Friday, June 06, 2014

Mobile and media linkage for a Friday afternoon

It’s Friday afternoon, so maybe you’d like to line up a bit of reading for the weekend? If news and media are your thing, here are a few links that may be up your street. And a few other ones besides. Enjoy.

An Empirical study of factors that influence the willingness to pay for online news – I’ll be honest, I haven’t read this yet, but it certainly looks interesting. It’s on my reading list for my journey up to Manchester tomorrow.

Publishers just don’t get mobile. This is a piece by Jez Walters who wonders why publishers just don’t get mobile. It’s well worth a read. I would argue that it’s not just publishers who don’t get it, but they probably have most to lose right now by not getting it. I meet media owners all the time and some do mobile better than others and some put more resources and effort into mobile than others. Interesting times indeed.

Who killed magazines? Another piece looking at the demise of the mobile magazine app. It’s from a US perspective, but there are some good insights here as to what could kill your mobile app strategy before it has even started.

Decline of newspapers hits a milestone with lowest print revenues since the 1950s. Print ad-dollars are not being replaced by digital ad-dollars. As if we need telling again, but just in case you do….

Native advertising works at treat but is dependent on platform and device: ‘native advertising – where an ad matches the form and function of the user experience and feels less intrusive – is pulling up trees in terms of reader engagement and click-through rates (CTRs). Hearst Publishing, which has 300 magazine titles to its name, let the cat out of the bag with its disclosure that a native ad campaign within Harper's Bazaar achieved a CTR of up to 1.5%; that compares with the US industry average of 0.1% on traditional display ads.’ Read the article for more.

Nine lies we tell ourselves about mobile (especially pertinent for those who are newer to the sector). An excellent read.

Measure for measure, the difficult art of quantifying return on digital investments. This is an interesting read from CapGemini Consultants, but the irony is not lost on me about on their choice of medium to share this report. This e-book is unreadable on my laptop screen, let alone a mobile device. It’s easier to handle if you download the whole thing as a pdf rather than struggling with their ebook format. If you can bear to work through that, there are some nuggets in there.

We can’t escape that the World Cup is looming and as part of that frenzy, the IAB and OnDevice Research have created a rather lovely piece of work looking at the global mobile perspective of the World Cup 2014. If you are doing anything in sport and mobile, or your customers are, this is worth a look.

This week’s Mobile Fix from Addictive! is a cracker as usual. Well worth a read.

The New York Times innovation report is still on my reading list. Hopefully I’ll get round to this one at the weekend too.

Mary Meeker’s annual slidedeck of key internet trends is out. Essential viewing for anyone with even a vague interest in digital and mobile technology. Plenty ammunition in this deck to convince your boss to go mobile sooner rather than later.

And now for something completely different… LJ Rich, who some of you may know from BBC Click, has written up about what it’s really like to live with perfect pitch. It’s totally fascinating. ‘For me, a laugh is almost always in a major key – crying is almost always in a minor key, regardless of language’ and other gems. A must read.

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