January 06, 2012

Readability tools break digital advertising. How to adapt?

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By Amy Gahran

People generally dislike ads, and will avoid them if possible. This is a hard truth for the news business, especially for digital news publishers. “Readability” tools are getting increasingly popular, especially with mobile users. But by stripping out visual “clutter” (including ads) these tools can break digital advertising models

How can digital news publishers adapt their ad and revenue models to make money without annoying their audiences?...

Online or elsewhere, intrusiveness has been the norm for most advertising: paid ads surround or even interrupt content such as journalism. So far, print audiences generally have had to put up with this annoying situation. So have broadcast audiences—although time-shifting and ad-zapping technologies have cut significantly into broadcast ad impressions. 

But digital media audiences have new and better tools for avoiding ads—and those tools are getting more creative and popular all the time, and new ones keep emerging. Given the generally poor quality, relevance, and value of most advertising (especially ads delivered via online advertising networks), who can blame people for using what are, directly or indirectly, ad-avoidance tools?

Readability tools

From third-party services like Instapaper, Readability and ReadItLater (which have been around for years) to the Reader view feature built into Apple’s mobile Safari browser, web and mobile users have easy access to tools that improve readability.

Specifically, these tools strip out from the displayed web page almost everything except the headline and body content, and format into a one-column presentation especially friendly to mobile devices. They also can combine multi-page stories (often split up to increase pageview counts and ad impressions) into a single page.

This means that users can easily choose not to see your graphical banners, interactive features, sidebars, links to related content and—yes—ads. If they only want to see your content, they can get just your content.

Technically, the third-party readability services may not hurt a news site’s pageview or ad impression counts too much, since the user must first load the published page and then save it to their Instapaper or other account. But they can hurt time spent on site, another key metric. And they certainly mean fewer people are seeing your ads.

Safari’s Reader view, however, presents a possible future concern ad-supported digital publishers. Currently 53% mobile web traffic comes from Apple devices (iPhones and iPads)—and that lead is likely to continue for some time yet.

So far, using Reader takes some extra effort, so it isn’t yet hugely popular with iPhone and iPad users. You must take steps to activate Reader view on your device, and then select Reader view for specific pages. So iOS users still first load the page as served by the publisher (with ads) and then switch to Reader view (stripping out ads).

But: What if, in a future iteration of Safari, Apple were to decide to activate Reader view by default—and also give users the additional option of making Reader their default view for content-rich web pages?

This change wouldn’t be that hard, since it just would involve changing options and defaults for an existing feature, not building a new feature. If Apple does this (and they could) it might make Reader view popular with iPhone and iPad users—and prevent lots of ad impressions.

Incidentally, the mobile browser Opera Mini—which currently accounts for 22% of mobile web traffic—already strips out most ads and other visual clutter by default. So there is some precedent.

Solution 1: Just give mobile users a good web reading experience.

In 2-3 years, most U.S. internet users will access the internet via mobile devices (phones and tablets). And while apps offer the best presentation capabilities for content and ads, having a mobile-friendly website is far more important for how people discover and share your content.

This means news publishers must work now to implement responsive web design.

If you can’t yet implement true responsive design, make sure you offer a really good mobile web theme which loads by default on mobile devices. Make it easy for mobile users to switch to your full site, and set a cookie to remember their preference. (No matter how loudly a few iPhone fanatics will complain, a mobile optimized site works best for most mobile users, even iPhone users.)

So far, the Safari Reader view option doesn’t appear for most mobile-optimized web pages. Apple may change this in the future—but if you already offer a good mobile reading experience, it’s less likely that users would want to leap away from your ad-laden web page in the first place.

Solution 2: Be more selective and less obnoxious about ad placement. A few months ago Frédéric Filloux, general manager of France’s ePresse digital consortium, railed against increased ad clutter on news sites. To put it bluntly, ads (and their placement) don’t have to suck. This is especially true on the web, and even more so for mobile ads.

In general, banner ads suck—especially on mobile devices. Consider other advertising options that are more useful or less intrusive, such as text-based or database-driven ads that link to mobile-friendly landing pages. (The Spokesman-Review mobile site offers a good example of this.)

Work with your advertisers to add value. Help them understand the difference between ad impressions and effective advertising, and how the growing dominance of mobile can help them build their business. You could even sell assistance or hosting for mobile-friendly landing pages as a service.

Also, if you integrate text-based advertising options, these ads might not get stripped out by Instapaper or other readability tools. They also may help publishers counter the threat posed by adblocking software. This is already commonplace for all computer-based browsers (especially Google Chrome, the new #1 web browser), but adblockers for mobile browsers are coming.

Solution 3: Support readability links for your long-format content. People who use third-party readability services tend to want to time-shift or device-shift for reading. That is, they encounter on their phone an article they want to read—but later, on their computer or tablet, where it’ll be a more comfortable experience. For them, stripping out ads and other clutter is a secondary benefit.

So far, Instapaper is the most popular third-party readability service, with a large and devoted following. Instapaper offers tools for publishers  that make it easy for people to save your content in Instapaper.

But other readability services support links too. For your most important long-format content, you might want to prepare these links in advance. The page listing longform finalists for the National Magazine Awards offers a great example.

Yes, this means these people won’t see your precious ads and graphics. But they never would, anyway. They represent a separate use case of ardent and often influential readers—an audience you definitely want to court. Supporting their preference will make them like your news site better, which in the long run means more traffic and attention. That benefits your site, and your advertisers.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Amy Gahran, 01/06/12 at 12:37 pm