By Aaron Radin
Late last week, we announced a deal with Dennis Publishing to provide the Toura platform for the production of at least 20 applications to be launched across devices running iOS and Android. The first of these, Auto Express, was published last week.
The strategy of Dennis to publish many apps, and that of publishers in general moving forward, points to the numerous challenges and opportunities of mobile content distribution.
I am not going to run through the specific statistics here of how fast mobile content consumption is growing, but it is clear that that the speed of growth has dramatically altered the way that publishers must think about how they distribute their content. Many of the publishers I have spoken with recently expect that up to half of their traffic to come from a mobile device next year.
There are, of course, two primary distribution channels for mobile: web and apps. I believe that a publisher has no choice but to focus on both. The latest research suggests that more content is being consumed through mobile apps, yet most publishers have created just one or a small handful of apps, generally for their marquee content titles, leaving vast amounts of content still inaccessible from a mobile device. This has, to some extent, been driven by economics. In most cases, publishers have spent considerable amount of time, money and resources to develop their first apps on iOS. A lot of them repeat the effort to then launch, if at all, on Android even though it represents about double the incremental audience. Given the effort and resources, the ROI on these applications may be neutral at best.
This is the quandary facing publishers today: a rapidly growing audience on mobile devices that they must reach with their content, but scale the distribution in a way that has incremental positive financial value to their business. Dennis Publishing has set out a blueprint of how they plan to deal with this challenge. It will be very interesting to see how other publishers manage it.
