The biggest trend in mobile publishing is content distribution.
Have you heard the about Facebook Instant Articles, Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Apple News? They are built to revolutionize the way we discover content on our mobile devices and give publishers new channels to grow their readership and make more money. In this webinar, we gave attendees the full scoop on the new mobile distribution trend and taught them how to format, publish and monetize content for each major format.
In this webinar recording, you will:
- Understand the power of each new format and the mobile content distribution trend as a whole.
- Learn a seamless way to format and distribute content on Instant Articles, Apple News and Google AMP.
- Learn specific monetization strategies tailored to each format.
11. Formatting
The stated goals of Instant Articles are to be fast and
elegant. Thus, all Instant Articles have a signature
simple design.
• Large, high resolution banner images
• Simple text formatting and streamlined font styles
• Simple color schemes, lots of white space
• Videos
12. Formatting
• Instant Articles are built on HTML 5
• Web developer help
• 3rd party plugins
• Facebook has two tools to help with formatting
articles
1. Articles Editor – allows you to review and
correct errors in the markup for your articles
2. Pages Manager – Facebook mobile app that
allows you to preview all Instant Articles
associated with you page, both published and
unpublished
13. How to publish on FBIA
1. Create a Facebook page for your website
2. Sign up for Instant Articles and claim your URL
14. How to publish on FBIA
3. Set up an RSS feed to send content to Facebook
and use the Pages app on your phone to confirm
the content is feeding through
4. Match your FBIA design style to that of your
website5. Submit at least
10 articles for
review
18. How to publish on Apple News
RSS Feed
Apple News Format API
Directly in News Publisher
19. How to publish on Apple News
From your iCloud account, you will find a new app
called News Publisher.
20. How to publish on Apple News
1. Add a title and
cover photo
2. Add an author
name
3. Paste your content
and select font
styles
4. Select “Submit for
Approval.” You will
get an email when
approved.
To create a new
article:
24. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages
The Accelerated Mobile Pages project was developed
to be the exact opposite of a walled garden.
“AMP is an initiative to improve the
mobile web and enhance the
distribution ecosystem.”
25. AMP & SEO
Page load speed is already a major factor in Google’s
SEO algorithms, as is mobile responsiveness, so it is
assumed that AMP pages will benefit from improved
search rankings.
26. AMP formatting
To format your content for Accelerate Mobile Pages,
you need to be able to write basic HTML or have a
technical resource help you out.
Basic formatting requirements for AMP pages include:
• Replacing image references with images sized to the user’s
viewpoint
• Inline images that are visible above the fold
• Inline CSS variables
• Preload extended components
• Minify HTML and CSS
• Elegant embedding of Instagram and Facebook posts and videos,
YouTube videos and tweets
30. Snapchat Discover
Snapchat Discover is another closed
platform format much like Facebook
Instant Articles and Apple News.
Discover is really geared toward big
brands with big marketing budgets
and super glossy content. Those
brands on Discover are after
Snapchat’s mostly millennial, techy
audience.
31. Medium for Publishers
Medium just threw their hat in the ring
with Medium for Publishers, a
publishing platform and set of tools
that is meant to encourage publishers
to create and distribute their content
directly through Medium instead of or
in addition to their CMS.
The platform offers monetization,
analytics and formatting tools.
32. Twitter Stories & Tweet Lengthening
Twitter Developers created Twitter
Stories to allow content creators to
better showcase a single tweet or
tell a story with multiple tweets.
In early 2016 news broke that
Twitter will soon be allowing their
users to write longer tweets, a move
assumed to help Twitter get into the
content distribution game.
34. The paths forward
• Hire some developers to conquer formatting and
bootstrap solutions for reporting
• Build a team dedicated to formatting, publishing,
monetizing and analyzing content for each format
• Take it one platform at a time
• Work with third parties to simplify formatting and
streamline monetization
- Improve user experience on mobile- Improve Load Time- Easy Discoverability- Streamlined Content & Ad Experience
With new Formats and Platforms users get an improved UX and the platforms get additional engagement through positive feedback loops.
And publishers get more pageviews because few users drop off.
HTML5 document optimized for:
Fast mobile performance,
Rich storytelling capabilities,
Branded design and
Customized visual display.
Instant Articles use standardized markup language to apply styles and functionality to a story.
Markup can be handled:
Automatically to enable automated publication of an entire content feed at scale.
Manually to create bespoke stories that take advantage of unique Instant Article capabilities and rich-media elements.
Cached locally on Fb servers. So whenever Fb sees a URL link to said article, rather than hyperlinking to external site, it serves up its cached IA version.
Monetization
- Monetize Instant Articles through direct sold ads.
- Remaining inventory must be sold using the Facebook Audience Network or not at all. - For direct sold ads, publishers get to keep 100% of their revenue.
- Ads can be served into your Instant Articles through your existing ad server implementation, including through Google’s DFP solution.
Facebook does not allow publishers full reign over their advertising options. If you are already working with multiple ad networks and SSPs for display advertising, you will not be able to simply port these tags into Facebook Instant Articles.
Ads can be placed in the article using tags or publishers can use Facebook’s Automatic Ad Placements in their article HTML to eliminate the need for tags. Combine both manual and Automatic Placements if you are feeling bold.
Apple’s approach is very similar to Facebook’s. Most people spend time in apps on the phone. With most of the time being facebook, email and safari. They want to move some of that time people spend consuming news on facebook on an apple device to their own platform.
The Apple News format allows you to get your content in front of millions of Apple mobile and tablet users through the native Apple News app that is installed on all new iOS devices. Apple News articles look very similar to Google Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook Instant Articles, with streamlined text, bold images and videos and minimal styling. Apple News touts their interface as elegant, fast and engaging.
The News Publisher app acts a little bit like a CMS in that it allows you to easily upload, format and publish content to Apple News. News Publisher also houses all of your article analytics and advertising metrics, making the publishing experience a breeze compared to Facebook Instant Articles.
The News Publisher app acts a little bit like a CMS in that it allows you to easily upload, format and publish content to Apple News. News Publisher also houses all of your article analytics and advertising metrics, making the publishing experience a breeze compared to Facebook Instant Articles.
With Apple’s built-in advertising platform, iAd, publishers can manage their campaigns, creatives and reports right inside the publisher interface. Publishers get to keep 100% of the ad revenue they earn through their Apple News channels, provided that they sell all the inventory directly.
You will not be able to port over your current advertising partners from your website into Apple News; you will need to manage advertising on Apple News seperately.
To use iAd, you will need:
- Set up an Apple Developer Account
- Link your Apple News channel to your Developer account through iTunes Connect, where you will also set up your tax, account and banking information
- Once your News channel is linked, you can set up your ads in iAd Workbench
Open source project from Google that is aimed at making web pages that are optimized to load instantly on users’ mobile devices.
AMP HTML is designed to support smart caching, predictable performance, and modern, beautiful mobile content.
Since AMP HTML is built on existing web technologies, and not a template based system like Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles, publishers continue to host their own content, innovate on their user experiences, and flexibly integrate their advertising and business models -- all within an architecture optimized for speed and performance.
Built on an open source framework that leverages a new type of HTML, AMP HTML, to format the pages for speed, elegance and usability. AMP pages restrict the use of load-time in inflators including certain JavaScript, HTML and CSS elements. The use of existing web technologies instead of a template based system like that of Facebook and Apple allows AMP publishers to integrate their own advertising and business models.
Though Google hasn’t officially disclosed whether or not AMP HTML pages will improve mobile SEO, loading speed is already a major factor in Google’s SEO algorithms, so it is assumed that AMP pages will benefit from improved search rankings. AMP pages will appear as “cards” on the Google Search Engine Results Page with large images and bold headlines, likely improving click-through rate for those posts who have an AMP card versus those that don’t.
Other proponents of the open web, including LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter will be supporting AMP pages and allowing publishers to promote AMP versions of their content inside of their platforms.
Google provides a boilerplate of starter HTML code that will allow you to build a very simple AMP HTML page. They also provide a list of markup that is required for AMP pages to work along with some optional meta-data options.
Google supports a large number of ad providers, ad networks and SSPs for AMP advertisements. All you need to do to set up ads for your AMP pages is use the amp-ad element (only ads served via HTTPS are supported).
No ad network-provided JavaScript is allowed to run inside the AMP document. This is to ensure that additional targeting and scripts that add weight to the page do not slow down the loading and behavior of the page itself. If you load an AMP article on your mobile phone right now, you will notice that the advertisements don’t load until the instant that you scroll them into view. “Lazy loading” of the ads, images and videos on the page allow the content to load instantly and only call elements to the page that are in view.
To set up advertising on your Google AMP pages, you need to write HTML or have a technical resource who does. If that doesn’t apply to you - or you want to take a more ef cient approach - you can work with a variety of third party plugins like sovrn Workbench that will auto-format your content and make monetization a piece of cake.
Whether you have a team of developers or not, each of these formats adds a substantial chunk to the daily publisher to-do list.
Not only do you need a system to format all of your content for these new modes of distribution, you also have to get your arms around all of the analytics, setup and manage advertising, and continue to produce stellar content for your readers.