Challenges of a mobile-only audience

2/17/2013 Unknown 0 Comments

Cory Bergman, General Manager,
Breaking News
Cory Bergman, GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first start-up owned by NBC News Digital, last week posted on Poynter.org about the business -- and, by extension, branding -- concerns of news organizations facing an increasingly mobile user. Check out the full post, here.

A few of Bergman's insights:

"There’s a huge gap in advertising yield between desktop and mobile experiences: $3.50 versus $0.75 in average CPMs, according to Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker. Mobile is growing so quickly, the explosion in available inventory is depressing advertising rates. Ad agencies typically lag demand, which means this gap won’t be bridged anytime soon.

"As audiences shift, the industry will be faced with more revenue pressure unless news organizations can create new mobile revenue streams to compensate. In many ways, this is similar to the shift from print to the Web. Just porting one business model to the other isn’t the solution. Traditional display advertising on mobile devices makes up a very small, declining fraction of total revenue

" . . . simply extending a news organizations’ current coverage into mobile isn’t enough. We need to solve information problems for our users and drive measurable revenue for our advertisers. Mobile is not merely another form factor, but an entirely new ecosystem that rewards utility. Flipboard is a classic example of solving a problem (tablet-based content discovery) while The Daily is an example of a product that did not.

"'When the Web was new, many of us went online with creativity and energy,” says Regina McCombs, who teaches mobile at Poynter. “Now, faced with even bigger potential and pitfalls for developing — or losing — our audience, most of us are getting by with as little investment as we can. That’s scary.'"