First, the stats from wikipedia (not the best source I know):
An increasing number of countries, particularly in Europe, now have more mobile phones than people. According to the figures from Eurostat, the European Union’s in-house statistical office, Luxembourg had the highest mobile phone penetration rate at 158 mobile subscriptions per 100 people (158%), closely followed by Lithuania and Italy.[7] In Hong Kong the penetration rate reached 139.8% of the population in July 2007.[8] Over 50 countries have mobile phone subscription penetration rates higher than that of the population and the Western European average penetration rate was 110% in 2007 (source Informa 2007). The U.S. currently has one of the lowest rates of mobile phone penetrations in the industrialized world at 85%.
A recent article in The New York Times about newspapers on cellphones had this statement from, “Tim Repsher, who oversees Media General’s mobile products, said he chose Verve because he would not have to hire new staff members to figure out how to publish newspapers on cellphones. Mobile readership quadrupled in a year”
Now, my question is this. If you are already giving away content for free online, outsourcing delivery, partnering with Yahoo on ad placement and classified ads, and losing paid print readership without creating a new deliverable, are you still a newspaper? Or are you a collection of freelance journalists?
What if Media General had hired staff to develop a cell phone application? Their ROI would be higher. They may even have come up with an application to sell others. We’ll never know I guess. What is the cost / benefit of outsourcing a service you think is integral to the viability of your organization? That doesn’t make any sense to me.And as for “quadrupling the mobile readership in one year”, what does that even mean? Did you go from 1 person to 4? Tell us what your penetration in the market is.
Tell us what you really paid for…
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To clarify. Our staffs create the entire content, layout and navigation for our mobile web sites. We use VERVEs web based system to do that in house. VERVE allows us to use feeds out of the publishing system to keep the mobile content pieces fresh and up to date when the online site is updated. Cuts down double publishing. Verve provides user agents for the web sites to facilitate redirects. The part of the article that says “i dont have to hire a staff” was referring to not having to hire a staff to keep up with the ever changing phone browsers and new phones coming out. Verve has staff for that. As for growth. I have over 600,000 pvs a month and it is still climbing.
Tim,
Thanks for the clarification. I like to play devil’s advocate here on metaprinter. I figure if all I do is agree with everything that’s going on in the industry, I’m not learning anything AND doing a real disservice to the two people following this blog.
I think your point would be more validated if you had said something like, “our page views are growing faster than the industry standard”. Or “our readership quadrupled in one year, while others in our market have only doubled”.
Either way, my point was that newspapers need to focus on more than unique content creation. They need to develop content delivery platforms so that their hard earned revenue is not marginalized by 3rd party applications.
Robert,
I understand you fully. The one issue with newspapers, that was always an issue, is space to put in more details on a story. I did the NYT interview the day of the deadline via cellphone in the middle of Tampa Traffic. Not a good place, but I appreciated the chance to get something in print for Media Companies to read that Mobile is a great opportunity to get into as readers of your local products utilize it. Almost seem hungry for it.
What I would of liked to have in that article is to your point. Newspapers need to revalue their local content. Mobile works well, but it is really important to be locally relavant to the point of content and ads being very location specific. Being able to have content in formats that can be used on a host of devices and delivery methods is getting to be more and more important.
Example of local relavance. The signs ups for local weather and prep sports outweigh the sign ups for other catagories of news. Our main mobile sites have good traffic but it is to local breaking news and community weather. Very local.
Even though we use 3rd party to help with national delivery on carriers, we do have in house built sections. Like a prep sports web sites for each area. A lot of work, but it can have immense rewards.
I agree with you , the need for content delivery platforms and tagged content to allow for hyper local relavance for mobile search and presentation is essential whether you use internal technology for your sites, or use another companies products to display your content.
On mobile , you dont have to be the best in the nation, just the best in your town.