When the Houston Chronicle launched its mobile Web site mobile.chron.com in the summer of 2007, page views sputtered along at 300 or 400 a month. Through the following fall, the Chronicle made minor adjustments to the site’s design, but there seemed little reason to invest time and money in such a tiny audience.
Despite paying almost no attention to the site, the Chronicle was astonished to discover mobile.chron.com registering about 100,000 page views a month by the beginning of this year. The Chronicle had to scramble to meet the demand.
“People were using our mobile site with absolutely no effort on our part,” says Sam Brown, executive director of online sales and business development for the Houston Chronicle. “We realized we had to put a lot more effort into it to attract more people and to keep them coming back.”
The lesson is simple: Every month, cell phone users are upgrading to better phones equipped with mobile browsers. Today, there are about 40 million active users of the mobile Web, according to Nielsen Mobile. And no sooner do people discover their mobile browser than they begin experimenting to see which of their favorite Web sites are optimized for a cell phone.
Getting Started
Setting up a mobile site is relatively easy. Some newspapers find all they need is one talented member of staff with an interest in the mobile Web and an interest in teaching themselves a little bit of code. Others have found vendors useful, particularly if they want to guarantee their site is accessible across the ever-expanding range of cell phones and mobile browsers, and if they want to add more complex features such as search functionality or advertising.
At the Houston Chronicle, the newspaper tried a mix of the two. The Chronicle’s in-house mobile expert, online operations manager David Herrold, designed the xhtml templates and CSS for the mobile site. But the site was built and maintained by Advanced Mobile Solutions, which allows the Chronicle to offer additional functions such as classified search.
Indeed, Herrold says that if a newspaper had only basic needs, it could probably manage the entire mobile site on its own. He says that the mobile platform is fairly easy to master for anyone with some knowledge of html and xhtml, and the patience and skill to do a bit of additional research and reading. For his own research he consults mobile Web development sites such as dev.mobi, www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp, and cantoni.mobi. He says that once the code is in place, all a developer needs to do is pick particular sections from the newspaper’s content management system and have the CMS send the relevant parts to the mobile site.
The Value of Vendors
Nevertheless, vendors argue that their services can be worth the investment from the outset.
Michael Weaver, vice president in charge of strategy for mobile publishing and advertising firm Crisp Wireless, warns that although it is important to get a basic mobile site up and running in order to build an audience, a poor brand experience early on can be detrimental in the long run.
“If you are going to go mobile, I think it’s important to recognize that the damage you can inflict by doing it halfway is enough to chase off a potentially larger audience and revenue stream than if you spend the money up front and do it correctly,” says Weaver, who predicts mobile traffic will soon be on par with online traffic.
While some vendors offer basic mobile services, such as transcoding core Web site content, Crisp Wireless offers a number of additional and more complex services, including search functionality, video transcoding and advertising options. Its clients include Gannett and Tribune newspapers, as well as other media companies like Time Warner, NBC, Hearst and Discovery Communications.
Another vendor, Quattro Wireless, offers a “juicing” technology, which takes core site content, including images, and transforms it into a dynamic format for the mobile Web without even requiring a content management system. Quattro also enables its clients to maintain the same URL for the newspaper’s core site and its mobile site. And one of its latest projects is an iPhone optimized site for cbsnews.com that includes weather and traffic widgets.
Because there are so many handsets and mobile browsers on the market, it can be difficult to ensure a mobile site is accessible on every phone. For this reason, both Quattro Wireless and Crisp Wireless test their mobile sites across a range of products, from smart phones to low-end and mid-range phones.
Lars Albright, vice president of business development for Quattro Wireless, says that although he can understand regional newspapers’ reticence to invest in third-party support, such services are not necessarily exorbitant. He says that because Quattro’s main interest is in sharing revenue from its advertising platform, rather than making money out of services, newspapers can set up a “Tier A” site for as little as a few thousand dollars, as long as they can guarantee a minimum of 100,000 page views a month.
In-House Experimentation
However, with mobile still in its very early days, some newspapers would rather experiment themselves.
Although the Arizona Republic is part of the Gannett chain and has access to Crisp Wireless’ services, it relies on an in-house technician to develop its mobile Web site.
Mike Coleman, vice president of digital media for the Arizona Republic, says he chooses to keep mobile operations in-house because it saves money and because he always has an expert on-hand if he wants to make changes.
AZcentral.com’s mobile site is a stripped down version of AZcentral.com. It updates automatically in line with the core site, and it has a very basic design to increase the chances of being accessible on as wide a range of handsets as possible. “Essentially we are trying our best to create a mobile site that anybody can access on any phone,” Coleman says.
Coleman concedes that there are drawbacks to building and maintaining a site in-house. He can not add the bells and whistles that a third party vendor can provide. He does not have leverage if, in the future, he wants the Arizona Republic to come pre-installed on handset desktops. (For now, the Arizona Republic offers a downloadable icon for Blackberry users that sits on the desktop and displays the current weather.)
But Coleman says the mobile Web is still in its infancy. And under such circumstances, a mobile site should be inexpensive and require a minimum of daily maintenance.
Mobile traffic to azcentral.com/w2 has tripled in the past year to 750,000 page views a month. Although its statistics are basic, one fact that has interested the Arizona Republic is that just as many people appear to access the mobile site on weekends as do during the week — unlike the core site, which sees a dip in numbers every Saturday and Sunday.
The mobile audience is still relatively small compared to the core site, says Coleman. And that provides the Arizona Republic with an opportunity to experiment with new sections and features without alienating readers. “I think this is one area where a little bit of experimentation can go a long way,” he says. “Everybody knows that five years from now mobile usage is going to skyrocket. Someone is going to be delivering the information. And we want to be there.”
Attracting an Audience
As well as building and maintaining a site, newspapers have found new challenges in directing readers to the mobile Web.
A sizable number of cell phone users are unaware that the URL for a mobile site is often different than the URL for a newspaper’s core Web site. And, many are no doubt disappointed when the newspaper’s regular Web site appears clunky and functions slowly on their cell phone. A key first step for many newspapers is to implement ways for readers to access the mobile version without too much effort.
One solution is to invite readers to enter their cell phone number on the core Web site. The newspaper’s Web site than sends an SMS message containing a link to the mobile URL to that reader’s phone. Another solution is to institute a redirect whenever a cell phone browser tries to access the core site. The New York Times, for example, has a database the CMS can pull information from that formats the site based on the phone’s specifications. Many newspapers, like the Houston Chronicle, implement a version of both strategies.
Newspapers also promote their mobile sites in print, online and SMS. When the Chronicle first launched its mobile site it ran in-paper promotions and banner ads on chron.com publicizing its mobile platform and classified search. Now, it promotes the site in the navigation on the homepage and with links in SMS messages. Likewise, The Arizona Republic regularly plugs its mobile version via promotions on AZcentral.com and links in SMS alerts.
Having implemented solutions for attracting an audience, the Chronicle has spent the past few months making its mobile user experience as attractive and convenient as possible, by adding new content, reordering sections and headlines and incorporating images (see sidebar).
But ensuring a mobile site looks attractive to readers is complicated by the literally hundreds of mobile browsers and handsets on the market, all of which affect the layout and functionality of a site.
Mike Coleman, of the Arizona Republic, says he does not have the resources to test the site on every handset. And because Herrold designed the Chronicle’s mobile Web site, it was impossible for him to experiment on every phone. Instead, he concentrates on serving the largest segment of the Chronicle’s market—people using Windows Mobile, BlackBerrys and the iPhone. “If the site does not support a particular browser,” he says. “We try to make it so that it will at least degrade gracefully.”
The upshot of the Chronicle’s work is that traffic to its mobile site has increased by 40 or 50 percent each month, according to Sam Brown, to almost half a million page views in May.
“If I had to give advice to a small to mid-size paper,” says Brown. “I would say they should use their internal resources to get their mobile site up and running, and start to use that to build traffic—to get some critical mass before you decide to make the sort of investment necessary for searchability and database management. These are great things to begin monetizing. But mobile is still in its infancy. Build a user base, and you can always expand on it as you go.”
Paul Berger is a British freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. More...