As many consumers of traditional news media, especially in the developed world, have moved to the internet to keep up to date, so another exodus has started: from the web to other digital media, especially cellphones.
This was the message at the Annual Digital Media Round Table held on Sunday at the Cape Town International Convention Centre as a precursor to the World Editors Forum and World Newspaper Congress running until June 6.
The forum and congress, attended by more than 1 500 delegates from more than 100 countries, kicked off on Sunday evening at the Castle of Good Hope at a welcoming ceremony featuring a Cape minstrel band, cannon shots and Cape Dutch, Cape Malay and African cuisine. Guest of honour Nelson Mandela could not attend, but praised editors in a televised message.
At Sunday’s round table, Erik Nord, deputy CEO of Telenor Broadcast in Norway, said total media consumption is rising around the world but growing more fragmented as users turn to cellphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players and a host of other devices to stay connected.
He pointed out that customers are willing to pay for premium content, such as football scores, reports and even live coverage on cellphones, which are a cheap, easy-to-use and cost-efficient medium. It is set to become the most frequently used media channel, covering anything from news and sport to music, dating and banking.
News providers should be finding the right partners in the mobile world and offering their core competencies, such as news or sport reporting, he suggested.
Martha Stone, director of the World Association of Newspapers’s Shaping the Future of the Newspaper, agreed that global media usage is on the rise, especially in digital media. She reported on a range of research projects regarding the use of digital media worldwide, showing it’s not just young people using such new media. Also, it seems consumers are not paying full attention to any one medium being consumed, but rather taking in several simultaneously, such as cellphones and the web.
Advertising
Though internet advertisement spending is growing faster than spending on other media, the ad spend does not correlate with the time users spend on it: for example, in 2006 in the United States, 6% of ad spend went online, yet 23% of consumers were using the web as a news source.
The online advertising industry is, however, raring to go, with search giants Yahoo! and Google leading the charge.
”Yahoo! has identified the local market as the future,” said Mike Smith, executive director of the Media Management Centre at Northwestern University in the US.
The market for online ad spend remains untapped, he said, and Yahoo! sees it becoming one of the hottest advertising commodities in the US by 2010, second only to direct marketing. Yahoo! also keeps an eye on the news, and predicts that the core news activity in future will be gathering, not distribution.
Smith explained Yahoo!’s long-term deal with a consortium of 264 US newspapers. The deal involves placing Yahoo!’s HotJobs facility on each member paper’s website, as well as offering the Yahoo! search engine.
More importantly, news sites get to display the ”right ad in the right place at the right time”, he said. Each member newspaper gets access to Yahoo!’s national reach to get a piece of the pie of bigger ad campaigns, while the websites are also able to display news headlines and advertisements tailored to a user’s location and even online behaviour.
Advertisers benefit through targeted ads and broad distribution, users benefit from seeing extensive local news and advertisements, and newspapers benefit from the revenues and being part of national ad sales, said Smith. Some news content providers can then, for example, use revenue generated from their business with Yahoo! to fund costly international news gathering.
Already, Google’s established AdSense product pays out $3,3-billion to its partners around the world every year, said Rob Jonas, head of media and publishing for Google Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Google is now building on its text ads and providing display and video ads too, suited to the context of a website, and has even launched PrintAds, which is still in an experimental phase but would make Google a simple go-between for advertisers wanting to launch a campaign across many print newspapers.
As these integrated models grow, content providers have found they need a way to control how services such as Yahoo! and Google access and use their content ‒ and it’s called the automated content access protocol (Acap), reported Daniel Neethling, a Media24 regional manager who is part of the global Acap development team.
It is a 12-month project to create an open standard for all to use, which will automate the way search engines and aggregators access websites. It will, for example, deal with open and closed databases (say, newspapers versus academic journals) and improve the relationship between such publishers and internet endeavours, preventing lengthy court cases about the misuse of content.
Following the opening ceremony on Monday morning, which will be addressed by President Thabo Mbeki, among others, the week’s forum and congress activities include business sessions on topics such as the future of the newspaper and convergence in newsrooms; a cultural evening at Spier wine estate; and a range of editors’ sessions and discussions.