Almost every news organization now has a Web presence. In terms of audience size, far more people use cell phones (the primary mobile media delivery channel) than will ever have computer-based Net access.
Since most news organizations crave new markets, I’m amazed that most of them seem to offer little beyond the basics in terms of highly mobile-friendly content and services. I’m talking about a lean and usable mobile-friendly presentation, suitable for simple phones that only have a stripped-down browser. You know, the kind of phone that the vast majority of Americans carry around daily and consider indispensable.
Mobile media offers not just a huge audience, but also existing revenue models — including ample room to make money through premium personalized content, advertising, interactivity or location-based services. These opportunities are significant today and will only grow in the future. Therefore, it’s important for news publishers to consider mobile first — as an up-front business strategy, not just a minor afterthought.
The math in favor of mobile-friendly news seems simple.
As of December 2008, 87 percent of the total U.S. population owned a cell phone. For context, as of the 2000 U.S. Census, about 20 percent of the population was age 14 and under, which means that almost every U.S. adult. plus a lot of our kids, have cell phones. The vast majority of these phones are not smartphones. Even though manufacturers and carriers are pushing lots of new smartphones such as the Palm Pre this summer, they still won’t comprise most of the mobile media market.
Meanwhile, according to Nielsen NetRatings, as of 2008 only 72.5 percent of the U.S. population used the Internet — and as of April 2009, only about 93 percent of these people had broadband access (knocking the U.S. out of the top 20 nations for broadband penetration).
To get a feel for how mobile-friendly your news really is, try to load it on a basic cell phone. Pay attention to how long it takes, how many clicks it takes to get to the actual content, how well the navigation works and, of course, whether it loads at all. What’s the user experience like? How can mobile users interact with or around your content?
Also, try accessing your site via dotMobi’s emulator, which lets you see how your content displays in a basic mobile display. If that’s not a sufficiently humbling experience, then Ready.mobi will grade the mobile-friendliness of your site or page. (Incidentally, this test rated the mobile-friendliness of the home page of Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits as “bad,” earning just one point out of a possible five. Philly.com and the Chicago Tribune earned a “good” with four points each.)
The first step to making your site mobile-friendly is to automatically route mobile visitors to the mobile-friendly version of your content. While it’s possible to optimize pages for specific mobile platforms and route accordingly, that can be a complex development headache. A good starting point is to simply have a lean auto-loading mobile version of your site, with an obvious link up top to the full Web version. Even on a fancy iPhone, full Web versions of news sites often take a long time to load, even over a 3G or Wifi connection, and then they require lots of zooming in and hunting around to see what’s on the page. Scrolling an auto-loading lean version first is much faster and easier on the go.
If you have no budget for mobile development, or if your content management system doesn’t support it easily, you don’t have to wait to upgrade your system in order to start delivering mobile-friendly content now. MoFuse.com offers free and premium services that convert your site (or parts of your site, as desired) to auto-detecting mobile versions. As a demonstration, I MoFused Tidbits. Using MoFuse requires you to publicize a different URL to mobile users, which is a drawback, but the service is still a good option for a first step and can help you start to capture some of the mobile media market.
If you’re using a popular open-source content management system like WordPress or Drupal, you can apply existing themes or modules to create auto-detecting basic mobile versions of your site.
Also, don’t overlook SMS text messaging in your mobile strategy. Experiment with special-interest mobile news or event alerts. (Sports, traffic, and school news are good bets to start.) Also consider how people can interact with your site or news org via SMS — for instance, do you have a shortcode yet? How are you publicizing and using it? Also consider interactivity options for QR Codes, which can be included in print content and ads, where people with camera phones and e-mail or multimedia messaging (MMS) can use them for several intriguing and useful kinds of interaction.
Teaching your potential mobile audience how and why to use these features will require some effort and outreach through print, online, broadcast and other content and marketing channels. But when you look at the size of this market, the effort probably looks like a good investment. Especially if you roll out appealing and useful mobile-friendly offerings one at a time.
