Why Mobile Content Is So Hard to Get Right - SAY Media

As a foreign correspondent in London ten years ago, my job was to unearth innovative new startups for my business magazine's readers. I traveled across the Continent from Helsinki to Milan meeting entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and big company researchers to write about the next big thing.

In the summer of 2002, I attended a launch party for a startup demoing their nascent service at a swanky Haymarket bar. Upon walking in, there were printed instructions to visit one of the tables playing music and then navigate through a maze of confusing WAP mobile phone menus. What resulted was my phone magically told me the name of the song playing in the room. The party was Shazam's coming out party. It took almost ten years for the music recognition app to truly gain widespread recognition but, for me, it was the first time I saw firsthand what was only possible with a mobile phone.

Ten years later, publishers are still plotting the best ways to engage readers on mobile devices.

The stakes are high. As technology continuously improves, the percent of content consumed from mobile devices increases. On average, 20 percent of sites' content is now being consumed in mobile browsers. But, evolving technology platforms and consumption patterns makes it far more difficult to succeed on mobile than it is on desktop.

And the challenge of building a great mobile experience isn't solved by simply ensuring the content displays in the right way in the right environment. The bigger challenge is to figure out how best to match the content and mission of that publisher with the unique properties associated with varied operating systems, devices, browser and app environments.

Different technology translates into different consumption patterns. For example, users are consuming content in very different ways in apps than they are on the mobile Web. Gaming and social apps account for 80 percent of all app activity. By comparison, those activities account for just 40 percent of time spent on the desktop. Mobile Web consumption more closely mirrors what people do at a desktop with news, utilities, entertainment and topic-specific content accounting for the bulk of activity. Most publishers are responding to the rapidly evolving technology landscape with a wait and see approach.

A brave few are experimenting early, and with promising results.

Food52 has tailored its approach to the screen size. Its iPhone app is focused on its Hotline, a forum for user questions and answers. To take advantage of the bigger screen and encourage users to take their iPads into the kitchen, Food52's Holiday app included a variety of entertaining tips including step by step instructional videos on how to prepare things such as a dry-brined turkey or Tuscan onion confit.

The logical first step for publishers into mobile publishing is to create a mobile-optimized site. SAY makes that easier with technology used by Remodelista that automatically resizes the page based on the screen size the content is being accessed from.

Still others are pushing the envelope even further. Kinfolk Magazine's luminous iPad app complements its quarterly books about small gatherings by encouraging readers to experience the content in a way unique to a tablet device. Whether swiping down for a peak at an intimate dinner by a freezing lake or rearranging the layout and size of photos of a salty dinner of buttered clams and beer in Maritime Canada, readers have never been able to personalize content like this before.

Josh Jaffe is vice president of media at SAY Media.For more insights from SAY Media, visitsaydaily.com.

SAY Media is a digital publishing company that creates amazing media brands. Through its technology platform and media services, SAY enables its portfolio of independent content creators to build passionate communities around key consumer interest areas such as Style, Living, Food and Tech. For more information visit www.saymedia.com.

Read all SAY Media's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at SAY Daily.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggers.com management or associated bloggers. MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries.