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Hyperlocal media & Journalism November 18, 2009

Posted by journojack in Blogs, Hyperlocal, New revenue schemes, News, Online marketing.
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The idea for this blog post came from the reems and reems of online column inches i have come across recently covering hyperlocal. Having an interest in it myself via Cutmedia.com and the first flagship publication Kingsroad.co.uk, i thought i should give my thoughts and allow anybody that is interested to check out the stories I have come across recently.

Recently I went to an event held at Channel 4 by 4ip where they are very keen to try and help young start ups with funding on projects that will help to shape the media industry. Whilst working out if Cutmedia.com could benefit from a partnership with 4ip i met a lecturer from Goldsmiths University called Angela Phillips. She is currently looking for funding with one of her projects, which is also focussed on hyperlocal, although that is all she would tell me!

We discussed the opportunity of hyperlocal and after a while got on to the topic of journalists and how they need to be innovative and play a more proactive role on the business side of their media work. I certainly think they need to pay more attention to how money and profit is generated as part of their business.

Many people in and around journalism fall in love with the romantic idea of the discipline and fail to understand how money and their wages are paid, which i think is  very dangerous. For them journalism is firstly about holding people in power to account, getting a scoop before anybody else and producing killer articles that demostrate the written skills they were born with and secondly a business. I think that this is naive,  especially in the light of the redundancies that have happen across the industry over the last year or so.

There are many ways in which publishers can generate revenue for their businesses and i expect that they will keep evolving over time as the publishing industry reinvigorates itself. The main task publishers face is to create robust products that can pay for for editorial so journalists can go and hold people in power to account, get that scoop and show us all what great writers they are.

Content alone does not pay the wages and the quicker they learn that the better.

New business models for journalism is something that has been discussed in the following articles:

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Mobile Platform development May 1, 2009

Posted by journojack in Advertising, Mobile, New revenue schemes, Online marketing, Uncategorized.
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Introduction

Our business media blog has been running a series called “Making Content Pay”. As part of this they recently had a look at who the innovators were in the mobile space. In this quest they stumbled upon a very dynamic business that has its roots in Germany that is reaching out across the world helping publishers and ecommerce businesses monetise their mobile traffic.

Netbiscuits, based in Kaiserslautern have been in mobile services since 2000. Since 2003 they have been managing major international customers. In 2006 they decided to integrate their highly specialized mobile Internet technology into one platform and make it accessible on the web, as they saw a potentially very big global market.

Mobile market

The 3G Mobile market can be split into three main segments:

Over the last few years the development of new devices like the iPhone and latest models to come out of Blackberry have driven high expectations about the mobile market. As we have documented the way that we consume information has changed and will continue to do so. This has had a disruptive impact on the traditional businesses models of media like newspapers and magazines meaning that new sources of revenue are crucial. 3G mobile services have enabled people to get information direct to their device rather than through a newspaper or magazine creating a whole new arena of opportunity.

Mobile versus PC

Netbiscuits have many high profile clients including Yahoo!, Bild, Wall Street Online, eBay, Sixt, RTL and Konami. Before implementing a Netbiscuits-based solution they all suffered technical translation issues. When a website that was built to be consumed on the PC is accessed via a mobile device then these technical translation issues do impact the user experience and the ROI that any media owner gets from the mobile traffic.

Netbiscuits have been able to develop a software platform that helps businesses create mobile websites that can maximise their mobile traffic. The platform enables media owners to produce mobile portals that run on any mobile phone on the market. The Netbiscuits software platform provides a proprietary mobile handset database, automatic rich media conversion and on the fly rendering, making the mobile portals delivered are highly specialised per device solving the technical translation issues discussed earlier.

Monetising mobile

The Netbiscuits platform is very flexible and can improve the ROI of mobile traffic in many ways. With eBay Netbiscuits have offered users a platform where they can search products and manage or update their bids via their mobile device.  The eBay mobile team decided against giving users the ability to set up or change any of the details of their accounts. This was decided after analysing the consumer journey of several different mobile platforms and has been vindicated with significant growth of the eBay mobile platform helping to drive sales overall growth.

We are not able to quote any direct information from eBay but Lars Hartkopf Head of Marketing for Netbiscuits says “with the right installation media owners can see a traffic uplift of between 15% and 20%.”

As well as clients with ecommerce platforms publishers have made great use of Netbiscuits. Some use it purely to give them a mobile presence and to be able to monetise traffic through advertising. One aspect of the Netbiscuits’ technology allows rich media files to play and podcasts to downloaded to any mobile device creating very unique advertising propositions to be sold to the market. If we think about this in terms of two of the largest online publishers timesonline.co.uk and guardian.co.uk who from my experience do not support video on their mobile sites, this creates a huge opportunity for publishers here in the UK. (These were accessed using a Blackberry Curve 8310 and Blackberry Bold 9000)

The most interesting way that a publisher has used Netbiscuits’ technology is traditional German newspaper publisher Bild. They recognised that publishers need to create new forms of revenue and decided to use their mobile portal as a central part of this. As part of their mobile strategy they began selling SIM cards, as a virtual mobile network operator. With this SIM card surfing the Bild mobile website was free of charge. This boosted the traffic on Bild Mobile, generated additional ad revenue, opened up new opportunities for business development and cooperation, and made Bild Mobile one of the best performing mobile websites in Germany.

When we were speaking to Netbiscuits about this we could not believe our luck to find such an innovative way of using the mobile market to create new publisher income streams. This is exactly what we want to champion here at businessmedia.co.uk and consumermedia.co.uk. Parallel to this we are firm believers in the Netbiscuits product if it can allow our UK publisher community to offer a solution to diminishing revenues from traditional media business models.

Do you want to use Netbiscuits for your own publishing or ecommerce platform? Consumermedia.co.uk can help!

If you would like any further information on Netbiscuits and would like to discuss potential strategies, let us know here at consumermedia.co.uk and we can help make things happen for you with the Netbiscuits team. Send an email to consumermedia@cutmedia.com

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