Will Publishers Survive The Mobile Onslaught?

pulse01Looks like mobile has started impoverishing publishers, too, since I wrote Will Mobile Impoverish Bloggers? two years ago.

Smartphones and tablets are causing trouble for publishers for more reasons than one:  

  1. Their smaller displays support fewer ads 
  2. People have a lower propensity to click ads on mobile (unless they’re like the nicely obfuscated Google Ads but that’s a story for another day)
  3. As Digiday has found out, “Mobile CPMs are still significantly lower than its desktop cousin”
  4. Third-party news apps are gaining traction as a preferred way to consume content on mobile. By aggregating articles from different websites and presenting them to readers in a uniform reading and sharing environment on mobile devices, these apps are robbing the very same publications of pageviews and ad dollars.
  5. To counter the effect of Pulse, Flipboard, Zite, NewsHunt, News in Shorts and other popular third-party aggregator apps, many publications like TechCrunch and The Next Web are cutting off their feeds at the 60th – or 100th or 200th – word of each article. To read the rest of the article, readers must tap away from the app at the end of the snippet and visit the publisher’s ad-filled website. In this age of ever short attention spans, this strategy might backfire: People might just be content with the shorter version of the article and slide over to the next snippet without leaving the app. I find myself doing this especially when I know from past visits that the publisher’s website is not optimized for mobile. It’s only the rare article – 1 in 5 in my case – that drives readers to break their flow and read it in full on the respective publisher’s website.

What can publishers do to counter the mobile onslaught?

They can create compelling content that drives readers to “leave the page and head to the screen”, as FORTUNE magazine would want them to. After doing that, they could take Digiday’s advice to determine “optimal ad formats and placements” so that their readers stay engaged.

FORTUNE, Kargo and a few other publishers are making solid progress on these fronts but, for now, most publishers are wilting from the pressure of diminishing ad revenues from mobile.

PS: Another update from my previous post: I mobilized my blogs using free-of-cost Mofuse alternatives, namely, WordPress Mobile Pack for Talk of Many Things and BAAP Mobile Version for GTM360 Blog. Even without these software plugins, readers can comfortably view publications on smartphones and tablets by using Pulse and other third-party news apps.