed with the strength of the widget particularly its flexibility and the attentive nature of Ross. It makes such a difference if there is decent support for a plugin.

Setting the plugin up was a bit fiddly. What I wanted to do was make the calendar link out to tickets or, where possible, to link back to previews or reviews on Inside The M60. This way the calendar aids site navigation. There’s a bit of a jiggle which you have to make to the PHP to make it read HTML in Google Calendar details but Ross intends to introduce this as a dashboard setting.

Once I’d got the plugin running on the back end of my site I approached Philip John to get it installed on Journal Local, where Inside The M60 is based. Philip had some reservations about to cross-site scripting attacks again I consulted Ross and we introduced a bit of code to stop this.

Inside The M60 are really happy with the Calendar, it has increased traffic to the site and has added another dimension. It’s also helped me get a cultural handle on Manchester and makes me feel excited about basing myself here.

I would like to encourage more of a standard way of contributing and I’m considering following the example of Wicci and allowing promoters and people to add listings themselves. I’m also thinking about taking feeds from other site. But at the moment I feel we’ve got more quality control by doing it ourselves.

One of the MA Magazine groups from City University are doing a magazine for the East End of London and they wanted to bring in a map. I naturally recommended Google Calendar Events. This week they’re going live with it so keep an eye on Eastbound Magazine’s website.


Outside Salford Lads

The Smiths Music Map

My brother and I grew up with The Smiths, so when he came to visit me I decided to show him Morrissey's haunts. I gathered together details from Cemetry Gates and noted venues featured on
Manchester Music Tour.


View The Smiths Music Map in a larger map

I cycled around a few sites on Saturday and I've added a few multimedia bits to those pinpoints. I'm also going to add a cycle route based on Cycle Streets and my own experience of cycling the route. This is open map so if you have more to add then feel free.

Outside Salford Lads
This image is on display in the Lads\' Club

Changing Tracks

This is the first time in three months that I have decided to blog. There are many reasons for this but one of the most important is a rapid life transition. This site was specifically set up to track my progress through my MA in Online Journalism. So for a while after I found that I had essentially blogged myself into a corner.

Things have also changed for me geographically too. The week I submitted my final dissertation, my wife and I loaded several vanloads and transported ourselves (and an obscene amount of CD’s) to Manchester.

Of course, the process of gaining employment has been slower. I made a conscious decision whilst I was studying that I would stick to freelance for a while, do enough of that to keep me in reasonable comfort and only go for staff jobs that I really want. My wife often reminds me that this is a somewhat privileged place to be in.

So, I’ve been trying to find my footing in the Digital Manchester community - attending Social Media Surgeries and Cafes which have evolved in quite a different way to the Birmingham versions. These differences I will certainly mention and discuss in later posts. In the last few weeks I have begun to start working with the good people of Inside The M60. My progress here will also be written about soon.

I have carried work up North with me. The Birmingham City of Culture Social Media work continues not least because we engaged a sizeable amount of people during the campaign and it would be a shame to ‘disengage’ them. The Facebook and Twitter still continue to promote and celebrate the cultural delights that the city has to offer – large and small.

I’ve also begun to preach a bit of what I’ve practiced with a Visiting Lecturer role at Birmingham City University helping first year BA students understand the basics of journalism. Most recently I have also started to teach MA Magazine Journalism students of City University London how to complement their final printed production with an online presence.

If I’m honest, the most interesting full time jobs still seem to be in London and if I do find the right job maybe we’ll pack up and migrate there. For the moment however any London work is achievable due to my sister-in-law and Village Underground who have agreed to offer me a bed as long as I promise to occasionally “do something amazing” for them.

These current commutes have one definite advantage: long train journeys give me time to write. So at least once a week from now onwards I intend to reflect on what I’ve been doing. Track 23 is now on the rails…


In and Out of Inside Out

On Monday Inside Out West Midlands broadcast their report on cycling around Birmingham which featured talking about my Birmingham Cycle Data site but also getting on my bike and checking out facilities for cyclists around the city. This road footage was inspired by my previous excursions with a Flip.

The BBC filming was an invaluable experience but for me it highlighted the difference between how you can allow a story to develop online compared with needing to have elements pre-defined when you start filming. My challenge for Inside Out was based around a FOI request and inquiry with City Council’s press office as to the amount of cycling improvements that had been made in the last few years. I then hit the road to see how the improvements had been installed.

Obviously, filming time is precious and to have a crew follow me round each improvement would have been expensive. The Inside Out package is about the state of cycling in the city, so just me peddling on my bike would be wouldn't have answered the general question 'Is Birmingham safe for cyclists?'. Instead this is a montage sequence with some on the spot conclusions at the end then plenty of context and 'right to reply' by the council.

I was pleased to see that my Belgrave Middleway coverage was used as a way to introduce but something my online footage allowed me to do was show the extent of the law breaking and to back that up with stats.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTPC_SqtmlQ

Within the confines of the TV programme you get an impression of what happened but you don’t get an in depth investigation. Furthermore, the point of Birmingham Cycle Data was to explore many cycle stories that affect Birmingham cyclists. It mainly using data visualisation to display how a question such as 'Is Birmingham safe for cyclists' is a complex one that can't have a simple answer.

I’d love the opportunity to now take the council cycling improvements story to my website. Ideally I'd display them on a map to visualise the scale of what the council has installed and where. Maybe even gather footage and evidence of me and others tackling them. This in conjunction with the larger exposure of BBC 1 programme would build up a more detailed picture of cycling improvements in the city and make suggestions how they could be further improved.

For now though you’ll have to just put up with my talking ‘helmet hair’ head.