Adaptive Media Assessment — Part 1
“Content is King” — An overview of publishing platforms
We are in an age where “content is king.” Many people may say that it is videos, social media sites, and games that drive the internet, but each of these elements rely on or are types of content. In recent years we have seen this idea of content creation and gathering explode and each platform has their own unique approach to how it should be done. While there are many other platforms such as Flipboard and Google Newsstand, this series will focus on Google AMP, Medium, and Apple News, and how each environment is handling publishing, social sharing, content-customization (favorites), and advertisements or revenue within the content-driven world. While they all have their individual priorities, they have the common goal of providing, distributing quality content for readers or content consumers.
Google AMP
Google released their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project in February 2016, with the goal to “create mobile optimized pages that load instantly everywhere.” What makes Google AMP unique however, is that there isn’t a dedicated app or platform for the pages, like there is on Apple News and Medium. Instead, the articles show up in a person’s mobile search results, with the AMP logo in the lower left-hand corner, to be accessed via their browser and the cache Google keeps of the mobile-optimized pages. Google AMP has many advantages, including their use by people who don’t know they are viewing them. With this being said, many elements such as the need for good SEO, HTML and CSS skills, and the flexibility for developers to prioritize business-oriented design lend the platform larger publications.
Medium
Medium was launched in August 2012 by the co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams. Unlike other platforms, the goal of Medium is to allow readers and authors to “focus on words” and help authors “find their audience.” The solution to the problem the founders were trying to solve came as a mix between a social and blogging platform, or Twitter for blog posts, where readers could follow, discuss, and learn from content rather than being interrupted by ads and other “junk” that occupies other publishing platforms. Because of this purpose, Medium has taken the opposite approach of Google AMP and Apple News, by prioritizing the needs of its readers and authors. As of January 2016, however, the company began implementing unique advertising strategies to bring in revenue for themselves, and publishers, to meet the business needs of the journalism industry. With this being said, Medium continues to strive to provide the most reader-friendly experience, and has done a good job so far. However, they have “only scratched the surface of how we can use the tools available to us to connect hearts and minds,” and there are improvements that could be made to make it easier for consumers to share and find content.
Apple News
Apple News has been around since 2015 when it was released as part of the iOS 9 package as a tool for people to gather “all the news they want, all in one place.” While it was considerably new, Apple redesigned the application for the release of iOS 10 in 2016, to provide readers with a more positive experience. The app allows consumers to follow content from their favorite news organizations such as CNN, ESPN and the New York Times, but until Jul 2016, restricted publishing to larger organizations. Since July, readers have had the ability to not only gather mainstream articles, but those from smaller publications as well. Because the availability is new, however, and many of the tools are still being developed, Apple News continues to be dominated by “the big guys.” Although the platform limits itself to iOS users, the News team seems to be working not only to gather content, but also to meet business needs with readers’ needs, to create a “best of both worlds” reading experience that we don’t see on AMP or Medium. With this being said, the Apple News has room for improvement, but because of all of tools that are in beta, I think we can still expect some big modifications to the overall platforms in the near future.
Conclusion
Overall, each of these publishing platforms aim to publish and distribute information or content from a specific audience, and each environment handles similar elements of the industry in ways that are unique to each player. Because many of these platforms are still considered “new” however, there is not a single front runner, and they each have their own improvements to make in order to get them there. With that being said, businesses must determine which one fits their needs, goals, and will get their information to this target audience. While there are many aspects of this decision, this series will discuss how each platform handles authoring, social sharing, favorite, and advertisements.
