More Freedom with Mobile

‘The mobile is more important because it gives you more freedom’, says Johan Brandt, director of mobile at Sweden’s largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

For the past 6 months, Mr Brandt and his co-workers have revamped the version of their mobile site, trying to break free from the print version of the newspaper. They see it as a business growing on its own and have recently entered into a cooperation agreement with Telenor and Nokia which, for example, provides a factory installed DN bookmark in the Nokia N82.

Mr Brandt believes the mobile is, for many people, the most personalized and social piece of equipment they carry and he sees a future increase in its usage.

Three important things that make the mobile media unique:

1. It is a local media.

2. It is a contextual media which provides local search. ‘Where? When? What?

3. It is a personal media which makes the mobile user unique.

Three challenges for mobile media:

1. Getting paid. This could, however, be solved with banner advertising, premium push services paid by the user, revenue sharing and sponsorship, suggest Mr Brandt.

2. Adapting processes for our new channels.

3. Obtaining a larger reader involvement through dialogue, participation etc.

Three changes DN are looking forward to:

1. Standardization of technology.

2. Standardization of advertising and measurement.

3. Flat free mobile browsing.

Advertising potential for mobile telephones

The advertising market for mobile telephone isn’t minimal - if all the advertising in the world is measured, internet accounts for five percent and everything else accounts for 95 percent - mobile doesn’t even register.

But the potential is huge, says Mr Ling. Here’s why:
  Things change rapidly in the mobile phone business.
  The industry is in its infancy.
  Mobile advertising isn’t like internet, print or broadcast advertising.
  There is good news for news providers.

The reason there is good news for the news business is that mobile users are extremely adverse to spam - so “push” content needs to be seen as information. And this provides opportunities to “piggyback” advertising on news content.

Mr Ling cited a study that forecasts that internet advertising revenues will exceed 11 billion dollars by 2011.

Getting rid of the yoyo-effect

‘In order to provide high quality content, you need to identify your audience; who are your users? How can I give the users what they want?’ asks Mr Lee, Sales Director at the search engine company FAST.

The main question users should ask themselves is: What do you provide to me as a user in order for me to click on you page?

Mr Jee says matching consumer to listing is not enough -- users also ask themselves the following questions when they’re searching for products and services on the net:
  Can I find it?
  Can I find it near me?
  Can I compare it?
  Can I map it?
  Can I find a deal on it?
  Can I read what others think about it?
  Can I call right now?
  Can I get all of this from just one search?

Mr Jee is aiming to free internet users from what he calls ‘the yoyo-effect’. ‘Google to me is like that - the search only goes in and out instead of using the opportunities of taking all different directions’, he says.

A profitable kiss

‘How do we kiss 713 000 teenagers and still make a profit?’ is the question with which Mr Oterhals opens his speech. He refers to the busiest communications site ever in Scandinavia, Nettby.

Mr Oterhals quotes Cory Doctorow who said that ‘content isn’t king - conversation is.’ With this in mind, Nettby focuses on bringing people together via interests and geography - communication is the most important thing.

The internet site has recently started a collaboration with lip balm company Lypsyl, where they offer Nettby users the opportunity to send a kiss to another site member. This has become a very popular activity with over 2 million kisses sent over a period of two weeks.

Even with this success, the company still worries about what will be the next big thing: you cannot stay on the market with only one product anymore, says Mr Oterhals.

‘That is the complexity of competitors, what should our next flying car be? One thing you can be sure of when you have no competitors is that you will soon have one.’ says Mr Oterhals.

Advantages of ACAP

‘A few publishers have no concerns at all about how their content is re-used by others,” says Mr Bide, Director of the ACAP project, or Automated Content Access Protocol.

But for the majority of publishers that are concerned about how third parties like news aggregators and search engines use their content, “we offer a solution that is core to every part of the publishing industry’, says Mr Bide.

ACAP takes the terms and conditions that appear on every website and puts them in machine-readable format that allows search engine spiders and crawlers to read them. In addition to saying whether they’re allowed to crawl the site or not, ACAP allows publishers the flexibility of offering terms for use - how long content can remain posted on third-party sites, for example, or whether only some third parties can use it, not others.

The solution is being offered free of charge. Full details are available at http://www.the-acap.org

World Digital Media Trends

Ms Stone presented the new World Digital Media Trends and Benchmarking Digital Revenue publications from the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project of the World Association of Newspapers.

‘Main purpose was to capture what traditional media companies are doing right now and why they are losing ground in market use’, says Ms Stone.

The biggest reason for this is costs: Internet advertising is much less expensive than other forms of advertising -- it only brings out one tenth print media advertising revenues.

Ms Stone also presented some interesting facts and figures about the digital media business, from the World Digital Media Trends report. For instance, about 25 percent of the total revenue online goes to media companies; the rest goes to Google. The trend is clear that one day - perhaps soon - online will produce more revenue than print. This trends is developing more rapidly in Scandinavia than anywhere else in the world. Ms Stone cited the example of the online version of Aftonbladet, which has already passed the printed version when it comes to ad revenue.

According to Ms Stone, the mobile channel is the most promising media for advertising in the future. However, mobile only represents less than one percent of the total revenues right now. Other emerging trends are video, search, e-mail advertising, crossmedia selling and citizen journalism.