Indian media giants that are still warped up in a print or
pdf world online have a real challenge coming up. Facebook’s instant article
feature effectively integrates what was happening through users to giving
control to publishers.
When Facebook users share content on their timeline
publishers get hits but they lose out on selling advertising directly.
Facebook’s new offer will allow publishers to share their content directly
through the instant article feature.
In a way Facebook has realised that it has an audience base
which can be leveraged to distribute news or content. Most media companies
still live in a destination site world, hoping the audience would come to them.
Though the audience has stopped going to them, most news
consumers use Twitter, Facebook and other apps to get information. This
disaggregation will happen faster in the mobile world. Apple is also planning
to disrupt the distribution of news. It has launched Apple News along with 50
publishers on board.
The entry of a handset maker and a social media platform
into the news distribution business should in India be looked from a mobile
point of view. It is not the newspaper that people pick up in the morning but
it is the mobile. Also, the last screen they see before going to sleep is also the
mobile.
With the trend catching up fast, Google coming up with its
own offering on mobile to distribute news is not too far. The search giant has
several advantages over both Facebook and Apple. For one, it has the largest
search engine for scanning news and can easily customise this news based on the
mobile user.
It also has the most amount of data about its users it knows
what they search, where they live, what they do, when are they travelling and
so on and so forth. If it decides to customise news in accordance with this, it
will most likely break the back of every publisher. The first to be hit will be
all the new online news aggregators.
Until now the new online websites which republish news or
aggregate do nothing but curate and repurpose content. Most Indian media sites
also do nothing but collect news from wires and republish it on their websites.
Very few actually work on creating content over and above what the wires are
churning out.
Google News is already the biggest wire service in the world
the way it structures news content across the world. The algorithms it has
developed to scan and search for news on one particular topic are getting
smarter. How long will these algorithms take to become a version of opinions
that the website is so proud of touting?
But that is not the real danger for online publishers or
traditional media their ability to command loyalty in the online world is
through design, fonts and layout. This edge vanishes almost completely in the
new distribution. Facebook strips away all but the font when it starts to
display content on its service. Apple News is likely to do the same.
Both these companies have learnt from the trouble Google has
had with news publishers across the word, particularly in Europe where it has
been forced to share ad revenues. Therefore, both Apple and Facebook have
partnered with publishers in its new offering.
Google is the original purveyor of content and it is moving
rapidly to demolish the content model that traditional media is developing
online. Even TV will not be unaffected in the online world. Most news channels
actively share their content on Youtube.com.
They get a pittance for sharing this content. Google is also
creating original content on Youtube.com. One of its biggest foray into this
space has been with its tie-up with storyful.com. User-generated news videos
that are generally the first and most credible view of news will now be
available on youtube.com.
It is not that traditional media does not recognise this
competition but news organisation top hierarchy is the most distracted
management. Every CEO has these six screens continuously running in their
offices. Most of them sit the whole day staring at these screens.
The reason top management responsible for creating, planning
and long-term strategy being involved in tactical moves is difficult to
understand. It is the reason that most new innovation in television news is not
happening inside these companies. Independent journalists walking the streets
are creating most of the new innovation. Across channels from ABP News to NDTV
most of the new programming is being done by freelance journalists.
The challenge of top management is the same in newspapers,
editors and managers are busy with bringing out the newspaper or magazine. None
of them have time to spare to plan and put in place a strategy that could help
them save from tumbling across the cliff they are all headed towards.
Source From:- http://www.firstpost.com/
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