platform publishing and distributed content - how did we get here and what happens next?

@PaulBradshaw, MA Multiplatform and Mobile JournalismBirmingham City University

PLATFORMPUBLISHING

April 2016:

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/platforms-and-publishers-no-sign-of-retreat.php

February 2017:


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How did we get here?

https://www.themediabriefing.com/article/nrs-padd-results-demonstrate-how-value-mobile-is-for-newsbrands

http://angelajimu.com/2017/03/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/29/5-key-takeaways-from-state-of-the-news-media-2015/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016-key-takeaways/

23 percent: Direct to the site or apps 14 percent: YouTube views 2 percent: Google search to the site 6 percent: Facebook traffic to the site 27 percent: Facebook native video 4 percent: Images on Facebook 21 percent: Snapchat content views 3 percent: Other distributed platforms

http://recode.net/2015/09/16/this-week-on-recode-decode-ceo-jonah-peretti-explains-how-buzzfeed-won-the-internet/




https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-announces-major-expansion-across-all-business-lines



“Platform publishing” or

“distributed content”

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Journalism%2C%20Media%20and%20Technology%20Trends%20and%20Predictions%202017.pdf




“We don’t try to send people away from their favorite online communities just to rack up pageviews.”

https://medium.com/reportedly/welcome-to-reported-ly-3363a5fb7ea5

https://twitter.com/Trushar/status/646701762422919168



“The Post will send 100% of its stories to Facebook so that all Washington Post content can be formatted as Instant Articles, giving readers a lightning-fast user experience for reading, sharing and commenting within the Facebook iOS app.”

http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/the-only-game-in-town-why-the-washington-post-is-pushing-all-its-content-to-facebook-instant-articles




http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/06/14/the-redistribution-game-for-news/




“They might not be using Facebook that much, to be honest. But they are living in Snapchat. So there's this huge audience and we're building an editorial structure on top of them and alerting them to things happening in the world."

http://www.independent.ie/business/media/snapchats-slow-move-to-editorial-evolution-31597959.html

3m readers a day on Snapchat“Lewis said that Cosmo delivers high content-consumption rates for advertisers. Drawing on stats from September, she said 72 percent of users clicked through every story after they opened the Cosmo Discover tab.”

http://digiday.com/platforms/cosmo-says-getting-3-million-readers-snapchat-discover/

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-you-need-to-know-how-six-publishers-digest-the-news-for-their-readers/




14% of revenues in 2016:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/dcn-report-shows-publisher-revenue-from-google-facebook-snapchat-2017-1

Facebook, yes, but YouTube too


Higher CPM


“The difference is largely due to the act that video advertising — largely driven by over-the-top streaming services — commands higher rates.”

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New roles

…had been monitoring the story’s social media performance and was alerted that Ingraham’s page had posted the piece. Recognizing her as an influencer, the social media team deployed Bruni to her page, where he answered the question Ingraham posed in her Facebook post about the story.

The Times’ audience- development team…

http://digiday.com/platforms/nyt-deploys-journos-interact-readers-platforms/

https://twitter.com/catesish/status/571178869300076544

http://digiday.com/publishers/its-white-and-gold-dummy/

Conde Nast International, Vox Media and CNN were among those creating new roles “to help coordinate and deepen its relationships with social media and video platforms, messaging apps and even hardware manufacturers”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-publishing-platform-specialist-1458896683

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Critical questions

Representatives of local and regional publications have frequently complained in interviews of having less access to, or access to lower-ranking, partnership managers at platform companies. Indeed, neglecting the needs of local publishers in particular is a problem that Facebook has acknowledged publicly.


Brian Fitzgerald, co-founder and president of Evolve Media, told Digiday that shorter form content had become a priority, for example. “By doing more platform publishing, we have had to sacrifice budget for longer-form content published directly to our site.”

http://digiday.com/publishers/hidden-not-hidden-costs-platform-publishing/

Recommended that publishers consider the corporate goals of each platform they are considering publishing on, and how that might impact on their own objectives.

http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/11/09/far-from-home-the-distributed-content-landscape-part-2

Warned publishers against locking themselves in to Facebook, a related loss of branding and context, and relying too much on superficial metrics

http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/11/09/far-from-home-the-distributed-content-landscape-part-2

“Grazing is negatively associated with knowledge and civic engagement … When people value convenience or brevity over quality … there is less incentive for news organizations to produce high-quality news and news in general is devalued.”

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21670811.2017.1334567

“Only a third of television viewers are consuming the medium exclusively in the traditional, sole-focus-of-attention way”.https://www.themediabriefing.com/article/screen-burn-out-the-new-demographics-of-television-viewership

“The production process is complicated if it must account for different consumption patterns and potentially different audiences across these platforms.”


29-year-old Mark “never paid attention to news until he got a smartphone in 2011”.

https://onlinejournalismblog.com/2014/09/10/research-news-consumption-sharing-searching-liking-watching-reading-listening/

Focused reading is not confined to any one medium, and that distracted forms of consumption popularly associated with smartphone use are equally typical of how people use television, radio or print. It’s not about the medium: it’s about the user.


Future studies should look beyond session frequency and length … this may be especially relevant in developing countries, where mobile is the primary means of internet access and users tend to “dip and sip” rather than browse the Web.


“Journalists and journalism scholars would do well to part with clicking metrics as a sound standard for the level of interest or importance attached to a news item. To click or not to click does not automatically point to a news gap, nor to a need to alter the selection of news.”


The move to a platform-native age A challenge to routineNews consumption is not easily measured

Key points:

Pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:platformsPinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:platforms+research

Further reading.

Further watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfl2loVIlsg

platform publishing and distributed content - how did we get here and what happens next?

Education