Whether or not Google’s Android platform for mobile succeeds quickly, people in the media industry need to pay attention.
I’ll go back to the Web days of yore to help make the point. A decade or more ago, a fair number of news and other content Web sites ignored a chunk of the audience. If someone logged on from a Mac, or a PC using something other than a recent version of Netscape or, later, Internet Explorer, they might get distorted columns, broken images, unusable interactive graphics and other inconveniences.
Today, alienating significant numbers of potential users is a no-no, even if they’re only a single-digit percentage of the audience.
As consumption of content on mobile devices has grown, iPhones have been the popular flavor. Content sites optimize for display on the device or come out with apps. It’s easy to see why: The iPhone has not only gotten lots of coverage and seized a share of Web usage out of proportion to sales of the devices, but its users also tend to be in the kinds of higher-income groups advertisers want to reach.
Still, adoption of other smartphones is increasing, and sites that make it difficult to consume the news on them will be foregoing other potentially lucrative users of devices that are growing in popularity.
Blackberry maker RIM had a banner year-end quarter, selling more of its handsets than expected. Comscore reported in December that Android was “crashing the smartphone party,” doubling sales in a year, and that 92 percent of its users consumed “mobile media” on the platform’s devices, about equal to the iPhone’s 94 percent.
With the multimillion-dollar marketing push behind Verizon’s Droid and the buzz around the introduction of Google’s Nexus One last Monday, we’ll likely see the trend accelerate.
Meanwhile, there’s been a backlash against the iPhone, due to its restrictive apps policies and its costs and carrier limitations.
There are some glitches that will slow adoption of the Google phones. T-mobile customers have launched a petition protesting their inability to get the Nexus One at the discount price for new subscribers, instead having pay the full $529 to add the phone to their plan.
“Do I think the Google phone will be disruptive? Not at that price,” says Adria Richards, a technology consultant and trainer who is often a big advocate for Google products. A T-mobile sales person who identified herself as Kelly told me by phone that it’s Google, not T-mobile, that’s making the pricing offer, but customers may not care. Also, Android phones lag in the number of apps.
Regardless of the wrinkles, though, the Android will gain at least some traction and traffic logs will see increasing numbers of hits from devices running the platform. Smart news sites have long provided apps to make it easier for all phones’ users to consume at least headlines and text. To build usership into the future and to gain institutional knowledge that may later also help with tablets or even PCs running Android, news organizations should invest to make sure their properties run properly on Android phones — and, for that matter, on any operating systems or browsers that show anything more than minuscule traffic. Sites that are popular in Europe, for example, will want to run well on Nokia’s Symbian OS.
While you’re at it, you might take a look at Google’s Chrome, too. We’ll probably see at least a small bump in users of the computer browser once Google releases a more stable version for Macs, reportedly on Jan. 12.
In a world of “WIW WIW WIW” (what I want, when I want, where I want) what publishers and editors don’t want is to have a large number of users or key advertisers asking why they can’t get what they want onto any commonly used device.
