E-Readers: Challenges and Opportunity for Publishers

Stijn Bus, Manager for Business Development and Sales, Irex Technologies, The Netherlands

E-readers now on the market don’t have colour, aren’t flexibile, are expensive, and don’t have a common standard for format or delivery. So why would newspaper publishers want to offer e-paper delivery to their readers?

Mr Bus, whose company is one of several manufacturers of such devices, points to the examples of Les Echos in France and NRC Handelsblad in Germany, which already offer both the devices and an e-reader daily edition to their customers.

Though today’s devices have drawbacks, Mr Bus made a case for starting now to gain a strategic advantage with a delivery system that some say will improve quickly and radically change newspaper delivery in the future.

“There are already parties taking pieces of the pie,” he said. “If you wait until there is a colour version in the store for 100 euros - maybe five years - it will be very difficult to get a piece of the pie.”

Mr Bus said the devices are already undergoing improvements - they provide readability comfort far greater than laptops and mobile devices and close to paper, they don’t use much electricity, they’re easy for users to update, and they can store a great amount of information.

Telling stories without text

Eric Scherer, Director of Strategic Planning & Partnerships, Agence France-Presse

“We know that a picture is worth a thousand words,” says Mr Scherer in a presentation that looked at a variety of animated graphics, maps and other visual journalistic tools.

“Pictures, videos and animated graphics will get the traffic, he said. “To reach a global audience, you will have to be more and more visual.”

Using the US presidential race and the economic crisis as examples, Mr Scherer showed what some news organisations - and some pure-play internet companies - were doing with animated graphics, video, animated maps, 3D models, even cartoons, to tell stories without any text at all.

He also pointed to the Lifehacker site, which provides a top-10 list of online tools for following the elections. “Unfortunately, on this top 10 list, there is no traditional media,” he said. Perhaps newspaper companies could be doing more?

Will Facebook Become Google?

Hans Peter Brondmo, CEO and Founder, Plum Software, USA, and Stephanie Stutz, Web and Mobile Product Manager, ViaMichelin, France

“I think that Facebook, the potential of that application, is not yet understood,” says Mr Brondmo. “I think Facebook has the potential to be the next Google in terms of revenue potential.”

Clearly a bold statement, but Mr Brondmo believes that social networking and social sharing have fundamentally changed the web, and how people access and share information.

“Nobody does websites anymore, they do web applications”, he says. “A website is a brochure, and application is something you can use, interact with.”

And social media applications fulfil a basic human need, he said.

Mr Brondmo, whose company makes the social sharing platform used by ViaMichelin and many others, believes another fundamental change in the digital world is of particular value to publishers. While social sites like Facebook speak to the masses, there is a growing trend toward micro-sharing sites - to speak and share things to your ten best friends, for example.

“If you are a local newspaper, you can’t compete with YouTube, but you could talk about the local election. You can create small private networks for the local community.”

Ms Stutz explained how ViaMichelin created its My Trips site to take advantage of this development. The site allows users to discover ideas from other people’s trips, create travel diaries (from home or the road, using a mobile telephone), and share the material with “people you care about.”

Such sites are valuable for businesses because they keep people on the site longer, increase traffic, benefit from user-generated content, and give insight into the customers.

The future is here for mobile revenues

Fredrik Oscarson, Founder and Vice President, New Business Director, Mobiento, Sweden

Mobile marketing brought in a relatively small 1.8 billion dollars worldwide last year, so “do we really have to care about this?” asks Mr Oscarson.

If you believe the forecasters, yes; analysts predict it will grow to 15 billion dollars by 2011 and 24 billion two years later.

“The reality is, in many countries it is the fastest growing channel,” says Mr Oscarson, whose company engages in mobile marketing.

Mobile advertising is also proving to be more effective than internet advertising, he says. The reading rate for text messages is more than 94 percent; the click through rate is two to 10 times higher than for the ordinary web; the recall rate is more than 60 percent, the “viral effect” creates a 25 percent pass-along rate, and marketers can target potential customers based on location, behaviour and timing.

Here’s a few of the things that publishers should do with mobile, says Mr Oscarson:

  Launch a mobile website. “You can get them up and running in less than two months and it’s not a costly venture either.”

  Drive traffic to the new site. “People don’t stumble across mobile sites, you have to trigger the action to get the traffic numbers. Drive them from the internet site - tell them to take the site with them for the entire day.”

  Monetize traffic. “Mobile advertising is the most sustainable way of doing it,” says Mr Oscarson.

“Reality” for Mobile Telephones

Jorma Härkönen, Senior Vice President and President of Internet & Consumer Business, MTV Media, Finland

Reality is big in the Finnish mobile telephone business - reality television shows, that is.

Mr Härkönen described how MTV Media, with interests in television, radio and internet, brings mobile telephones into its cross-media offerings of such reality shows as “Big Brother” and “Idol” (the Finnish version of the British Pop Idol show). The shows can be streamed on mobile devices and fans can vote, buy merchandise and have access to other services linked to the shows.

MTV Media is Finland’s leading electronic media company, but Mr Härkönen focused his presentation primarily on the future of mobile information delivery.

Mr Härkönen believes viable mobile businesses have arrived - he points out that voice calls on mobile telephones now make up only 12 percent of usage time, dwarfed by information services like messaging, games and internet browsing.

The content for mobile television will grow and diversify, as well the supply of user-friendly hand-held devices, he says. But while devices and content are advancing, the internet advertising-driven model does not yet work for mobile, and solutions must be found.

Mr Härkönen said MTV Media’s strategy will focus on three main areas: improving the user experience, providing made-for-mobile content (which he calls ‘snack media’), and organisation of advertising sales.

Integrate mobile into existing platforms

Ilicco Elia, Head of Mobile Europe, Reuters, United Kingdom

Stop thinking about mobile as a separate platform, Mr Elia advises.

“You need to start thinking about mobile as part of your much larger platform,” he says. “It is not a standalone site. It’s just part of the way you get news out to your clients.”

And, he says, “you need to make sure you are integrating mobile into your other advertising platforms. You need to understand how your mobile site enhances your offer to your advertisers.”

He demonstrated why this was so with an advertising campaign for IBM that used Reuters mobile and internet sites and its electronic outdoor locations.

As Reuters has the ability to sell keywords to its advertising clients, IBM bought the right to appear around any story about innovation - be in on the regular website, the mobile site, or on an outdoor screen.

“We’re not trying to say, ‘give us five pounds for the website, give us 10 pounds for the outdoor, give us three pounds for the mobile. This says the package is worth more than the sum of its parts,” says Mr Elia.