Next year will be a bit of a throwback to 2009 in that Google will be a focus for lots of news publishers. It will also remind us of 2007 as we spend time on homepages, have a touch of 2008 as we reassess app offerings, and be a rerun of 2010 and 2011 in the attention we give to aggregators.
Why all the flashbacks?
Google’s importance has grown as publishers have dialed down their focus on Facebook following the algorithm change announcement of January 2018 (though Facebook still drives 24 percent of traffic to publishers, according to data collected by analytics platform Parsely). But while 10 years ago it was a pure desktop search story, heading into 2019 we now pay attention to Google AMP, Google Content Suggestions, and Google Discover.
Homepages, apps, and the kind of destination journalism and product experiences that drive readers to go directly to a site on mobile are crucial in 2019. While the past couple of years have been trying for Facebook-oriented publishers (think Mic, Mashable, Vice, UniLad), the following three facts demonstrate the need for us to focus on driving direct relationships with readers on mobile homepages and apps.
Mobile homepage visitors spend 40 percent more time actively engaging than their desktop counterparts (22 engaged seconds vs. 16 on desktop), Chartbeat reported in June.
How a reader chooses to spend her time on her phone is our only true competitor.
What happened during a 45-minute Facebook outage in August? Direct traffic to publishers’ websites increased 11 percent, while traffic to publishers’ mobile apps soared 22 percent.
What happened when there was an hourlong YouTube outage in October? Publishers had a 20 percent net increase in traffic. Just over half of this increase went to general articles on publisher sites, while articles about the outage comprised a 9 percent lift.
So when a reader can’t access a social network, or when she has satiated her appetite for Instagram, checked her Facebook groups, and cleared her other notifications, she’ll spend time going directly to a trusted news source.
Next year is when mobile will surpass TV as the medium attracting the most minutes in the U.S., according to eMarketer. U.S. adults spent an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes per day on mobile devices this year, a one-year increase of more than 11 minutes. Here in the U.K., Britons spend more than 24 hours a week on their phones.
So as time spent on mobile continues to rise, the battle is not just for the lock screen, but for readers to have our site or app front of mind when they’re thinking of how to spend the next five minutes of phone fiddling.
Sarah Marshall is head of audience growth at Vogue International.
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Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
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Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
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Greg Emerson Power to the user
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Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
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Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
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Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
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Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
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Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
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Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
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Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
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Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
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Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
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Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
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Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
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P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
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Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
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Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
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Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
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Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
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Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
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Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
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Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
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Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
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Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet