Mobile news consumption is picking up very fast

The changes are a revolution: Almost one in three visits to Norwegian media products are now from mobile platforms.

For two years I have been recording how users choose the different digital platforms of Norway’s biggest newspaper: Aftenposten.

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The dramatic changes over the last 24 months are indeed a revolution.

People are moving from PCs to mobile platforms at increasing speed. It is only a matter of time before smartphones and tablets will outperform the PC as the major platform for media consumption in Norway.

With 1,3 million unique visitors to its web site every week in a country of 4,5 million there is no reason to believe that the numbers from Aftenposten are not representative for the media market in Norway as a whole.

So let us compare which platforms people used to consume the news from Aftenposten in January 2012 with the same month two years ago.

PC versus mobile platforms

Some conclusions

• Visits from mobile platforms have increased from 3,7 % of the total in January 2010 to 30,5 % in January 2012 (23,9 % mobile phones, 6,6 % iPad).
• Two years ago there were 26 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones.  Last month there were only 2,3 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones and tablets.
• So far there are no signs that the new traffic from mobile phones and tablets have cannibalized the traffic from PCs.  Instead the mobile visits are coming on top of the visits already from PCs.
• iPad is picking up quickly – and made a jump during the Christmas holiday. Almost seven per cent of the total visits to Aftenposten’s products now come from the iPad.

Android picking up market shares quickly

There are also interesting developments in what type of mobile phones people use to access the news site:

• Apple’s IOS has stayed the biggest mobile operating system ever since this statistics started two years ago. But in January 2010 IOS was barely bigger than Nokia’s Symbian operating system.
• Since then Symbian have almost disappeared completely and instead Android phones are starting to pick up market shares at increasing speed.
• Last month IOS was 53,6 % of the mobile visits, while 34,5 % used Android phones. The gap between the two is decreasing every month.
• Especially the Android-based  Samsung Galaxy gt-i9100 seems to gain popularity quickly in the Norwegian market. From December 2011 to January 2012 the number of visits from iPhones actually decreased by 3,7 per cent, while the number of visits from Samsung Galaxy phones increased with 15,1 %.  No wonder which phone was under the Christmas trees!

Few other analysts give as comprehensive and solid analysis of current Internet trends as Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. Here is her latest presentation of mobile and other digital trends.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

I always try to bookmark the presentations of Mary Meeker, as I find myself going back to them again and again. And what is a better way of bookmarking a great presentation than to blog about it?

Mary Meeker used to work for Morgan Stanley. Her annual presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit continues to draw a lot of attention.  The presentation inserted above is from this year’s summit.

A few points that I have noted:

• The top global players are still mostly US companies with a couple of Chinese services as the only exceptions
• Still China now has almost twice as many Internet users as USA. And half of them been added during the last four years.
• Smartphone usage is exploding  - but still has tremendous potential for further growth
• iPad is growing at much faster rate after launch than iPhone did
• Social media is moving mobile big time: 55 % of Twitter usage and 33 % of Facebook usage is now from mobile platforms
• The next “big thing” is online sound
• Mobile commerce is finally lifting off
• There is a big discrepancy between the time spent on different media and where advertising dollars are spent. For instance: 8 % of media time in the USA is spent on mobile, while only 0,5 % of the advertising budgets
• In hardware tablets and smartphones outshipped PCs in Q4 of 2010

Related articles

• Mary Meeker’s 2011 Web 2.0 Summit Presentation (readwriteweb.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)
• Mary Meeker’s state of the Internet report (digitaltrends.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)

One in five Norwegians now consume media content on mobile platforms on a daily basis. Changes happen so fast that media companies struggle to keep up.

Hardly before has the media industry seen changes in user patterns take place as fast as during the last year. And this time we are not talking about how people are abandoning the printed newspaper (they still are), but how mobile media consumption is exploding.

TNS Gallup, a major market research company, just published its latest data about how Norwegians use media content on mobile platforms.

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Norway is a country of almost five million people. Yes, it is a small country. Yet Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are technologically advanced – and the population is generally considered to be early adopters of new technology. Because of this, changes in media habits in these countries should be of interest to media companies in other countries in the Western world as well.

The latest report from TNS Gallup shows how quickly Norwegians now are adopting mobile phones as a platform for consuming media content.

In the first quarter of 2011 19,3 % of Norwegians – or one in five – consumed media content daily on mobile platforms. That is twice as many as one year ago.

Here is a graphical presentation of the changes in use of mobile media content during the last few years.

For media companies still struggling to come to grips with users moving from the printed newspaper to the web this poses a new challenge. It may seem like readers’ habits are changing faster than many media companies are able to adapt.

The transformation from PCs to mobile platforms is driven by two forces:

The smartphone. Media habits changed almost overnight with the introduction of iPhone. Suddenly people started using their mobile phones to surf the web.

• The iPad – and other tablets. iPad is opening up new user situations for media content.

I looked at how these changes play out with Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten (disclaimer: I work for Media Norway, the owner company of Aftenposten).

In April one in six visits to Aftenposten’s digital products were on mobile platforms.

One in six!

Or 16,3 % to be more specific. 12,4 % on mobile phones and 3,9 % on iPad.

The percentage is up from 3,7 % in the beginning of 2010.

I don’t have access to data for the other Norwegian media houses, but I am pretty sure the trend is similar.

It is a dramatic shift in just one year – and the revolution is bound to continue. This means that media houses have to hurry up to develop great mobile versions of their content. In Norway most large media companies already have quite good mobile versions. However, very few are able to make significant revenues yet on the mobile platforms.

More than anything, though, the platform shifts offer new opportunities for media companies to create compelling products for new user situations. We can already observe very specific user patterns throughout the day on the different devices:

• News content on PCs is consumed throughout the whole day, without any clear peak. In fact the usage is at its highest while people are at work.
• iPad is a sofa device. The usage peak is from 6 to 11 PM at night.
• The mobile phone usage pattern has a big peak early in the morning and another one in the late afternoon as people commute home from work.  But the most intense usage is from 11 PM to midnight. All of a sudden media companies are finding themself in people’s beds!

The usage of Aftenposten.no on PC, iPad and mobile phones have very different patterns throughout the day

So what does this mean?

First of all: Media companies have an unprecedented chance to reach their users throughout the day and in whatever situation they might be.

The challenge now is to develop smart cross-platform media products that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and at whatever device the users choose to consume the content.

Do you need to catch up on the latest mobile internet trends? Check this excellent presentation from the highly respected analyst Mary Meeker.

Few analysts receive as much attention when presenting the future internet trends as Mary Meeker. Until recently she was with Morgan Stanley. She is now a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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The presentation was given together with partner Matt Murphy at Google’s Thinkmobile conference in New York this week.

I really recommend that you flip through it. They elaborates on several mobile internet trends that are taking place at the moment:

• Mobile platforms hit critical mass
• Mobile is global
• Social networking accelerating growth of mobile
• Time shifting to mobile usage
• Mobile advertising – growing pains, but huge promise
• mCommerce – changing shopping behavior
• Emergence of virtual goods and in-app commerce
• Not all platforms are created equal
• Change will accelerate, new players emerging rapidly

You can download the presentation from Slideshare.

Localization, platform shifts and continued fragmentation of the content market are some of the digital media trends that will shape 2011.

What are the core forces influencing digital media in 2011?  This question can be approached in a number of different ways.  I have tried to identify five trends or forces that I think will influence or continue to influence the media industry in a particular way in the year to come.

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This article, as many others on BetaTales, was written as preparation for a presentation I gave on digital media. I had the pleasure of talking about digital media trends in 2011 for about 150 communication and marketing professionals at the annual Scandinavian Futures Conference held by the Norwegian market research agency Opinion. As similar presentation was also held for the management conference of Media Norway (see the slides for the presentation above).

None of the trends are new – rather it is an attempt to sum up some of the more powerful ones. And of course: Many more could have been mentioned.

But at least I think any digital media executive should try to analyze how these five forces will influence his/her business in 2011.

The five trends are:

1. New platforms take big parts of media consumption
2. Localization
3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content
4. Everything is social
5. New business models for content

Let us go through them, one by one:

1. Mobility and platform change

E-readers and tablets are about to reach critical mass. On one end of the scale you have dedicated e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle. Here we are already seeing a dramatic drop in prices; the cheapest Kindle now sell for USD 139. I will not be surprised if we see the cheapest e-readers fall below USD 100 in 2011. That could give these readers a boost in numbers.

On the other end of the scale we have iPad and a long line of Android-based tablets that are about to enter the market. These are multi-purpose devices that satisfy a whole range of needs among users.

Gartner has already estimated that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the dominant web access device worldwide by 2013.

Access to content is therefore no longer a limited good. People will be continuously online and expect to be able to access whatever they need wherever they may be.

As part of this we will start seeing “tablet-only” and “mobile first” media companies, as pointed out by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable.

Parallell to the emergence of new platforms we see anincreasing number of services and products moving into the cloud. In fact many products become platform agnostic. Users expect that they can access the service on whatever platform or device they use at any given moment.

In the media industry we used to talk about print versus the web – and then we would define how our products would differ on the two platforms.

Not any more. As more platforms emerge and users consume media on several devices during the day, the value of the brand will be more important than the value of the platform-specific product.

Look at some of the most successful digital services out there now, like Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox and Kindle. None of them are platform specific. If you decide to pay for the file sharing service Dropbox, for instance, it will not be because their iPhone app is so awesome. Instead you buy a service with some specific attributes – and use this service on whatever device that is handy right now.  The core benefits of the product, like how many GBs you can store in your account, follow you across platforms. And the convenience of being able to use it on many platforms is actually a core benefit of the product in itself.

We see a very strong trend towards platform agnostic services – where a product is not defined in terms of one platform only, but as a service across all available platforms.

In this area most media companies are dragging behind. Many media executives seem to believe they will be able to sell each platform specific product individually. For instance they want you to pay for an iPad subscription as a different product than the premium level of the web site.

I believe this type of platform specific strategy will fail. Instead the winners will be those who succeed in defining product offerings that are available wherever people choose to access them. As smart phones and tablets become more common, most people will indeed consume media content on several devices during the day.  In this new reality users will expect seamless transfer of product benefits across platforms.

One important point: That products become platform agnostic does not necessarily mean that they have the same attributes on all platforms. In fact I think we are about to see that making digital versions of the printed paper will fail as a business model. Content must be presented according to the specific user situation of each platform, and the traditional broad print bundle may no longer be the core of the digital product.

2. Localization

The rise of smart phones is pushing localization services many steps ahead.

In 2010 we saw the rise of localization networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. At the same time Facebook introduced Facebook Places as its tool to encourage people to tell where they are and Google made clear that location-based coupons would play an important part of its strategy.

In short: It is time for local media sites to watch out as the global giants prepare to move into their territory.

2011 will be the year when we see services based on localization take a big step forward. People will start getting used to content and commercial offers being served according to where they are at any given time. And people will start to depend on these type of services in their everyday life.

The development will be driven by big services like Google and Facebook, which both see great opportunities in the local ad markets.

But also media companies will follow along, creating local news services targeted at users’ location.

An especially creative service using localization information is Ratio Finder. The service uses check-in information from Foursquare – and makes a dynamic map of pubs and clubs with higher than average ratio of female checkins right now.

One interesting question: Who will own the biggest database of location-based offerings in each market? I am convinced those who succeed in building such a database will make lots of money. And I think this market will be defined by the network economy, in which the market leader will have a huge benefit.

A creative example of service based on localization is Ratio Finder: http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/

3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content

As I see it, most editors seem to underestimate the powerful forces of disaggregation of content in the digital area.

And still disaggregation of content is perhaps the most powerful force influencing the traditional media industry.

What do I mean by disaggregation?

Think back a few years at the typical offering of a traditional media company, be it a newspaper or television company. At the time distribution of news and content was limited by physical restraints. In order to be able to present the news to people in your local target area, you had to package it so that it fit the needs of most of your users. It was “one size fits all”.

In the digital era these physical boundaries are no longer valid. In fact there is no longer an additional cost to speak of to present news to each user according to his/her personal interests.  News can be distributed freely – specialized for the individual user.

So we see that content is being split up into its individual pieces.

And then it is being repackaged. Sometimes it is done by the media companies themselves, but more often other agents have more at stake. Content is being repackaged in all kinds of ways. Some examples:

• Social repackaging. People use services like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to receive content recommendations from friends or people they trust. For music playlists on Spotify perform a similar function.
• Repackaging by aggregation. Google News or similar services aggregate content from thousands of sources and present it according to different categories. In this way users can follow all the news on one particular topic of interest without having to look up each content source individually.
• Repackaging by search. Searching for information on Google helps users find exactly what they are looking for.
• Repackaging by human curation.  Huffington Post is in many ways an example of this, where editors summarize and link to stories from many different sources.

The huge challenge for media companies is that the main focus is switching from the edited package as the core of its offering to the individual article or content piece. I believe edited packages still will be important, but they will no longer be the only way people consume news.

For media companies this means that the content structure becomes much more important than before. In fact we can state the following:

Content without metadata has no value!

No value!

And this is a huge challenge for most media companies! In the analogue world they did not have to worry about meta data. In the digital world it has become essential for success.

4. Everything is becoming social

Social media is ingrained in more and more digital services. Therefore it is impossible to talk about digital media trends without mentioning social media.

Facebook has become the new hub for people’s digital life. More than 550 million people now use Facebook – and for many of those it has become the online starting point, replacing photo albums, address books, chats, news services, etc.

While many media companies a couple of years ago tried to build their own social communities, many of them today decide to use Facebook as the social glue around their content. In Norway this trend was illustrated by the demise of the once hugely popular newspaper-owned social network Nettby.

The social aspect of digital life spreads to more and more areas:

• Social shopping is growing, illustrated by services like Groupon and Livingsocial.
• Search is becoming social. Google is experimenting with including results from your Twitter followers and Bing and Facebook has started a partnership to make search more social.
• Social gaming has become a huge industry, as illustrated by the success of Zynga, the creator of the very popular Facebook game Farmville.
• Even ads are becoming social. A good example is Facebook’s new ad format Sponsored Stories, in which your interactions with brands online may show up in ads displayed in your friends’ newsfeed.

5. New business models for content

Almost all media companies now try to find ways to charge users for content. In this regard 2011 will be the year of experiments. The task is extremely difficult, though:

Content is everywhere in the digital world – and no longer scarce.  In addition people expect to be able to share the content they like with their friends.

Does that mean we cannot make users pay for content? No, it does not. But it is extremely important to remember that people rarely pay for just the content. Many other aspects are equally important, such as Unique Convenience and Unique Usefulness.

• Read my article: Five ways to build Unique Value for digital content

I have asked myself why user payment suddenly has so much more important for media companies. I believe there are at least two reasons:

• Media companies need more revenue streams to finance good journalism. This has been even more clear as newspaper readership continues to drop – and banner ads are loosing value by the day. The process has been helped by the financial crisis, which gave media companies a new sense of reality.
• The shift to mobile platforms for media consumptions has changed the rules of the game. People seem to be more willing to pay for content on mobile platforms – and media companies are eager to explore that.

My guess is that most attempts at charging users for content in 2011 will fail. The reason is that media companies need to completely rethink their approach to content in order to succeed. That does take some time.

But failures are what will push us forward. Only by making mistakes we will realize the steps we need to take.

And we will see some success stories. Many of them will be surprising. And they will help the rest of us to identify what really creates Unique Value for our readers. In the long term the experience will also improve the quality of journalism, as we learn more about what our readers truly appreciate and are willing to pay for.

————————————————————————-

More to read about digital media trends in 2011

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• 10 predictions for the news media in 2011 (Mashable)
• Our Bets For Digital Media In 2011 (paidcontent.org)
• Ten newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2011 (lostremote.com)
• Seven Digital Media Trends of 2011 (socialmediatoday.com)
• My Mix of Social Media Trends 2011 (John Bell)
• Ten digital trends (ClickHere)
• Trends to watch in 2011 (sfnBlog)
• The rise of apps, iPad and Android (Wall Street Journal)

What are the digital trends that will shape the media industry? I asked five digital media experts. Here are their answers.

Everybody in the media industry these days seems to be trying to predict what happens in the digital media space right now. But the more experts you ask, the more different answers you get.

For the record: This is an updated version of the previous blog post “Digital trends that will shape the media industry”. Two more experts have been added to this post.

I put the following question to five recognized digital media experts:

• What are the three most important digital media trends right now that will shape the media industry over the next 3-5 years?

Here are their answers:

Knut-Arne Futsæter is one of Norway’s leading analysts of media trends. As research director at the market research agency TNS Gallup he regurlarly presents the latest research about media habits of the technological sophisticated Norwegian population. TNS Gallup is responsible for the official Internet surveys in Norway.

Futsæter is a very good person to follow on Twitter if you want to catch up on interesting links about what happens in digital media.

Thomas Baekdal is the man behind the well respected and very popular digital media blog Baekdal.com.

Having worked with new media in Denmark for 13 years, Baekdal now spends most of his time on his blog. I do recommend you to follow it, as Baekdal.com in my opinion is one of the most interesting digital media blogs out there.

His background is unusual, with a mix of expertise in design, fashion, media and publishing.

Thomas Crampton used to work for years as a globetrotting newspaper journalist, primarily for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

He then changed the course of his career – and since 2004 has been passionately involved with digital media. He is now the Asia Pacific director for 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy – and a frequently used keynote speaker on social media.

I recommend you to follow his excellent blog, in which he often provides very interesting information about social media in Asia.  He also tweets at @thomascrampton.

Grzegorz Piechota is the president of International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) in Europe.

One of the points he makes is how the older generation also will become digital.

“New devices like iPads seem to be much easier for the old generation to understand and to use. (Look at my parents-in-law.)”, he writes.

“Printed media used to think they had problems with the young readers, now watch out as their core readers are going finally to discover digital news, entertainment, communication, geolocation and e-commerce.”

“And you know — at least in developed countries the market of the old is much bigger than the market of the young, and it is going to be bigger and bigger.”

Grzegorz tweets at @forum4editors.

Nic Newman presents himself as a “digital consultant working on the future of journalism”.  For many years he used to work for BBC, first in different editorial positions and then in charge of teams developing major web sites for the broadcasting corporation.

One of his points is how the use of videos create new ways of telling and distributing stories.

“Navigating the world of the web through video led gateways will shake up the old broadcasting elites and open a new wave of innovation on TV, PC, Tablet and mobile”, he writes.

He tweets at @nicnewman.

• Read also: 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010

How location and positioning will become game changers in the local media market as Google and Facebook proceed with their offensive plans.

As they watch the wave of change hitting the media business, chief executives of local media brands usually have been able to cling to one last resort: At least their strong position in the local market is fairly safe.

No more.

There is a global digital revolution entering local media markets.

It is called location. And positioning. It is the tool of global players like Google and Facebook as they try to attract local small advertisers.

Let us start with formulating two basic postulates:

1. What can become digital, will become digital
2. “Global equals local” in the digital world

Why do I mean by this?

The first postulate should be pretty obvious. We are in the middle of a major digital transformation. The changes are inevitable, the only point left arguing about is the speed. Everything that can become digital, will eventually become digital.

That includes all types of local ads.

The second postulate probably needs a little bit more explanation.  In the analog world local market places and services in most cases were controlled by players with a strong local presence. The reason for this was obvious: Physical restraints, like distribution or storage needs, gave huge advantages to companies geographically based in the local area.  In this type of market many areas of business, like running a newspaper, required a huge initial investment, primarily in buildings and production equipment.

In the digital world there are no longer physical restraints to entering a local business. In fact local needs can be served as well by a global player as by local businesses. No longer do you need local expertise in every area where you do business. More important is the platform you have built for your business.

In short: Global equals local.

What does this mean for local media sites?

The major competitors are no longer necessarily other local players. Instead you are competing with global giants in your own small and local market.

And here comes the most important point: Global players are now preparing a major offensive to grab the lion’s share of local ad markets around the world.

The reason for this development is obvious: The rise of the smart phone. People no longer want a phone just to call with. They also like to surf, search, look for additional offers, etc. This includes services that register your physical location at any time. And basically all smart phones today offer geographic positioning as a major feature.

Both Google and Facebook now seem to go after the local markets around the world – although from different perspectives.

Let us start with Google

Google’s ingenious idea in ads was to automatically connect the content of a web page with the message of an advertisement. In addition the pricing and display of ads would be dynamic, depending on the efficiency in collecting users for the advertiser.

Google Adwords has been the major revenue stream for Google with its smart way of combining commercial ads with whatever content is on any specific web page.

Now Google obviously is refocusing its resources from Adwords to location based coupons.

“The Holy Grail for local advertising is location-targeted coupons, and we’re building Google Offers to enable that, as well as click-to-call functionality for nearby businesses,” said Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms at Google in a recent interview.

Google has announced that one third of all mobile searches are based on where people are at any given moment.

And Mike Steib notices how that is an enormous opportunity for a company like Google:

“When we see that a third of the search queries on a mobile device are local in nature, but a smaller percentage of ads that are local in nature, that’s a recipe for an opportunity for advertisers and agencies.”

We should also mention Google Places, which essentially is a free global catalogue service enabling any small business to get correctly tagged on Google Maps. In many countries Google has purchased data from catalogue companies to make sure all businesses – large and small – are placed on the map.

There is no more telling example of Google’s refocus than the fact that the well-know search boss Marissa Mayer has been given the new role of managing the geo/local business.  That means she is moving away from the area that has represented 90 % of Google’s income to a new area said to be “crucial to our users and to the future of Google”.

Geo/local is crucial to the future of Google? Think about that! If it is crucial to the world’s largest search gigant, what about the many thousands of local media sites?

So tell me, executives of local media sites around the world: What have you done in the area of geolocated ads recently? Not so much? You better pay attention!

What will Google do?

Fast Company in a recent blog post exemplified how Google already is already betting on geo location being an essential of the future. Look for instance at this example of changes in Google’s search result:

You may also try to search for the word “restaurant” on an Android powered mobile phone – and you will get a glimpse of how Google hopes to include location based search results whenever possible.

The direction Google is moving is quite obvious: From being the best in the class to connect ads with content on web pages, Google now hopes to have a similar position in serving ads based on where you are at any given time.

That is bad news for local media sites!

What about Facebook?

Fecebook seems determined to compete in the same area as Google, namely in utilizing where people are at any given moment.

The last effort is Facebook Places. This encourages people to report where they are at any given time. Facebook wants to connect people to friends who happens to be nearby – and the company wants to offer lucrative deals.

Several services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, are already based on people “checking in” at where they are. Both have become quite popular, and have inspired a number of creative uses, like how you can check which bars in New York and San Francisco have the highest female to male ratio right now.

Still, Facebook, with its 500 million users, have a much bigger potential of becoming the de facto location service of people around the world.

I suggest you read this article from ReadWriteWeb that explains the Facebook strategy in this regard. Most important is how Facebook has decided to open up it Places API.

“In other words, Facebook Places has positioned itself as the central hub for all check-in apps”, concludes ReadWriteWeb.

Not only has Facebook Places been introduced. The huge social network at the same time has launched Facebook Deals. The service gives businesses a chance to offer users special deals as soon as they check in to their business on Facebook Places.

So far this is only available in USA – and it is still in an early phase. But imagine just for a moment that Facebook indeed succeeds in making its many users check wherever they are and also builds a successful location-based ad business on top of this.

Who stands to loose from this?

You are right! Local media sites. Suddenly a global giant offers a whole new opportunity for your local advertisers to pinpoint just the people who are close to their physical store.

To conclude so far:

Two global giants are moving into the local ad scene – attacking from different directions. Google’s approach is through search. Using your mobile phone to find information, you are better served with links that are relevant to your physical position. Facebook’s approach is through your social network. It has the potential of making huges masses of people voluntarily tell others where they are at any time – and then monetize this information.

While being strong in offering local content and keeping a close relationship to the population, many local media sites will still find themselves at disadvantage in this area compared to both Google and Facebook.

And that is not enough: There are other players as well!

Please write down the words “social shopping”! It is a whole new group of sites utilizing people’s need to make shopping a social experience.

Maybe the best known example is Groupon.com, a site offering daily deals to its users and rewarding members who invite friends to take part in the deals.

In my own small country (Norway), Groupon has in a very short time been able to offer deals in no less than 20 different cities.   It is not a huge success yet, but still indicates strongly how foreign services move into what has been considered very local markets.

To conclude: My advice to local media sites

Please, please: Pay attention to what is happening to location-based commercial offerings in your market! Your competitors are no longer local players. They are global!

As a first step: Make sure all your content – be it editorial or ads – has the correct meta data so that it can be utilized in a location-based service. For a starter: All ads and local stories should have geo coordinates associated with it.

In my experience most local media sites unfortunately will fail already at this step. While they have plenty of local content, it is not structured.

Secondly: Think carefully through how you can utilize your unique relationship with the local population to offer unique services to people. What can you do that is not possible for Google and Facebook?

Thirdly: Look for ways you can use the location-based services of global giants like Google and Facebook to make money in your own market. If Facebook becomes the de facto “check in” service for location: Use their API to offer local services on top of it. If Google proves to have success in location based search: Make sure your content and commercial partners are right in the middle of the search results!

And most important: Do not assume that because you have controlled your local market for decades you cannot be put out of business by competition from global players.

Stay alert! You are in for a tough fight!

(Thanks to Espen Grimmert, founder of social media consultancy Klokere.no for contributing suggestions for this article)

Related articles

• Is Google Prepping a Local Mobile Coupon Offering? (marketingvox.com)
• Adwords Is Dying and Google Knows It (and they are doing something about it) (fastcompany.com)
• Local Search Engine Optimization An Investment In Your Company (webmanmarketing.com)
• Google taps Marissa Mayer for location, local services (intomobile.com)
• Localization, Unique Data Sets & the Future of Search (seobook.com)

What are the digital trends that will shape the media industry? I asked three digital media experts. Here are their answers.

I had the pleasure of talking to the board of executives at Schibsted Media Group recently about the big changes taking place in the digital landscape. As part of my preparation I asked three smart digital media observers to answer the following question:

• What are the three most important digital media trends right now that will shape the media industry over the next 3-5 years?

Here are their answers:

Thomas Crampton used to work for years as a globetrotting newspaper journalist, primarily for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

He then changed the course of his career – and since 2004 has been passionately involved with digital media. He is now the Asia Pacific director for 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy – and a frequently used keynote speaker on social media.

I recommend you to follow his excellent blog, in which he often provides very interesting information about social media in Asia.  He also tweets at @thomascrampton.

Grzegorz Piechota is the president of International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) in Europe.

One of the points he makes is how the older generation also will become digital.

“New devices like iPads seem to be much easier for the old generation to understand and to use. (Look at my parents-in-law.)”, he writes.

“Printed media used to think they had problems with the young readers, now watch out as their core readers are going finally to discover digital news, entertainment, communication, geolocation and e-commerce.”

“And you know — at least in developed countries the market of the old is much bigger than the market of the young, and it is going to be bigger and bigger.”

Grzegorz tweets at @forum4editors.

Nic Newman presents himself as a “digital consultant working on the future of journalism”.  For many years he used to work for BBC, first in different editorial positions and then in charge of teams developing major web sites for the broadcasting corporation.

One of his points is how the use of videos create new ways of telling and distributing stories.

“Navigating the world of the web through video led gateways will shake up the old broadcasting elites and open a new wave of innovation on TV, PC, Tablet and mobile”, he writes.

He tweets at @nicnewman.

• Read also: 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010

From almost zero market share in January to 14,8 per cent in September: Android phones are picking up very fast in news consumption in Norway.

In Norway big groups of the population tend to be early adopters of new technology.  For instance the big web sites already see thousands of visits from Norwegian iPad users each day, even though the tablet has yet to be officially launched in the country.

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With this in mind I took a look at the mobile web statistics of Aftenposten.no, the web site of Norway’s largest newspaper.  This graph shows how the mobile visits to the news sites are divided between the major operating systems.

Some conclusions can be drawn:

• iPhone users dominate the news consumption.  53,1 per cent of the mobile visits to Aftenposten.no in September came from iPhones.
• Phones based on Google’s open source Android operating system grab market share at very high speed. In January a mere 0,5 per cent of Aftenposten’s mobile traffic came from Android phones. Nine months later the share stands at 14,8 percent. That is a tremendous growth in a very short time period.
• The big looser is Nokia’s operating system Symbian, which has halfed its market share from 36,5 to 17,3 per cent in this time period.
• Other operating systems, such as Windows and Blackberry are also loosing market share.

These numbers do not necessarily reflect the actual market share of the different mobile phones in Norway. Experience shows that smart phone owners will use news sites much more than other mobile phone owners. However, I am pretty sure other big news sites will see a similar trend in their statistics.

It seems to be a safe prediction that Android phones will be more important for news sites than Symbian phones by the end of the year.

With regard to the global fight between iPhone and Android, it obviously will take more time as we take into consideration Apple’s very strong position. But as it looks now, iPhone and Android are the two platforms media sites in the Norwegian market should concentrate on.

A small detail at the end: Among the Android phones one model stands out in Aftenposten’s statistics: HTC Desire. This model alone represents 5,2 % of the visits to the news site.

Related articles from other sources

• Google’s Android Beats RIM BlackBerry in Mobile-OS Race (nytimes.com)
• Gartner: Symbian, Android to dominate in 2014 (news.cnet.com)
• Android making dramatic inroads in smartphone share (shortformblog.com)

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When do people choose to use their new iPad? In their sofa late at night, if we are to believe the first traffic statistics.

iPad has still not been launched in Norway. Yet a large number of people obviously have gotten hold of the device and their use of it has started popping up on the traffic analytics of the bigger web sites.

I took at look at the iPad user pattern for my own employer, Aftenposten, a leading news site in Norway with 1,1 million unique visitors weekly.

• Read also: 5 advices to succeed with a media product on iPad

Although iPad is not yet for sale in Norway, a four-digit number of users in our country visit Aftenposten.no (where else would they go?) daily, according to our analytics software.

And the user pattern for the first couple of months is quite clear: iPad reaches a definite traffic top in the late night – at around 9 and 10 PM.

This puts iPad as a socalled LPD – or a Lean Back Device, to be used for relaxed consumption of media content. Or should we call it a sofa device?

Here is the graph of iPad usage during the day at Aftenposten.no, updated as of June 16th:

Use of iPad during the day

Use of Aftenposten.no among Norwegian iPad users during the day

As you can see, iPad use reaches the top at around 9 to 10 PM. The traffic at this time of the day is almost double the traffic at the other peak, which is during breakfast time. iPad so far certainly seems to be a device people typically use in their sofa before going to bed.

How does this compare to other platforms?

On PCs the main web site has the highest traffic during the working hours of the day, with a peak at lunch time. Increasingly we also see a peak at night time.

For mobile users there is a peak in the very early hours of the morning, literally before people get out of bed, and very late at night. A smaller traffic peak is seen at around 4-5 PM, when people commute home from work.

So here is the user pattern we might see: You wake up early in the morning. Before getting out of bed, you check the latest news on your mobile phone. Then you proceed to breakfast. It is time for the printed newspaper – or, if you have already bought an iPad, the tablet. Getting to work, your will check the latest news on your PC. And in the evening, after dinner and all the kids have been put to bed, you will jump into your sofa and enjoy content on your iPad. To be completely sure you got it all, you will check the latest news on your mobile phone after you have gone to bed and before you finally fall asleep.

For media companies the main question is: How can we produce great content not only for each one of these platforms and user situations, but also in a way that will keep a close relationship with our users throughout the day, no matter which platform they will choose to use?

The winners will be the media companies that can answer this question in a compelling way.

I think.

What is your opinion?