{"id":2753,"date":"2014-08-08T14:21:22","date_gmt":"2014-08-08T08:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/?p=2753"},"modified":"2021-11-03T12:00:56","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T06:30:56","slug":"will-publishers-survive-the-mobile-onslaught","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/08\/will-publishers-survive-the-mobile-onslaught\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Publishers Survive The Mobile Onslaught?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pulse01\"<\/a>Looks like mobile has started impoverishing publishers, too, since I wrote Will Mobile Impoverish Bloggers?<\/strong><\/a> two years ago.<\/p>\n

Smartphones and tablets are\u00a0causing trouble for publishers for more reasons than one:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Their smaller displays support fewer ads\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  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)<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. As Digiday<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0has found out, “Mobile CPMs are still significantly lower than its desktop cousin”<\/span><\/li>\n
  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.<\/li>\n
  5. To counter the effect of Pulse<\/a>, 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n

    News In Shorts cracks the Holy Grail of news apps by summarizing entire articles to 60 words instead of just displaying the 1st 60 words.<\/p>\n

    — GTM360 (@GTM360) August 1, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n