On April 15, Crowdynews was present at Digital Media Europe. The conference organized by WAN-IFRA with the sub title - Get ready for the next digital impact, addressed the issues of the publishing industry and the opportunities and possibilities for  innovation. Returning topics where paid content and new revenue streams.

Several large digital publishers presented their strategies, their learnings and conclusions regarding to social media, paid content and business models.

Here are the top learnings for online publishers from the conference:

Mobile First

Focus on mobile is key in online publishing. Perhaps it should even be leading. Some of the publishers are experiencing two third of their visitors coming from mobile devices. Most digital publishers are choosing responsive web design for their website and are launching apps for tablets and smartphones. The apps are in most cases completely different from the regular website. Offering a new user experience and offering special content. The paid apps are doing well however most prefer a freemium model where some content is freely accessible and some content can only be read by (paying) subscribers.

Pay walls

We have seen several strategies around paywalls. For the large digital publishers pay walls are starting to work. Where a few years ago people thought is was crazy to launch pay walls on news websites, they are now (slowly) getting used to the idea that news is not always free. The biggest learning in this field is that it only works on content that is not availlable elsewhere. If you are publishing general news, your readers probably aren’t willing to pay for your content, because it can be found elsewhere for free. It is important for publishers to find their uniqueness and their place in the news consumption of their readers before deciding to put up a pay wall with the risk of losing readers.

Thinking Customer first

“We were thinking very digital-first before, now we are thinking consumer-first,” said Frédérique Lancien, Digital and New Business Director at Groupe L’Equipe . “You need to think what consumers want before you build your offer,” she recommended.

Paul Smurl, vice-president of NYTimes.com, and Brooke Christofferson, VP if business development at Republic Media shared this thought: “to make a paid digital offer work, it’s essential to invest in quality, unique content, and identify what readers are most concerned about. Regional publishers seemed to have success with freemium models as well, offering unique local content only available to subscribers.

The panel discussion was concluded with the wise words to try, try, and try. There is no such thing as one working strategy. All publishers at the conference tried a lot of different models before they found the ones working for them their readers.

Social

Social media strategies become more and more necessary for digital publishers. Adding options to increase interactivity and allowing readers to discover content through social media is engaging readers. Readers are no longer just reading articles, they are distributing it for you. When digital publishers aren’t thinking about ways to improve engagement and audience participation they could be leaving highly valued opportunities untouched.The discovery of social content related to your editorial content is one way to improve reader engagement and that is where Crowdynews fits in perfectly. If you are interested to find out how we can help you to enrich your editorial content with real time social content, in a fully automated way, contact us now.

News consumption behaviour is changing. News consumers want to be up to date when visititing a news website. Partly due to social media they are now used to getting the news they are interested in, when they want it, and they want it fast. 

On some topics (even a really great) editorial team can not reach the speed of the real-time news that is available trough social media. On big topics, like the situation in Norht Korea for instance, new content is available every second.

At Crowdynews we believe that social media content can never replace editorial content, but it can definitely enrich it.

We are helping online news publishers to display the real-time conversation right next to their editorial content.

The factual and researched stories still provide a solid and trustworthy basis for the visitors, while at the same time presenting them with real time content. 

This is an example widget that could be placed on any news website’s North Korea topic. Note that the full screen button takes you to a full size social media page.

If you are interested in embedding this widget on your website, please contact us.

Happy 7th birthday Twitter! 

7 years ago the first tweet was sent out into the world:

just setting up my twttr

21 maart 2006

Today, 400 million tweets per day are sent from 200 million active users. In this video Twitter is celebrating the past 7 years and showing you all the highlights.

As you can see, most of the highlights are big news stories. News through Twitter travels with the speed of light, but how do you find the ones relevant  for you, or your stories? That is how Crowdynews started. For over 3 years now, we are finding the relevant stories from the clutter of 400 million tweets a day.

As our platform collects thousands and thousands of news stories, photos and opinions, every day we see quite a bit of interesting content here in the crowdynewsroom. With #favoritenews we want to take you through a selection of our favorite pieces of content we come across every day at Crowdynews.

This weekend saw the start of a new season in Formula One racing.

Being quite the race fans ourselves, we monitored the incoming tweets as well to see what F1 fans around the world had to say about this ever spectacular event. Without further ado, here’s our #favoritenews around the opening of the Formula One Racing Championship of 2013:

Vodafone announced on thursday it will discontinue its sponsorship agreements with the McLaren F1 racing team after the 2013 season.

Morten Lundal, group chief commercial officer at Vodafone, was quoted saying:

”the way customers prefer to engage with the mobile industry [is] continually getting more sophisticated “

“We now want to focus on our own marketing engagement platform to showcase the key attributes of our brand directly to our customers, using digital interactions and live events in ways that are both locally relevant and globally consistent”

(Read more at BrandRepublic)

Red Bull Racing posted this picture on their Instagram page a special helmet that Sebastian Vettel used during the Free Practice on friday:  

redbullracing

Seb’s helmet for Free Practice yesterday featured a reproduction of fellow @redbull athlete and world record breaker Felix Baumgartner’s space jump helmet. What would you reproduce if you could?

Caterham F1 team introduced a newcomer in Formula 1 and fellow Dutchman Guido van der Garde, needless to say someone we’ll be keeping a close eye on!

During the race, the Lotus team had a good laugh with their pit crew:

A 2.9secs stop - the crew don’t want to make arses of themselves #WeMissedYou#AusGPtwitter.com/Lotus_F1Team/s…

March 17, 2013

Williams F1 remembered to also celebrate St. Patrick’s Day:

Wow this worked out rather well! Best picture of the day!! The Rolex girls in front of the garage @ausgrandprix #F1 twitter.com/WilliamsF1Team…

March 17, 2013

Did you have a good weekend? What’s your #favoritenews today? Let us know in the comments!

The photo above is a perfect illustration of the current generation. Today if anything happens anywhere in the world, there is always someone with a smartphone shooting pictures or videos of the event. We all wish to capture the news, and share it with our friends on Facebook or our followers on Twitter and Youtube.

At Crowdynews we are following this trend for years now and actively encouraging online publishers to integrate the voice and images of the people.

Editorial teams are doing a great job in providing us with engaging and factual stories. But what is a story today, without real life illustrations? It’s time to team up with the world’s biggest editorial team and include the real time conversation in your stories. 

Curious how Crowdynews can supply you with engaging, relevant and real-time content? 
Get in touch!

Image by Michael Sohn / AP

(Source: BuzzFeed)

Today Facebook is planning to announce a redesign of their newsfeed.
As with any Facebook-announcement, media are highly anticipating the event and of course some are already speculating on the outcome.

The redesign comes at a time the company is facing multiple struggles.

On one hand, Facebook is noticing a trend of users moving away from the service, citing ‘Facebook Fatigue’. In particular the younger users appear to be leaving Facebook in favor of other social networks to share their content on, such as Instagram and Pinterest.

On the other hand, Facebook is catering to advertisers on their network, who are looking for bigger and more photo and video content, on top of their desire for more engaging advertisements, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told New York Times.

The team at Crowdynews will be keeping a close eye on the announcement tonight; we know all too well how the battle for Engaging Relevant Content is never won.

We would even go as far as to predict that indeed images are going to be bigger. Bigger, if not immersive imagery is something we’re seeing across most social sharing sites.

Besides following the Facebook announcement, of course we ourselves are also constantly looking for ways to improve our methods of finding, understanding, ranking and displaying content in the most meaningful manner.

Curious how Crowdynews can supply you with engaging, relevant and real-time content?
Get in touch!