How tablets and mobile apps will change the web

During INMA’s Oxford Tablet Summit, Fréderic Filloux, Editor and Publisher at the The Monday Note, France, spoke about the shift of users and content from web to mobile devices.

At first, Fréderic Filloux underlined the major difference between the platforms – navigation varies between the web and mobile devices.  On the web, users navigate either through the brand directly, or through the search. In order to do so, filters and aggregators are used. Contrary, on mobile navigation is mostly done by function, whereas the search is excluded.

The applications are a big advantage for the media. They are engaging in many ways:

• they capture readers’ attention,
• people stay longer on in the application than on a web page,
• they are transactional,
• thay boosts traffic many many times

There are 3 major rehabilitations for tablets:
1. re-bundle – web has killed the cross subsidies. It scattered / dispersed the information. Killed the value in the process: endless inventories, unsold for a large part.
2. length – it has a great potential for innovative formats. Long form journalism is more attractive on iPad. 60-120 pages investigative or narrative piece sold for 5 dollars can make a sort of business model. Of course, we are talking about the new kind of books: lively, up-to-date, news related, and searchable.
3. visual - tablets open new space for visual and graphic content

Digital advertising basically doesn’t work nowadays, both on mobile, and on the web. People are more and more ad reluctant. The ads that can be seen on mobiles or on the web today are poorly designed (poor job of advertising agencies), invasive, badly sold (low tech selling), and discount obsessed. Closed applications will solve these problems. Advertising, thanks to tablets, may again become a content, just as it is in printed newspaper.

Due to three reasons (increasingly closed environment, north korea like policies, and propensity to exclusive deals), tablets will be the new gatekeepers.

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