You are killing our revenues: newspapers to smart phones

MUMBAI, INDIA: While the onset of online has been bleeding print revenues, smart phones will kill it altogether.

This is the gist of a recent study conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), which said that people are reading more and more news on their devices, leaving news organizations without a source of revenue because of plummeting ad revenues.

According to the study published in RISJ’s annual Digital News Report, many news organizations are struggling to profit from smart phone content as their readers have taken to search engines and social media rather than the front page of a news website. The reason being the readers are frustrated with the adverts and sponsored content.

Are the news apps dead?

Only the most loyal smart phone users are using news apps, as others rely on social media, messaging apps, email and mobile notifications to read online news, the RISJ said.

While more than two-thirds of smart phone users have downloaded news apps, only one-third use them on a weekly basis, the report noted.

Four in 10 smart phone customers use Facebook to find, read, watch, share and comment on the news each week-more than twice the usage of YouTube, and almost four times that of Twitter, as per the study.

RSIJ also found that newer apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat were giving tough competition to the social networking giants worldwide.

Accuracy doubts:

Although most smart phone users praised social media for bringing them stories they would not have seen otherwise, they said they had reservations about the accuracy and reliability of news found in this manner, RISJ said.

Disappointed?

A third of smart phone users said they felt disappointed or deceived after reading an article they later found had been sponsored, while one in four people said it negatively affected their opinion of the news organization, according to the RISJ.

Also as smart phone users become increasingly dissatisfied with pop-up advertisements and banners, more than four in 10 in the United States and Britain regularly turn to ad-blocking software, the report found.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of Research, RISJ, commented, "Most people like and use news, but they don't want to pay for it, don't want to see advertising around it, and don't want to see it mixed up with sponsored content."

"This means sustainable business models remain elusive even for those who succeed in building an audience," Nielsen said while releasing the report.