The news and media industry has been making high growth strides compared to the last decade. This growth is backed by rising consumer demand and improving advertising revenues. In India alone we have about 70,000 newspapers and over 400+ news channels and it is the biggest newspaper market in the world - over 100 million copies sold each day.
Digitalisation changing News and Media’s landscape
Though print newspapers are popular, there is a decline in the usage of print media and a sharp upsurge in usage of online/digital media. People are up to date with news and entertainment within minutes of happening. Credit goes to the availability of affordable smartphones, internet on mobile(Jio Effect) and accessiblity of free wifi in locations such as bus stations, railways, airports, hotels and coffee shops.
Here are some statistics about news media on the web
- About 4 out of 10 people prefer reading news online.
- People want to be informed about news as it happens. When a story breaks, with a “breaking” or “breaking news” or “Hot News” tag there is 57% higher engagement.
- Articles with pictures receive 50% more engagement.
- Fastest News websites in India load in 7.7 seconds on average
Increasing revenue per reader and getting better on the web
1. Speeding up news and media web pages
Images in articles convey precise messages and engage more readers compared to text-only articles. News and Media houses have to constantly upload new images with new content. Due to this dynamic nature of the news websites, Image optimisation is always missed out.
And this is how it is going to cost you. According to a statistic, “you lose 7% of people every time your site loads 1 second slower”. And in another statistic, “32% of people will not revisit your site if they find it slower than 2-3 seconds”.
News page take 6x more time on a regular 2G network to load than on 4G. Based on these observations, most mobile news sites would need to be redesigned to deal with the harsh realities of many cellular networks.
2. Optimising SEO for news and media sites
A few rules of SEO, like publishing great content and providing a good user experience, are universal.But for News and media websites it is a complete different ball game. Google has decided to down rank heavy websites. If you want to increase your revenue per reader, you will have to pay close attention to your website's SEO ranking. If your competitor's website is ranked higher, your audience will eventually move towards your competitor. One way of dealing with this is to optimise images and make your page as light as possible. Additionally, leverage color meanings in your images to convey messages that align with your brand.
3. Right sized image for right devices
Mobile web surfing has been growing tremendously so much so that it has overtaken desktop traffic. According to Hootsuilt study, "Mobile internet users grew by 1 billion in 2018". News media have to be constantly on their toes since new content keeps coming up and they have to push it on their website. If you do not have right sized images for your users' devices, you are not giving them the best user experience. You would lose your readers if the images are too small or too large for their devices.
Gumlet for News Media
Media houses either outsource the website work to agencies or get the work done inhouse.
When website engineering is done inhouse, Your tech team would have to put time and effort in managing the images. Same principle applies to media houses which outsource the work. But optimisation and saving costs for you may not come under agencies purview.
With Gumlet you can achive
- Automatic Image management and delivery of images
- Reduced website bandwidth usage by 40-90% their by saving your costs
- Super fast web page loading
- Uprank your SEO and
- Eliminating your tech team’s time spent on managing images
“Is your news media website bleeding money?” Check out our image analyzer to know how much money we can help your organisation save using Gumlet.
For consultation within your tech team or agency please get in touch with us on support@gumlet.com.
