Google and Twitter team up to provide their own news service

An article in Re/code looks at Google and Twitter’s plans to launch their own news service along the lines of Snapchat’s Discover, Facebook’s Instant Articles, or Apple News.

Like these existing services, the Google-Twitter tandem would be quick to access, and also offering news providers interesting advertising options. The battle is on to become the place to go for news on smartphones and tablets, and it’s one that will change the way we consume this kind of content.

This near-instant services will include a range of formats, as well as video and animation, and allow users to personalize their news pages. The media is responding to users’ magpie approach to news consumption by adapting their formats to theirs.

The next step in this process is to create recommendation algorithms that provide news that will be of interest to the user and that also remember topics that we have previously looked at, and so be able to offer related themes.

Finally, what’s also needed here is an advertising platform that allows media to offer advertisements additional to those that were already running alongside their content, integrating images of these pages into their analytical tools so as to be able to carry out a full tracking to allow them to charge advertisers, seemingly configured without any kind of commission by the platform, and making them more attractive in the process. At the same time, this will allow the platform to insert advertising when the owner of the content has the space available and indicates it as such. The value proposition here is clear: if you have been able to sell advertising around your content, these types of formats will increase your capacity to reach more users by being on their social apps, which is how most people use their mobile devices.

The platform can also provide you with advertising, based on commissions of between 30 percent and 70 percent. For media that produce content but cannot sell enough advertising, using the selling power of these platforms and obtaining 70 percent of the income generated, while still being able to insert their own advertisements, is a very attractive option.

How many sources? Under what conditions? Everything points to more open platforms, such as Google and Twitter’s, compared, say, to more inclusive approaches such as Facebook’s (which is saying that anybody who wants to can provide material for Instant Articles once the trial phase is over), and possibly others, such as Snapchat, which is seen as having the most appeal to the younger market segment, that are proposing an entry fee for publications. We will doubtless see many different models, all of which will have to be looked at carefully by media looking to take part in these platforms.

Everything indicates that the newspaper and magazine as we know it is on the way out: no more mastheads, no more reading articles as part of sections. This is a new world for the media, and for the consumer, spells the end of searching for a publication via our navigators (an approach that is already on the decline). Instead, users will access content via an app that will include personalized alerts, social functions, news storage for later reading, etc. Most of us will install just a few specific media apps, and we’ll alternate them with content provided by these new apps, or that we’ll access via the social media, picking and choosing as the mood takes us.

Google and Twitter’s decision to join the fray further increases competition. It’s still too early to speculate on what this joint venture will mean, and whether it will lead to an acquisition (Twitter’s price, which has fallen below that of its IPO, is interesting, and there have been rumors about Google’s interest in a buy out for months now). That said, the initial results of the other players in the field look promising: the news segment is still vibrant, able to generate advertising, and the social networks could become logical partners now that it’s clear they’re not interested in buying publications, instead opting to purchase content on an as and when needed basis.

In the future, publications will see more and more of their traffic come from outside their own platforms, a development that need not be negative. The question is whether they will be able to adapt to this new reality.

(En español, aquí)