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Matthew TK Taylor
@TheTimes Digital Production Editor. Esports enthusiast.
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Digital Times
Letter sent on Feb 12, 2016

What we’re reading this week

The mobile news chat app has arrived (almost)

Quartz, the digital-only financial news site set up by The Atlantic, have launched an iPhone app. Why is this at all interesting? Well, because they previously based themselves around a business that didn’t require one. Quartz was famously web-only, with a responsive site available on all devices, so when they announced they were producing an iPhone app everyone got very confused. Now we know why Quartz did it, launching the app yesterday and showing off how future-thinking they are.

The app can be downloaded here, but for those that don’t have an iPhone I’ll describe it. It’s a text messaging interface from which you consume news in tiny, digestable, text-message-sized chunks. Each of these you can tap on to link out, (either to Quartz’s own website, or other news providers they have chosen to promote), or respond to with a set of pre-written prompts that are effectively ‘read more’ and ‘next story’ but much more witty. It has push messaging (to your watch and phone), and a settings menu based on emojis (the Chinese alphabet of the Western world) asking if you would only like notifications for ‘red flashing light’ events, or whether ‘bells’ and ‘stars’ are enough to interrupt you.

Quartz have always been a shining beacon in the world of digital news, quietly building the core mechanics to reduce their cost of experimentation, change, and future development. This showed last year when they had multiple major revisions of their homepage, and launched (and shuttered) Glass, a project based around the future of TV (or screens, to be more exact).

This latest experiment looks simple, but drives at some of the core principles that I believe are the future of how we produce consumable content: direct user engagement and collecting useful data from it; finite units of content bundled together; and simple, understandable, quiet, familiar interfaces.

Note this is also similar to how chat apps have come up in the past as the future of everything. Though this just borrows the interface, you could imagine how this might work as a contact in your WhatsApp or iMessage, rather than a separate app entirely.

Viacom joins arms with the ghost of publishing future

One of the world’s largest broadcasters, Viacom, will be selling ads in Snapchat in a multi-year deal signed with the self-destruct messaging company. MTV and Comedy Central, two Viacom brands, already publish via the platform. The deal includes two new yet-to-be-announced partner brands to take residence in the Discover area of the app, which may be a US MTV channel, and an international Comedy Central.

Viacom have committed to young viewerships through their brands, and with young cord-cutters (or cordless children of the internet) not having access to their cable programming, they are looking at other ways to boost their declining share price and ratings.

This is great news for Snapchat too. The social app has had little presence with the big ad buyers still, and they seem to be hoping a deal with Viacom will help bring them back into the fold. Viacom will sell Snapchat ads as part of wider TV packages, and Snapchat have a revenue share agreement for the ads themselves.

Also

  • Ok Go, the American music-video group, who wowed the internet and blasted YouTube with their treadmill hit ‘Here it Goes Again’, have released their latest in a string of one-take wonders. ‘Upside Down and Inside Out’ is worth a watch in itself, filmed between moments of micro and macro gravity on a ‘vomit comet’ plane. Here are the outtakes. What’s interesting from a digital media perspective though is the fact this isn’t released on YouTube, but is a Facebook exclusive, and it currently has 23 million views just two days in, half that of their most famous video This Too Shall Pass. Though Facebook and YouTube cannot be compared like-for-like because they will clearly have different viewcounting mechanisms, it’s worth noting how well this seems to have done both on and off-platform, soon after Facebook started supporting external video embeds.
  • The Washington Post are AB testing content within their CMS, report the WSJ. WaPo, who recently overtook the NYT in terms of traffic, have seemingly spent a lot on their core architecture after being acquired by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. This latest feature will allow them to do what marketing agencies on websites have been doing for years, and work out what the best copy is to attract readers programatically.
  • Transport For London have announced they are changing the way they interact with Twitter based on the social-media publisher’s changes to their sorting algorithm and movement away from real-time chronology. Their blog discusses their slow realisation that the original microblogger may no longer be as relevant for them in the world of an algorithmic timeline.
  • Will Amazon ever stop? The retailer famous for having everything from a to z now powers an astonishing proportion of the internet including Spotify and Netflix; has its own Netflix competitor; owns a giant of game streaming; will build up to 400 brick and mortar stores; and now are expanding into video game development, launching Lumberyard on AWS, a way for game developers (including their own studio) to become even more embedded in their services. Although we’ve heard more about drones recently, it also looks like Amazon container ships may be berthing at a port near you soon.