Digital magazines and other media look to meet metrics and challenges of multiplatform mobile publishing
Ask any publisher about the industry’s top trends, and it’s likely the majority of their responses will start with the letter “M.” Multiplatform, mobile, and metrics, to name a few. These are a few of our favorite things, as it happens, so we’re excited to share several recent Digiday articles that address these emerging issues.
Email Newsletters: A Key Facet of Multiplatform Publishing
Lucia Moses reports that several publishers are leaning hard on their email newsletters as platforms in and of themselves, a practice we wholeheartedly support. Emails are so dynamic, and they’re being delivered straight to consumers you already have some connection with. Quartz, Ozy, and Vox are three new-school publishers investing significant resources into a rather old-school tool. We love to see it!
Read our thoughts on creating email newsletters for more tips.
The Anxiety of Influence: How Publishers Measure It
Moses interviewed several publishers giving serious thought to influence. She spoke with Mic CEO Chris Altchek, OZY Vice President of Marketing and Audience Development Aneesh Raman, and Daily Dot Editor-in-Chief and CEO Nicholas White, among others.
“We measure impact through quantitative measures including readership, sharing, and referral links and qualitative measures including reader feedback (usually email and social), insider feedback and third-party mentions and interest,” says Henry Blodgett, Business Insider CEO and Editor-in-Chief.
“We use proprietary analytics for the readership and sharing info and our own eyes and ears (and social) for the rest. We don’t obsess about any of this; we just use it to help learn what our readers care about and to make sure that we’re doing a great job of serving them.”
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Time Inc. Digital’s Latest Breakthrough … Radio?!
Podcasts are hot, but Time Inc. is now offering audio editions of its daily newsletter, The Brief, Digiday reports. Episodes range in length of 20 to 25 minutes, and listeners are tuning in for an average of 16 minutes, a significant chunk of time in this day and age.
Ad Blocking Goes Mobile
As if publishers don’t have enough to worry about when it comes to winning the mobile game, ad blocking might now make it even more difficult to monetize, Digiday reports. Stay tuned for more on this one.
Are Publishers Falling Behind in Multiplatform Mobile Performance?
Are publishers too slow on mobile? Ricardo Bilton‘s findings – and Facebook – argue yes.
“Publishers know that they’re behind the ball. Earlier this month, Vox Media, well known for its design and product chops, declared ‘performance bankruptcy’ for its sites, where performance lags behind competitors The New York Times, Mashable, and The Huffington Post. To fix that, Vox created a ‘Performance Team’ dedicated to shaving its page-loading times and making a variety of other tweaks to improve the overall performance of its properties. Vox Media front-end engineering director Dan Chilton said that turning things around involves a combination of optimizations both big and small, such as compressing images for mobile and lazy-loading page elements so that they only appear when users scroll to them,” Bilton writes.
“All of this underscores Facebook’s mobile edge over publishers, which have comparatively less control over the various elements needed to run and monetize their sites. While publishers rely on third-party ad networks, analytics, and tech, Facebook has developed it all in-house, giving it a competitive advantage over its new partners. But publishers say that the upside of Facebook’s performance push is that it will get publishers to think more seriously about how they improve their own.”
How is your multiplatform mobile performance these days? Need help pushing for more visitors and profits? Download our free Multiplatform Publishing Strategy Handbook today!
To read more about multiplatform mobile publishers in the news, visit Digiday.
