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| Google and Twitter are pointing – together – to the great battle for the news |
The News battle
A
news published by RE/code discusses the plans of Google and Twitter to
jointly launch an alternative for the consumption of news, pointing to
the line previously marked by Snapchat with Discover, Facebook with its
instant articles, or Apple with Apple news.
The
anatomy of the service looks similar: a fast-loading mechanism, and an
adapted advertising system to seduce the creators of information. A
battle, the one to become the preferred place for the consumption of
news on smartphones and other mobile platforms like tablets, that we
will see happen in a practically immediate way, and that possibly ends
up modifying many of the habits of our informative diet.
The
"Access Card" consists, firstly, in being able to offer a mechanism of
loading of the information practically instantaneous, without delays or
appreciable load times. Protocols that have been developed trying to
fully optimize the experience on mobile platforms, and they should also
offer not only integration of different formats (videos, animations,
etc.), but also allow a level of personalization of the page that
enables each media or news creator to maintain their personality and
identity. Before a user who is going to inform himself by jumping from
medium to medium as a bee that flies from flower to flower, the media
will try to make the image of its header and the formats that
characterize it to be fixed in the habits of the user, so that they end
up prefering them in conditions of equal access.
The
next necessary aspect of the system is logically the presence of
recommendation algorithms, with more or less user participation, that
allow the news offered to be attractive depending on their interests. A
terrain in which the user, on the one hand, chooses some contacts, while
on the other, the platform is able to develop a profiling that allows
him to offer news similar to those that have interested him previously.
Finally,
it is necessary an advertising management platform that, on the one
hand, allows the media themselves to offer the ones they already had
flanking their articles, to integrate these visualizations of pages in
their analytical tools and to be able to make a complete tracking that
allows them to charge them to the advertisers, and that appear to be
configured without any kind of commission of intermediation by the
platform to give it thus a greater attractiveness , and, on the other
hand, allow the insertion of publicity by the platform itself when the
owner of the contents has space available and mark it as such. In this
way, the value proposition is perfectly clear: if you have been able to
sell advertising around your content, this type of media will multiply
your ability to reach more users when you exit through social apps,
which concentrate most of the time of use in mobile media, and allow you
to expose both your content and your advertising to more people. But if
you have not been able to fill your inventory, the platform becomes an
advertising supplier, and everything indicates that it will be
configured with a commission of around 70% – 30%, which has already
reached the standard range. For the medium that produces the content and
is not able to sell enough publicity, to resort to the commercial power
of these platforms and obtain 70% of the revenue generated, without
losing the possibility of inserting their own publicity in case of
having it, seems an unbeatable proposal.
How
many sources? Under what conditions? Everything indicates that we will
see more open platforms, such as the one that appear to pose Google and
Twitter, against others with inclusive encouragement like Facebook
(which states that anyone who wants to offer information in the form of
instant articles as soon as the test period ends), and possibly others,
like Snapchat, that in view by many as an essential key in access to the
elusive younger public , that they consider to charge some type of
entry fee to the publications that they want to be there. Surely we will
see several models, which require a careful study by the media that
decide to participate. We'll see ads, signings of means by
platforms-although surely none in exclusive-and movements of different
types, in which some will try to assert the suitability of its platform
as a source of information, and others will try to make gala of
modernity, presence and adaptation to the Times.
In
return, everything indicates that the future of the headend as such,
the sequential reading or the consumption of complete sections could
become a matter of the past. To be nostalgic around this concept seems,
at this moment, a lost battle. For the media, a completely new terrain
is set up, in which the consumption from the browser – now under – would
become merely testimonial, and have an own app in which its users are
comfortable, integrate familiar elements and can serve as a basis for
offering value-added services – personalized alerts, social functions,
news repositories that want to save for later consumption , etc. – would
be strategically important. The common of the users would pass, surely,
to install one or several-but surely few-media apps, and to alternate a
consumption of news in these apps or directly in their or their
favorite social networks, in which would be skipping medium in between
having the individual news as a consumer unit.
With
Google and Twitter entering this battle, the field seems already quite
delimited. Without trying to deduce anything from the agreement between
the two companies and whether this can imply a proximity that ends in
acquisition (the target price of Twitter, below already the initial
quotation of its IPO, it is interesting, and rumors about the possible
interest of Google have already been on the table for months), the
initial results of some of the competitors seem promising : The news
continues to represent a terrain capable of attracting attention and
generating page views and advertising revenues, and social environments
can become a natural partner who are no longer interested in acquiring
publications, but simply to own articles and dynamize them properly. In
the future, a good part of the media traffic will occur outside of their
platforms, and yet they will not necessarily seem like a bad situation.
As long as, of course, you know how to adapt.
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