(I wrote this in April of 2016, but it’s still an important message.)
This article — Publishers: Weigh The Risks Of Platform Content Distribution — makes a lot of good points about the dangers publishers face when they put their content on a platform.
Unfortunately, it starts off with a very common but fundamentally misleading argument.
First, nearly two-thirds of digital media time spent in the US is on a mobile device. Second, most of that time is in apps. That’s not all. Most consumers spend that time in only five different apps.
While the apps vary by person, the trend is clear for publishers: In order to achieve scale, their content needs to be accessible through the apps that people use every day. This means that there is a strong incentive to partner with digital companies that dominate the top five for a critical mass of people.
Do you see what’s happening here? “Digital media time” is presented as the pool that publishers need to be in. Once you accept that premise, the rest follows — e.g., most digital media time is on a few apps on mobile devices, so that’s where you need to be.
The thing that continues to amaze me about this line of argument is that it completely misses what people are doing during this “digital media time.”
Sure, people spend half their life on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever useless time suck appeals to them. But they’re on Twitbook to find out what their high school friends are up to, to get the latest gossip, or to rant about some political topic. They’re not involved in serious reading.
If you publish data on commodities transported by rail, Facebook is irrelevant to you. It doesn’t matter if your market fritters away 90 percent of their day on the thing. What matters is where and how they expect to consume your information.
“Everybody’s on Facebook, so your content needs to be on Facebook” makes about as much sense as “everybody’s watching the Superbowl, so you should sponsor the halftime show.”
People at the Superbowl aren’t in the mood for serious content. They’re in the mood for beer and jokes and whatnot, but probably not for what you’re selling.
Some publishers are doing the sorts of things that fit with the Facebook ambiance. That is, they’re simplifying complex stories and making mock of things they don’t understand. The Onion should make a killing with Facebook. The Journal of Neuroscience … probably not.
And it doesn’t matter if every neuroscientist in the country is on Facebook for half the day. The question is not how much “digital time” that group spends on social media, but whether that’s where they want to consume the information. It’s entirely possible they want to catch up with their nieces and nephews on Facebook during the day, but read about neuroscience out of a print magazine in their arm chair at home in the evening.
The logic behind digital publishing has been skewed for years, and publishers need to make distinctions and parse out what’s really being said.
It doesn’t matter if 90 percent of web traffic is on smart phones if that includes third world data, and you don’t publish to the third world. It doesn’t matter if 86 percent of “digital time” is spent on apps, if that means Angry Birds and chatting with friends. (And yes, I just made up those numbers.)
The question is not “where do people consume content these days?” because “content” is a ridiculously broad term. It includes reading tweets and recipes and social media silliness.
You need to find out where your market expects to get the kind of information that you’re selling. Don’t be distracted by other things they’re doing just because it can be called “consuming content.”
