Nieman Journalism Lab |
- No, people are not already sharing more BuzzFeed stories to WhatsApp than to Twitter
- Right back after these messages: Watchup adds ads and partners with The Washington Post
- “If the news is that important, it’ll find me.” But what determines if it’s important?
- The newsonomics of Spotified news subscriptions
| No, people are not already sharing more BuzzFeed stories to WhatsApp than to Twitter Posted: 20 Feb 2014 02:37 PM PST Liz Gannes at Recode had an interesting story Thursday about how newly acquired WhatsApp had already begun introducing “Share on WhatsApp” tools to a select group of publishers, including BuzzFeed. Gannes’ story included this remarkable statement:
Whaaaat? More shares to WhatsApp than to Twitter? That’s insane if true! Should we all be abandoning our Twitter strategies in favor of WhatsApp strategies? What the hell does a WhatsApp strategy look like, anyway? But here’s the thing: It’s not true. Gannes spends the next few paragraphs noting that it isn’t really “more shares” as much as it’s “more taps on one button as opposed to another nearby button.”
Aha: So it’s not that WhatsApp is generating more traffic than Twitter for BuzzFeed. It’s not even that BuzzFeed stories are being shared more often on Twitter than on WhatsApp. BuzzFeed doesn’t know how many times it’s being shared on WhatsApp! What it knows is that the green button on the right gets more taps than the light blue button at left-center:
I was wondering about that, so we emailed BuzzFeed’s McCollum just to be sure. “The metric is that more people click the WhatsApp share button on iOS mobile web than the Twitter button,” she wrote back. Which is in no way the same as saying BuzzFeed sees more shares to WhatsApp than to Twitter. (Even once you note that we’re only talking here about mobile web pageviews on iPhones and iPod touches — which I’d guess is at most 20 to 30 percent of BuzzFeed traffic.) People have lots and lots of ways to share stories to Twitter. If they’re using iOS, Twitter sharing is built right into the operating system. If they’re Twitter users, there’s a very good chance they’re already viewing the BuzzFeed article inside a Twitter app on their phone, which features a separate “tweet this webpage” button. And we know from previous data that Tweet Buttons generate only a small share of the Twitter shares of news stories — only about 12 percent as of November — and I’d wager that’s even lower on mobile. Anyway, I say all this not to denigrate WhatsApp sharing — it’s likely big and will only get bigger. It’s a real phenomenon worth talking about! But to say, as Quartz did, that “People are already sharing more BuzzFeed stories to WhatsApp than to Twitter” is just completely unsupported by the evidence at hand. |
| Right back after these messages: Watchup adds ads and partners with The Washington Post Posted: 20 Feb 2014 12:30 PM PST The news video aggregator Watchup aims, in a sense, to recreate something like the traditional television newscast experience, but redesigned for tablets. Soon it’ll have one of another element of that experience: ads. Watchup, the former Knight News Challenge winner with $1 million in fresh capital, is slated to release the latest iteration of its app next month, which for the first time will feature preroll advertisements via a new partnership with The Washington Post’s PostTV.Launched just over a year ago, Watchup creates personalized newscasts for users, culled from video from dozens of global and local news organizations. The newest version of the app, slated to be released on March 13, will bring the third iteration of its interface. Watchup CEO and founder Adriano Farano said the Post, like other news organizations, is looking for other opportunities to expand pre-roll video ad inventory. The Post’s ads will be incorporated into its videos that are played on the app; Watchup will get a cut of the revenue generated. “We were able to increase engagement, and now we’re ready to start monetizing,” Farano said. “And just like The Washington Post, we are talking to many other potential partners, all of them who are looking for that opportunity to monetize our inventory together.” (Watchup’s latest round of funding comes from Microsoft Ventures, Stanford’s StartX, the Knight Foundation, and others. ) The move is also a way for The Post to get its video content in front of more viewers. The paper has invested heavily in video production, launching PostTV last year. In December, the Post became the first news organization featured on Google’s Chromecast, and Andrew Pergam, head of video at the Post, said the paper is constantly on the lookout for video partners. “For us, what’s really important is producing really high quality video journalism and then figuring out how to let it spread on ways to reach all new audiences,” Pergam said.Most of Watchup’s content is integrated via public YouTube channels, but it now has about 12 partnerships with news organizations to directly provide content to the app, including The Wall Street Journal, AP, and PBS NewsHour. Farano said he is in discussions with other outlets as well. Farano wouldn’t disclose how many users Watchup has. (It’s spent much of the past year ranked in the 100s or 200s in the U.S. App Store’s News category; at the moment, it’s No. 56.) But he did say engagement was growing. In January, active users watched an average of 62 videos over the course of the month, up from 45 after the launch of the second version of the app last summer. (The first version of the app only allowed users to add videos to their playlists manually, and as a result Watchup users only watched an average of 22 videos per month, Farano said.) When users sign up for the app the first time, they select their interests and a time of day when they want their personalized newscast to begin. So at, say, 7 a.m. you get a push notification that your newscast is ready, and over breakfast, you can watch a series of videos — CNN on the latest from the Ukraine protests, AP on what happened overnight in Sochi, or Bloomberg’s take on Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp. Farano said Watchup was able to increase user engagement because they made the “experience totally effortless.” Videos now start automatically when the app is launched and playlists can be personalized from there; they’ll also evolve as the app learns what kinds of videos a user prefers to watch. Users can also get more context on any story from a series of articles in a sidebar on the right side of the app. The new version of the app will advance its ability to personalize the newscast and also allow users to choose videos by topic in addition to channel, Farano said. It’ll also be the first version available for Android tablets. (It currently works on iPads and Google Glass.) Farano said they’ll be exploring specific deals with some OEMs. |
| “If the news is that important, it’ll find me.” But what determines if it’s important? Posted: 20 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST In March 2008, a young(er!) Brian Stelter wrote a piece for The New York Times about how young people get their news online. Nearly six years later, like nearly all old news stories, it’s been mostly forgotten. But in the seventh paragraph of Stelter’s piece, there’s a line that has since achieved a life of its own. It’s a quote passed along by Jane Buckingham, founder of the market research company Intelligence Group:
If the news is that important, it will find me. I can’t tell you how many conferences, how many symposia, how many gatherings of worthies I’ve been at where some version of that line has been tossed around. In some ways, it’s a beacon of hope: Sure, young people aren’t reading a newspaper any more. But the really important stuff still finds them, somehow. But in other ways, it’s an admission of defeat: Most news isn’t “that important,” in the sense of being essential to an individual’s day-to-day life. The most significant value of news isn’t in any single piece of information leading to tangible improvements in the news consumer’s life: It’s in the ambient engagement and community awareness that comes from reading a bunch of stuff that isn’t that important — at least not in any immediate personal-consequence sense.
The episode, produced by Lisa Pollak, P.J. Vogt, and Alex Goldman, is called “The Knowledge,” and it’s an accounting of a contest that is sort of the mirror image of that Times quote — an attempt to avoid the news that is trying to find you. In this case, it’s news of who won the Super Bowl. (Spoiler alert: Seattle.)
It’s an entertaining 14 minutes, but it’s also a window into some interesting questions for the news: What is it that makes news unavoidable? Could we tweak that unavoidability in ways that would be socially productive? Would it be possible to make civically useful news and information unavoidable? Or, put another way: If the important news will find me, how can we maximize what counts as important when it comes to this ambient transmission of information? Listen to this podcast (and the squirming induced by various feats of media avoidance) with those questions in mind. |
| The newsonomics of Spotified news subscriptions Posted: 20 Feb 2014 06:30 AM PST Can you make digital subscriptions sing? In a first-of-its-kind partnership with streaming music leader Spotify, The Times of London has brought a whole new meaning to the subscription bundle — even as the wider media world dissects the mega Comcast buy of Time Warner Cable and the impact of that on cord-cutting, bundling, and unbundling (“The newsonomics of Comcast’s deal and our digital wallets”).In that leap, we see pioneering thinking about a news company’s relationship with its readers, one that tries to blow life into the much-talked-about notion of membership in the digital age. It’s a straightforward offer, launched February 9. Pay £6 a week (or $10) for The Times/Sunday Times “Digital Pack,” commit to a year, and you get full across-all-platform access to The Times — plus a full year of Spotify Premium. Spotify, the Europe-dominating streaming-music giant (as U.S.-based Pandora now stretches itself into Australia and New Zealand), just revised its own pricing at year’s end. Its premium offer now provides customers ad-free listening and the abilities to download music and listen offline at a price of £9.99/$9.99. The Times made the partnership move as it moved forward with price parity. While you can still subscribe to its “Web Pack”, or desktop access, for £2 a week, its all-access “Digital Pack” price of £6 is the same as for seven-day print. While most publishers price digital under print (with a notable exception at the Orange County Register, which launched with price parity), The Times has arrived at the point of saying: Have it either way — same price. Want both seven-day print and all-access? Get the “Ultimate Pack” at a price of £8 a week.The strategy: Push forward strongly into membership-based digital relationships, giving the customers more — and expecting more in payment. “It’s a unique relationship,” says News UK chief marketing officer Katie Vanneck-Smith, speaking of the reader/news connection with her Times (and tabloid Sun) newspapers. “We’re now getting closer to the things you love, like the journalism of The Times. Spotify is a perfect partner; it offers another passion with our readers.” Vanneck-Smith, a 20-year veteran of The Times (with a little time off spent at the Telegraph and searching for life’s non-financial returns in India) likes to talk about the “heart of the relationship” between readers and their favorite news medium. In this case, it’s The Times, published since 1785. “Back in 2000, you could see you had to make a choice,” she says. “There’s room for free journalism. Yet you have to have [reader] payment at the heart of what you do if you want to enhance your journalism, invest in it, and invest in the relationship beyond it into more products and services.” The Times of London famously went paywall early, in summer 2010, nine months before The New York Times. Its hard paywall (offering only tops of stories to non-payers) drew much criticism. Now critics both in the U.S. and the U.K. have acknowledged that The Times’ tough-love approach has borne some fruit. Its subscription numbers are impressive: 153,000 digital subscribers and 207,000 print subscribers. Most importantly, the combined total of paying readers now exceeds the number that The Times had when it put its paywall in place. London is still a single-copy city, unlike most of America. Consequently, even with a significant loss in single-copy sales, a trend shared by its peers, its print-plus-digital subscription strategy is making up for it. Those are the big numbers, and ones that News UK CEO Mike Darcey has highlighted as he derides competitor Mail Online’s free, ad-based model and speaks of the reader-revenue imperative. Under the big numbers are the smaller, more telling ones, and that’s in part where the Spotify strategy fits. Five years ago, The Times had a subscription relationship with only 15 percent of its readers. Now, says Vanneck-Smith, that extends to 55 to 60 percent of its readers, print and digital. In that quest, its philosophy parallels the smarter news companies, like The New York Times, which is well along on the journey of turning faceless readers into customers, and newbies like The Guardian (“The newsonomics of The Guardian’s new Known strategy”).In the cold world of brutal ad competition with the likes of Facebook and Google, The Times’ relationship to its ever-higher-paying readers is a key path to its future. That path is credited with reducing The Times’ annual loss to the neighborhood of £6 million, down from £72 million in a five-year span. Why was Spotify added as an inducement to subscribe or upgrade a subscription? The reasons are several:
Will The Times be regularly signing up more of these passion partners? Vanneck-Smith laughs, noting that the workload involved is extensive and that only true, meaningful mutual value can drive successful relationships. But clearly there’s more in the works. Bill Adee says The Times’ Spotify deal “gets at what we are aspiring to do.” (How did he hear about it? Via a Rupert Murdoch tweet.) Adee, long a Chicago Tribune digital leader, was recently named to head the new Tribune news spinoff company’s efforts in digital business, product, and partnership. The Chicago Tribune doesn’t release its digital-only subscription numbers, but figure it’s in the 30,000–40,000 range of other metro leaders like the Star Tribune and The Boston Globe. The Tribune has stood out, if quietly, as a leader in trying to figure out the membership future. It hasn’t cracked the code, but it’s probably doing more wide-ranging innovation around membership than any other daily I’ve seen. As seen on its Tribune Nation page, events, book clubs, products, classes, and commercial offers all try to make new connections with readers. The Tribune has also offered non-Tribune content as a subscription inducement. Not as sexy as Spotify, perhaps, but the Trib’s seen a little traction in providing wider business content. It has licensed Financial Times, Economist, and Forbes content and plans a wider foray into subscriber-pleasing business content. Perhaps most worth watching is the Tribune’s Blue Sky Innovation initiative. Aimed to be a digital (and event-based) hub for Chicago’s growing tech community, Blue Sky encompasses content, community, and potential revenue. Its March 9 Mark Cuban event is sold out. Right now, Blue Sky overall is free, but it may be folded into overall Tribune membership, or niched into a separate paid subscription/membership later this year. Blue Sky positions the Tribune as a convener, a role I think is hugely important in any serious news company’s next-stage strategy. Overall, this Spotify model speaks to a much larger opportunity, and one that is playing out in an ungainly way across entertainment and news media generally. Look no further than the announced Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable last week. As Comcast prepares to match money and wits with the big boys and girls of digital media selling — Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook — it is trying to figure out what its bundle(s) will look like in 2015, 2018, and 2021. Certainly, it would like to hold on to all those multi-hundred cable channel, $100-plus monthly subscriptions — but it also knows that world is ebbing away; it eked out its first gain in cable subscribers in the last quarter after six years of loss. When did it last gain before then? 2007. It’s no accident of history that that’s also the last year that U.S. newspapers showed a revenue gain year over year. The moneyed legacy world is doing a slow but parallel disappearing act across formats, from cable to broadcast TV to newspapers to magazines. So last year, Comcast quietly unbundled a bit. Knowing a lot of people just want HBO and local channels, it put together a $40 monthly package for those and Internet access. In a world of $7.99 here (Netflix), $14.99 there (SiriusXM Radio), and $3.46 a week (Atlanta Journal Constitution all-digital), marketers and would-be members may soon be doing all kinds of mix-and-match games. Media is media. Newspaper business models are far closer to entertainment ones than they used to be. The near-universal all-access pitch demonstrates that. Now, with all-access proven, we move to the nuance of what else to bundle — even as some bundles become undone. If Spotify can make enough passionate sense to some Times of London subscribers, the same approach may work elsewhere in Europe or in the U.S. (In the U.K., The Times has worked out an exclusive, as it did with football highlights.) If music works, how about Netflix or Hulu deals around movies and TV? With Jeff Bezos standing supreme, with one leg in Amazon’s media-selling business and another in The Washington Post’s news business, isn’t a new D.C. bundle inevitable and logical? What about membership bundles that may tie together public radio basic memberships, at about $40 a year, and newspaper ones? Overlapping audiences, we’d assume. In sports, the Orange County Register rolled out a model Register/Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim!) bundle last year. Many publishers have told me they admired the innovation, though follow-on adoption or adaptation has been scant.For newspapers and magazines used to self-referential subscription offers, a mindset change is required — and the addition of serious marketer talent, drawn mostly from outside the world of traditional publishing. But the possibilities are near-endless. |
That’s a long prologue for 
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