Live notes: Afternoon of PANPA Future Forum conference

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Following my live notes from this morning of the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference, and before my closing keynote, here are quick notes from the afternoon session.

Jan Rezab from CandyTech in Czech Republic was originally going to speak about mobile but decided that it would be more valuable to discuss Facebook. According to their statistics, over 1 million news articles were shared globally in July and August, with 100 million news items seen as a result. Media organizations in Australia are not strong on Facebook, with the most prominent, FHM, having 13,000 likes on its Facebook page, and the top newspaper, news.com.au, 10,000. In contrast, regional radio Europe2 has 300,000 fans over the sites for its various shows.  

Jan shared the results of a study done specifically for this conference, examining sharing of media articles in Australia. Over a one month period there were a total of 10.2 million article shares, with 2.6 million likes of articles. From theses, The West Australian had 839,000 article shares, Herald Sun 459,000, and Yahoo!7 452,000 – interestingly not the most prominent news titles.

Alex Burke of TigerSpike, which has made mobile apps for a number of large media organizations around the world, including The Australia’s iPad app, spoke about the mobile market and where it is going. Alex said that the mobile is now becoming the first screen rather than the third screen, with for example Facebook accessed more on mobiles than from fixed devices.

iPad panel:

This is early, experimentation phase.

User engagement with media is very high.

One of the problems in getting online advertising revenue is that agencies prefer to sell their clients TV ads. Corporate marketing heads are looking for justification for their budgets from their agency strategists. It perhaps requires selling advertising direct to clients.

Production workflow challenges with multiple platforms – if put 9 people onto iPad production then there is a big weight to justify. If you consider that there are 32 new tablets due for release by next March, then perhaps you need to create a more generic production process.

The page inventory issue is crazy. We need to sell brand and premium positioning.

If you create an immersive experience for a luxury car company where you drive it along mountain roads using the ipad as a steering wheel, that cannot be priced on a CPM model – it needs new pricing.