// Story-to-story navigation on iPad //

Web-analytics types push time-on-site and pageviews-per-visit as measurements of a reader’s engagement. It’s fine to have someone following an occasional link in Twitter, but the real money, some argue, is in dedicated readers who spend lots of time with your content. And to that end, a number of sites have been working on their internal website navigation to push users from story to story, rather than asking them to head back to a list of headlines first.

On news iPad apps, that story-to-story navigation has become the norm. The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, Reuters — their apps all allow (and in some cases emphasize) swiping or tapping from story to story rather than Back and Forward, web browser-style. (The New York Times’ app is an interesting exception.) I suspect that’ll lead to more stories consumed per session — and I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t see more news companies taking that lesson back to their websites.

“HTML5 is aimed at making it easier to build wikis, drag-and-drop tools, discussion boards, real-time chat, search front-ends, and other modern web elements [like Quake] into any site, and have them work the same across browsers.”

Thus I am thinking, like Jeff Jarvis, who pointed out that he is wary of the illusionary move from the web to apps (with control) could be fatal. I think, … no, I strongly believe, that it is yet another stage of the grieving process the industry is going through. 

Stages of Grief

• (1) denial, (ie saying people still read their daily newspaper in the morning)
• (2) anger, (ie Rupert M. said that content should not have been free in the first place)
• (3) bargaining, (ie Paywalls, metered content, Apps for platforms - following the eyeballs, saying that such [closed controlled] platforms are the future)
• (4) depression, (ie letting people go who write your stories and digg up scoops, closing of newspapers and satellite offices, blaming it all on declining ad rev)
• (5) acceptance  (ie those who were let go start blogging, blogging/content networks hire or poach journalists/reporters from NYTimes et al, established tech columnists from big papers acknowledge publicly that they read TechCrunch … daily)

Just a brain blip again. Hope it makes sense.

“Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment [of News Corp earnings], however, things are looking less bright. The Digital Media group, which operates MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a bit of a hit (again).

The company says earnings contributions from the Digital Media Group decreased by $32 million from a year ago, principally due to lower search and advertising revenue. Unfortunately, those numbers aren’t broken out.” (Source)

If you try to build a business (of that scale) on [only] two pillars of income (revenue streams), what do you expect how stable your business will be in the future (excluding internal environment factors)?

And yes I know that these are the two biggest and they have some minor ones too, but I think you get my point. Right?!

Update Feb 3rd: Was just watching some DLD10 sessions and found van Natta saying that they have a ‘diversified set of revenues’ in place, and that they ‘are not overly dependent on anyone of them’, when asked about the Google Search deal. (Source)