This is NOA, the Spotify of journalism. Listen to The Financial Times, The Independent, Bloomberg and more.
“One of the most precious commodities that we have is our time, so if we make it convenient for people to do things… I think there’s a huge market in that for pretty much everything” — Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, 2012
In the summer of 2013 I began searching for a solution to a problem that I was experiencing. Almost daily I stumbled across online articles that I had every intention of reading — I just couldn’t find the time. I found a solution in an app called Pocket. It let me save article URLs across my smartphone, work machine and my personal laptop so that I could read them later. Problem solved? Sort of!
At the time Pocket had about 10 million users. So 10 million people were experiencing a similar problem to me. They didn’t have the time to read the stories that they found interesting so they saved the URL to read them later.
Before long though, I faced a new problem; finding the time to read the stories in my Pocket list. Weekends usually worked well, but the list continued to grow faster than I could get through it. As good as Pocket was, it was really only ever a band aid on the wider problem of being short on time.
Fast forward to May 2017. That was when my friend and fellow co-founder, Shane Ennis, and I launched NOA — News Over Audio. (Two years of behind the scenes testing and negotiations took place before that day, but that’s for another time.) We wanted to provide a more immediate solution for people who were faced with a busy schedule and as a result couldn’t find the time to read.
“We want NOA to become a personal assistant that people can turn to in order to become fully informed about important topics, regardless of their background knowledge or a busy schedule. Audio, AI, and voice-controls will be at it’s core.”
Our theory was that most people chose the “read it later” option because they were too busy (or too distracted) to read, but that by providing them with the ability to listen to the story while they were in the car, walking, cooking or at the gym, for example, their problem would be solved. Audio books provided a convenient solution in the book publishing market and today the result is widespread adoption and increased engagement. Advances in mobile computing power and data connectivity made audio book consumption very practical while on-the-move — the perfect use case. To Shane and I, the timing seemed perfect. We wanted to do the very same for great quality journalism — the type of stories that people rely on for concise, well-rounded insight, analysis and perspective on the topics that matter to them. (No, radio and podcasts — while fantastic — don’t meet this need!)
Engagement
Since launching NOA the results have amazed us. Listenership continues to grow organically and article engagement times far exceed those of their text-based online equivalents.
Having an engaged audience is key to the success of any digital offering. Unfortunately, the level of engagement that quality journalism enjoys online is not where it needs to be. (This has far reaching and negative implications for democracy, but, again, that’s a story for another time.) Journalism struggles to stand tall in a crowded media landscape that is abundant with headlines, social statuses, photos and videos.
As we all know, reading takes time; however, Chartbeat analysis reveals that the average amount of engaged time spent on an articles page is just 44 seconds. (And at NOA we’ve seen and heard of lower figures.) A typical reader might get through 150 words in that amount of time (and that’s assuming they begin reading from the moment the page loads, withholding from viewing any images (or ads), etc.), whereas the average journalistic article is closer to 750 words in length. (For this piece, you’ve read about 600 words so far.)
Chartbeat CEO, Tony Haile, summed it up like this:
“The more pageviews a site gets, the more people are reading, the more successful the site. Or so we thought. Chartbeat looked at deep user behavior across 2 billion visits across the web over the course of a month and found that most people who click don’t read. In fact, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page.”
Engagement on NOA is significantly higher. In fact it’s where it needs to be for quality journalism to attract and retain paying subscribers. For the month of November 2017, our average article completion rate (i.e., user listen duration/article playback length) was 84 percent. This average far exceeds our initial expectations and has continued to remain above 80 percent on a monthly basis despite significant user growth. In short, when someone presses play on a NOA article, they tend to stick around and listen.
Context, not content. News tells us ‘what’ happened; a great story tells us ‘how’ and ‘why’ it happened.
One important takeaway for the team since launching NOA is that our users will happily listen at length to stories that provide them with context, background, insight, and perspective. In fact, the data indicates that our listeners love opinion and analysis style pieces. (Many of them have also told us as much.)
Their relationship with news, however, is one of lower engagement. This is to be expected. In today’s digital society, news has turned into a commodity that is widely available at zero financial cost. Most news stories can also be summed up in only a handful of words (quite often within the headline itself), so reading or listening beyond this can appear to be of little reward.
Our editors choose stories that go beyond the headline and provide additional context about the topics that matter. We complement this with a selection of lighter and more timeless pieces spanning lifestyle, careers, sport and the arts.
Here is an example of a typical news headline from the early days of the Qatar-Gulf crisis which began in June 2017:
Qatar is given a further 48 hours to meet Gulf demands
And here’s an example, from around the same time, of the type of story that NOA’s editors would have our readers narrate (feel free to listen to the below too):
This is the real story behind the economic crisis unfolding in Qatar
Ultimately, NOA doesn’t just act as a convenient way for people to consume great journalism, we’re also a reliable and trustworthy source for the stories that will help you get ahead and stay informed.
Listen anytime, anywhere
Our team of readers work to tight deadlines and begin recording from late evening right the way through to midnight. They are a hard-working, dedicated bunch with voices that lift the words from the page and deliver them as the author intended. The result is a high-quality, timely narration of a selection of articles that will appear in the next days newspaper.
Our listeners can create a playlist of the audio articles that are of interest to them and begin listening anytime, anywhere — including offline.
2018 and beyond
Daniel Ek put it best when he stated in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose that our time is precious and as a result, products and services that make things more convenient for people will have a huge market. NOA does just that. We want NOA to become a personal assistant that people can turn to in order to become fully informed about important topics, regardless of their background knowledge or a busy schedule. Audio, AI, and voice-controls will be at it’s core.
2018 will be a year of growth for both NOA and the wider on-demand audio market. There are a number of fantastic services on the horizon, including Curio, Otto Radio , Spoken Layer, and Audm — all of which we are active listeners of.
Advances in text-to-speech technologies will also accelerate the acceptance of voice assisted products and services (and, unfortunately, will likely be a huge threat to workers in the customer service sectors). Whether they can ever replace human narration though remains to be seen. The development by Google of WaveNet represents a significant step forward in this space.
For NOA, our objective over the next 5 years is to become the global home of audio-journalism. We see a bright future for quality journalism — that is, for publishers and journalists that can stand above the click bait and provide insight, perspective, and analysis. By partnering with some of the worlds leading publishers we will provide them with a valued income stream and grow the market for their content across all channels (text and audio) thanks to the convenience with which people can begin to consume and identify with their stories.
Audio has the potential to grow the market for quality journalism to heights never before conceived.
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You can download the NOA app on iOS or Android, and enable our Amazon Alexa skill here.
Stay in touch by connecting with us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Or if you ever wish to speak directly about feedback, partnerships or otherwise, you can reach me at: gareth@newsoveraudio.com .
