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New media frontier

SOUTH Africans are increasingly turning online for news and opinion. Digital publishing is seeing decent growth in the local market and new sites are coming online in droves.

It seems two major trends are driving the uptake: an increase in the use of mobile Internet, and broadband access in general. Social media is also providing a form of casual quality control.

When it comes to existing publishers, Naspers-owned News24 leads the pack with a record 2 million unique readers per month. While this is still somewhere off from the 4 million weekly readers of the Sunday Times print edition, for example, it does show that online publishers are closing the gap.

Editor of News24 Jannie Momberg commented that the barriers to digital consumption are falling further every day. He said that more and more South Africans are able to get online now, and that cellphones feature prominently in the list of devices accessing news websites.

Momberg said there is no doubt in his mind that cheaper bandwidth, access via mobile devices and social media like Twitter and Facebook have played a significant role in increasing South Africans’ appetite for on-demand news content.

My own summation is that social bookmarking is a strong part of the global growth of digital media as people share links with their online networks, aggregating the news. I'd go so far as to say that most people engage with online news indirectly - and this is more evident the younger those users are.

It's also interesting to see how the social networking layer adds some filtration to news content. The likelihood of a news story spreading through social networks depends on how the initial reader is able to relate to it.

If I had to guess, I'd say one of the questions being asked is: “What will my social network think of me if I share this with them?”

Based on their perception of quality and the answer to the above subconscious question, readers will then either spread a link to the story or not.

And while this myopic sharing happens on the one hand, the same users are increasingly becoming content creators themselves on the other.

This is where an opportunity lies for publishers to harness the power of user-generated content, and fence off their own spaces online where visitors can submit their own stuff. CNN has proven how this can work even in traditional broadcasting with its iReport system.

And then there's the impact of cellphones that are being used to both consume and create digital media from anywhere. Some analysts predict that mobile will be the single biggest contributor to the growth of digital media in South Africa, especially as most South Africans will access the internet for the first time on their phone, which will remain their primary access device.

To this point, traffic to News24’s mobile offering, m.news24.com, has increased by more than 124% since February 2010 - and we're only in May now.

International IT research firm Gartner has predicted that cellphones will overtake PCs as the most common web-access devices worldwide by 2013 - and I can only conclude that this will be true in South Africa sooner than anywhere else, given our socioeconomic realities and 100% mobile penetration.

South Africans also have a keen appetite for and understanding of social media. We consistently rank in the top 10 of countries using Facebook and Twitter. Combine this with our high mobile penetration, improving broadband situation and expanding middle class and it seems obvious that on-demand publishing is headed for the big time in SA.

- Fin24.com

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