Reading Online News is Getting Painful
One of the debates roiling many newsrooms / board rooms is the question of balancing on-platform experience versus off-platform partnerships.
Let me address one very narrow, particular aspect of that question: in large measure the reading experience of news content on-platform, that is on the sites and applications of the publisher, is getting worse not better.
Publishers are trying to manage way too many priorities within a single article: maximizing revenue, increasing engagement, improving audience development, presenting stunning visuals, implementing new products…and lest we not forget…the actual news content.
As we know the news business is tough and the result is a high stakes news experience that has all of these priorities are being piled upon each other.
On one hand publishers want to create a habit amongst consumers to drive them down through the subscription funnel to increase ARPU/LTV. Hence you get stunning visual treats, big bold video and infographics, rich and even cheeky headlines and strong ledes. On the other hand they know that also have to play in a scale business and each single article is an opportunity to maximize ad revenue, whether that is jamming the reader with programmatic ads or sneaking in native ads.
Obviously tied to this question is the conversation about page loads and ads. The hand wringing on this particular subject is warranted and there has been some progress where the ad industry and publishers are starting to make some progress. (See this, this and especially this.)
While the notion that the reader experience is getting worse is a sweeping statement, let me share with you a rogue’s gallery:
The Washington Post:
The Guardian (US):
The Chicago Tribune:
Buzzfeed News:
There are user experiences that are well-balanced between clarity of presentation and revenue, even some that are beautiful. I am thinking of NYT, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Slate that strike me as ‘readable’.
But, ironically enough, better reader design is being driven out a new crop of mobile apps and aggregators. While a number of these have serious business case problems for publishers, such as building in ad blocking tech or stripping out javascript, they are, in many ways re-defining content consumption as a much more pure experience of audience and article.
It should be noted that in markets like India, as well as elsewhere in Africa and Asia, mobile aggregators have market conditions — uneven 3G/4G coverage, high data expense/limited incomes — are built from the ground up on limited interference with the reader experience. Existing reader apps like Nations Media with Safaricom in Kenya or the upcoming Express News app from Reliance Jio in India may feel retro, but are innovating within the constraints of their market.
However, in the West, Facebook’s Instant Article or Google’s AMP, each different in their approach, are becoming key reference points. But there are a new crop of reader experiences that are being shaped by mobile aggregators. News Republic, one of the more successful and established players brings a stripped down RSS feed with an unobtrusive floating banner ad at the botttom of the screen. (Though it allows publishers to bring their content discovery ads…the new banner ad…to the article. They now being joined by Axel Springer’s Upday, which allows publishers to place ads within the mobile web views, but also presents their own ads via cards every ten or so articles.
However, the purest of pure plays is a company I have written about before:Blendle. Their model is per article payment and presents just the content. Blendle has a whole set of problems they are trying to solve, for this is one they got right. Let me leave you with this form of loveliness:
