Researching mobile media in SA – Workshop
This is the blog for the Mobile Media in South Africa workshop held on Wed 15 April at UCT. A group of researchers studying mobile media in South Africa will be getting together to discuss their latest latest research projects. The workshop will take place after a public lecture by Vincent Maher, who will be visiting UCT during the week.
Lecture by Vincent Maher, Vodacom Mobile Media
9.00am – 9.40am
New Science Lecture Theatre, University Avenue
Research presentations – Programme
9.45am – 12.40pm
TB Davie Seminar Room, Otto Beit Building
Most South Africans now use a mobile phone. Many of these phones are being used as all-purpose media and connectivity devices, and this relatively new range of uses provides several challenges to researchers who attempt to understand how and why people are chosing to use their phones, or how phones, mobile media and software applications could be redesigned to better serve their users. It may be easier to address these questions if researchers can make connections between technology disciplines (such as computer science, information systems, and HCI) and disciplines focused on communication, such as media studies, marketing, linguistics, anthropology and visual and cultural studies. This broader focus could be useful both to researchers who want to evaluate and design innovative development projects and to those who want to account for the rapidly shifting practices of everyday communication in South Africa.
Here is a printable version of the workshop programme
If you have further queries, contact Marion Walton – Marion.Walton@uct.ac.za
Commercial media and marketing South African commercial media are noticing that their audiences are shifting their attention to converged mobile communications networks, which have been called the ‘seventh mass medium’. South African advertisers spent R250 million on mobile advertising campaigns in 2007, evidence that this is a burgeoning new platform. In this context, the rapid rise of the mobile Internet presents a significant challenge to the current leaders in the local online publishing industry. The mobile Web looks very different to the Web used by deskbound users – just because people can access any website from their phone does not mean that they choose to do so. Are the ‘walled gardens’ of the leading mobile properties in fact holding their audiences captive or are they making it possible for them to explore the Web further, and to contribute to broader public discourse? How will locative features be used, and by whom? How do South Africans distribute their attention between local publishers and global sites such as Google and Facebook? What kinds of features and content have contributed to the rapid success of the relatively obscure publishers who have become highly popular among South African mobile users?
Development communication A range of innovative development projects promote the use of mobile technologies to broaden access to banking, education, government and health communication. While many of these projects have relied on SMS texting in the past, how will communication strategies shift as people enjoy greater access to a wider range of media options?
Youth culture Young South Africans are adept at negotiating the range of communications options available to them, and routing around those that do not appeal. Low cost and low-bandwidth instant messaging and social networking applications such as MXit have become a significant force, driving down the costs of interpersonal communication, opening a new space for youth culture, and introducing many to the Internet for the first time. How does this space relate to other expressions of youth culture, to consumer culture, and to broader civic and public discourses and expressions of identity?
Moral panics and media regulation Like teens around the world, young South Africans often use mobile technology to evade adult regulation and surveillance, a trend which led to many South African schools banning cell phones outright. A number of moral panics about teens’ access to pornography and risks of sexual abuse of children in particular have followed. Heightened government interest in regulating online and mobile media contributed to the drafting of controversial proposed new amendments to the Films and Publications Act.
Convergence culture Broadcasters, publishers and advertisers increasingly operate within a ‘convergence culture’ and storytelling now embraces a range of platforms. Here, researchers can investigate how traditional media genres change as they go mobile (such as, for example ‘mobizines‘, ‘mobidocs‘ and ‘mobisoaps‘), while locative features and the rise of user-generated content in applications such as The Grid promise to give rise to new genres and applications in the future.
Social media Mobile audiences look less and less like ‘audiences’ — people now use media as and when they need to, while their phones also allow them to be media producers and distributors . For this reason, media researchers may need to adopt methods from HCI in order to study mobile phones in use.
Similarly, the nuances of interpersonal communication are just as important as the strategies of mass communication in the study of mobile media. Social media are governed by ‘Web2.0’ principles which allow users to connect with one another and cultivate participatory communities. These communities identify, generate and filter valued forms of content for one another rather than relying on the editorial judgements of paid professionals. This ‘we media’ is often seen as a new and more empowering alternative to the high-handed arrogance of mass communication. Despite its democratic aura, in its current form social media remains the province of a relatively small elite, and it remains to be seen how soon widespread mobile access will alter this pattern in South Africa.
Political economy While media may have become more conversational, mobile network operators and aggregators (search, content and social networks) nonetheless hold significant cultural, economic and political power and wield extensive gatekeeping and surveillance powers. The spaces they provide for community are also proprietary spaces, and they do not have the journalistic or public service mandates of traditional broadcasters. Charging micro-payments for communication means that mobile operators can exclude low income communities from full cultural and social participation if their rates are not affordable, thus potentially replacing the ‘digital divide’ with an economic ‘participation gap’. In addition, the ecological impact of mobile technologies remains an area of concern.
Multilingualism and multimodality Researchers are paying attention to the specificity of local languages and the linguistic, cultural and generic changes that are taking place in mobile communication. As photography, image editing, video, audio and animation production become more widely accessible on mobile platforms, multimodality will also need to become a central research focus. As these forms of expression are better understood in the context of mobile communication, they have the potential to suggest new interfaces, search algorithms and design principles for mobile media and applications.
Children, parents and mobile phones – global study
I’m at the IAMCR conference in Mexico City. There are quite a few papers focusing on mobile media use on the programme, and I’m trying to attend them where possible. If I have time and battery power I’ll post a few reports here in the next few days.
Aiko Mukaida from NTT DOCOMO’s Mobile Society Research Institute talked about a large global comparative study of children (9-18 years old) and their parents’ perceptions of mobile phone use. Over 6000 participants from around the world were surveyed.
I must admit that I was disappointed that the study didn’t use data from any African countries. Aiko explained that apparently DOCOMO approached had approached the South African mobile networks to sponsor research into South African children and parents, but they were not interested in participating. What a pity.
The study draws on research from Korea, China, India and Mexico. The data shows how children in different countries start using phones at different ages and adopt them at different rates. In Japan and Korea, for example, children start using phones at young ages (with Korean children starting earliest of all). In these countries, about 90% of twelve-year olds have mobile phones. In Japan children tend to adopt phones at particular points in their schooling careers – when they change schools and start having to rely on public transport. In India, the children in the sample mostly started using phones at about 14. In Korea, parents seem to be discouraging teens’ phone use in the final years of schooling, probably because of the tough school-leaving examination in that country.
Aiko focused on identifying correlations between parental concerns about mobile phone use. Most parents have concerns about their children’s mobile phone use (60% of the survey). There were also some interesting global differences which probably relate to the key social, cultural and economic differences between children and parents around the world.
Parental concerns related primarily to worries about children using the phone for too long, spending too much money, and (in contexts where mobile Internet use is growing) concern that children might be accessing inappropriate information, or communicating with strangers. I wondered why the potential health risks from radiation posed by children’s mobile phone use did not feature in the study, but Aiko explained that apparently, other than in Europe, parents have low levels of awareness of this as a risk to their children.
Aiko expected to find that parents’ concerns increased the more their children reported using mobile phones, and the more children were dependent on their phones. While this did seem to be happening in Japan, it didn’t turn out to be the case everywhere. The actual use of mobile phones or children’s dependency on them didn’t consistently correlate with parental concern in all the countries that were studied.
In India, for example, where children used text messages primarily to communicate with their parents, high levels of messaging were not a source of concern, perhaps because this was likely to reflect a strong relationship with the parent.
The study was commissioned to investigate children’s use of mobile phones, and so does not use random sampling – for example in Mexico, the study focused on selected regions which have mobile phone coverage, while in India a socio-economic index was used to identify children who are likely to have a mobile phone. The Korean and Japanese data is apparently more of a random sample, and so the 90% of twelve year olds with phones is probably pretty close to the actual figures. Apparently most have contracts, and mobile email is very popular because it allows them to exchange images – so they’re using it in similar ways to an MMS.
Here’s a transcription of Vincent Maher’s talk (presented to the Media and Writing third year students) at the University of Cape Town on 15 April, 2009
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Goodmorning, everyone. My name is Vincent Maher and I work at Vodacom. My job these days is basically to come up with ideas around social networking and then roll them out as products within the company.
What I’m going to talk about today is a personal story about the move from traditional media (the newspaper company) into the mobile environment, and what that has meant. Before I was at Vodacom, I was at the Mail and Guardian, which is a small Joburg-based paper that some of you may have read. It’s very political, slightly left of centre, and quite small. The circulation was around 58000 a week then (my understanding is that it’s gone up). I’ve gone through this transition from not really being a journalist, but someone working in an environment where journalists work and implementing online strategy. Then moving into the mobile space (which is quite radically different in terms of culture) but also has different objectives, and seeing the different work that this involves.
So just to go back about a year and a half, when I got to the Mail and Guardian they had a fairly successful website, I think about half a million page views (125000- 140 00 South African uniques per month) although the website itself hadn’t changed since 2002. So it was an old website, and had architecture that was starting to creak at the seams. That was the impression that I got anyway, when I arrived.
When I joined there, they gave me two mandates, one was convergence, I’m sure as media students you know what that means. The other thing that I needed to do, was to build the entire digital strategy of the company. We started on the convergence thing, and that didn’t go so well, because the publication was a weekly, and the website was essentially a daily. So we had these bizarre meetings when the print editorial and the web editorial met. And we’d say “Well we need to break down and take away the silos and converge production”. The people who really came from the extreme print media culture would say, “How can you expect us to do more work without more pay?”. That was the one extreme that we had to deal with. And the online people would say that “We don’t need actually need weekly content because it’s old before we can even publish it on the web”. So there were these two very divergent cultures within the company. One which was very small, very fast-paced, but with very little depth. And then there were these very senior and very experienced journalists, who worked on a story for three or four months at a time, going into hiding, all sorts of weird real journalism, the kinds of stuff that you imagine journalism is all about. And so these things didn’t go all that well, and this convergence never happened. From the web side of things we didn’t want to converge because it wasn’t very appropriate to converge a weekly news production system into a daily one.
On the other hand, one of my previous colleagues from Rhodes University went to The Times and quite successfully went through this process of converging a daily editorial. So that worked quite well. We didn’t really feel that bad, though because there was a certain point where we decided we were really about blogs [indistinct]. Instead of doing the big multimedia-type integration, we decided that we were going to embrace the blogosphere and we did some interesting Web2.0 projects. Where everybody else was saying “Can we trust the bloggers?”, “Is the solution that we should get our own journalists to blog?”, we just said, “Firstly let’s aggregate all the other blogs and create content and then lets take our audience and give them the power to create content on our platform.”
So the two projects which came out of that were Amatomu.com (essentially a blog tracking aggregation service). And something called ThoughtLeader which is one way of saying we are not constrained by the physical size and time constraints that are critical for our print production and it means that we don’t only need to have ten columnists and they don’t all have to embrace the political point of view that the rest of the organization does. We don’t have to choose between them. And so that’s what we did with Thought Reader, we invited 500 that were essentially loyal readers, and people who wrote a lot of letters. It’s very wierd, people still wrote letters, I think that’s changed though. Steve Hofmeyr would write an actual letter, almost every week, to the Mail and Guardian complaining about this or that. So that was our target. These guys really need a place to go and claim as their own, so we built Thought Leader.
But then around April last year, when we finally reached a point where we were going to rebuild the M&G website, a guy came to see us from San Francisco, he had quite a cool, hippie accent. It turned out that he ran a company called AdMob. Now AdMob are basically a mobile advertising delivery service. So websites would sign up with AdMob, put the AdMob code on their mobile sites, then AdMob would serve the ads and they give you a cut of whatever ads they sell. So he said here’s my presentation, and he gives us an elevator pitch about how AdMob is a really awesome company. We were sitting there going “Why. Are you here? What are you talking about actually?” And he said, “Do you realise that South Africa is the third largest in terms of mobile Internet access across their entire network?” So where they serve 190 billion ads a month [I must have transcribed this wrong, their April report says 7,535,272,901] a good third of that advertising volume was coming from South Africa [SA April figures are 125,325,923 or 1,7% of Admob’s volume] .
This just hit us in a totally different way, Firstly , those stats can’t be true! And secondly, what does that actually mean if South Africans are using their phones basically to access the Internet. It wasn’t a common experience. At that point I didn’t know anyone within my circle of friends or family who used their phone for the Internet. Of course I didn’t count MXit though that’s part of it. I’m talking about using the web browser on a phone. That was April last year. Within about six hours after that meeting, I realised if I didn’t move to mobile, I would be in the same situation that I think a lot of people are who are still clinging to print journalism at the moment. Basically what you do is not about the medium that it is published on, it’s about what it actually is. But if you cling to that notion that you write for a newspaper rather than write for a company that produces media, regardless of the output, then things are pretty scary Even in the online world people a lot of people are making the move into mobile now There is a general sense that [if you don’t] you will be very left behind If you’re a tech savvy Internet person at this point.
So what I’m going to do is talk you through some numbers This is from the Opera Mini annual report. Opera Mini is a browser that runs in the mobile client. You can see these are the number of page impressions consumed by SA Internet users on their mobile phones, going up to December last year. So that’s about six billion and a half just using Opera Mini, which is just one single browser. So technically that’s excluding the built in browser on your phone, that’s excluding things like MXit, and so on. At the time of this report, Opera Mini had seventeen million installations around the world, and that figure itself is growing quite rapidly [In April 2009, Opera Mini had over 23.4 million users – MW].
So you can see firstly that the growth, it’s almost doubled in a six month period. That’s fairly radical. And the numbers themselves, I don’t know, did any of you think that six billion pages were being served to mobile phones in this country? Does that strike you as the correct number? It’s sort of counter-intuitive. I guess you don’t see people, I guess you do see people sitting on their phones, but you think they’re sending an SMS or something. You don’t necessarily think that they’re busy surfing dating sites or adult content sites or news.
These are some stats from Comscore that did a report about the five countries in Europe that were using social networks for mobile reasonably predominantly in Europe. The column on the left shows the percentage of users who exclusively use mobile internet for social networking, so they don’t consume news, they don’t necessarily chat. Those percentages are fairly high. Almost half of the Spanish mobile users only use their phones for social networking. The year on year growth also is quite substantial and that percentage is the percentage of the global total. Let’s say that you’re concerned about your career because you had it in your mind that you would work for a newspaper or magazine. Then that [online] thing happened, and it’s already kind of popped. I mean if you haven’t figured it out now, it’s almost too late. And now there’s a whole other thing going on that most people aren’t even aware of, that’s going to change everything. It’s a difficult situation to be in, and it’s hard to counsel people on how to pick a career path.
This company called itsmine they’re a social network and they used a sample of people, 15 000 people in the US Spain and Italy. They found that within their user base 42% of their users use the Internet for the first time on their phones, and that they were doing social networking on their phones and didn’t do it on a PC. So whoever is clinging to the notion that the Internet, the way we do it today on the desktop is essentially misunderstanding the platform because to a large extent, the mobile phone is going to be that thing that brings everybody online. It’s not going to be a desktop PC or a laptop or some fancy ultra-cheap foldable piece of paper that’s got digital ink in it. It’s going to be the device that you currently have in your pocket.
Here’s a comparison [from Rick Joubert -MW]. These are the number of mobile Internet users in Europe as compared to South Africa as of December. By now we are already in the 10.1 million Internet users or people using Internet on their phone, in South Africa If you take the least conservative estimate of how many people are using the Internet in South Africa, that’s about 5.5 million people. That includes ADSL, dialup, corporate LAN’s, so essentially desktop Interent. And there’s a number within that includes HSDPA and 3G connections Essentially out of the total Internet population if you assume that there’s no overlap, that means that 66% of the people who are on the Internet in South Africa are using it on their mobile phones. If we take that statistic it’s maybe 20,25% of the country’s population who are online. Still, those figures are good and they are very encouraging.
I found out recently that Vodacom, now that they’ve moved into the Vodafone group, Vodacom’s mobile advertising sales team are the highest revenue earners across the entire network of 90 countries that Vodafone operates in including the UK, Germany, Spain. So South Africa is an incredibly ripe ground for the space that we’re in at the moment We slipped slightly in December, Admob ranked South Africa at number 7 and that 123 million was the number of Admob ads that were served to users within South Africa. That’s just a ton of advertising.
Now let’s talk about that advertising. Firstly if you advertise on the web (and the reason you should know this is because if you’re going to create what digital people call content, the key thing is how well your sales people sell advertising, no-one is going to pay for a subscription-based service). So, advertising for any content creator starts to become very relevant the moment you enter, I wouldn’t call it “The real world”, but it’s the world where all the other factors come into play. The average clickthrough rate for a web banner is about 0.1 percent. Now what that means is that 0.1% of the time that your ad is shown it will get clicked on. So, work it out. That’s incredibly low and inefficient. Most of the online media companies still charge on a cost per thousand which means that they charge for every thousand ads that get displayed, as opposed to a cost per click. If you take that to mobile, as opposed to 0.1% you’re looking at 2-5% average clickthrough rate on mobile advertising. Lets say that you’re an advertiser trying to decide where to put your money, you’re going to put it where people actually click.
That does affect things, because now all of a sudden you’re faced with a situation where everyone on the web has said, “Let’s give away our content for free because everyone else is doing it and lets not really innovate in terms of how we advertise or display advertising”. So we find ourselves in a situation where, in North America and Europe, newspaper circulation has declined to such an extent that journalists are losing their jobs, newspapers are closing down. No one has actually spent enough time and figured out how to deliver high-quality advertising on the Web. In parallel, the users are actually on mobile in certain areas, and those people are clicking on ads. Not necessarily because the ad formats are better, but because, when you’re on the Web you have more competition for your attention. You’ll have a couple of tabs open in Firefox , you’ll have your email, your Skype, your Facebook, your Twitter, a few other things that are vying for your attention.
In the mobile space I guess because of the simplicity of the device, you actually can’t concentrate on more than one thing at a time because you can’t see more than one thing at a time. Your attention that you pay to that content and those advertisements is actually much higher. When I joined the Mail & Guardian I guess the conventional wisdom was that for mobile you have to shorten your story. So we took a long time to launch a mobile site because shortening a story was actually a lot of work, because which part do you cut out? It’s not like The Argus where you can cut from the bottom and it still makes sense.
What we’ve discovered though, is that people read more on their phones and for longer than they do on the desktop web browser. The reason is because whatever has driven them to be reading the news on their phone means that they are either so bored, or so lonely, that they actually have a lot more attention to pay to this tiny little device. Everyone says, “Well, the screen is really small”. Not if you hold it over here! If you hold it like this. If you hold it over here, it’s a 42” screen. Go sit in your lounge and compare that to holding your phone 30cm away from your face. So people are sitting there in queues, at doctors, whatever, reading this stuff. And it’s a much deeper, personal experience that they’re going through and they read more, they don’t mind scrolling.
This is a list of the top four social networks for mobile, according to Opera. Now I’m sure most of you know about Facebook. Who doesn’t know about Facebook? But what about Peperonity? Has anyone ever seen or heard of Peperonity or [indistinct] or Hi5 it’s a different scene that’s going on in mobile. It’s a different group of users and they’re doing different things.
I must say, what MXIt has done for this country, is it has prepared about 5 or 6 million young people for the process, very painful as it is, for the process of downloading and installing an application on their phone. The Americans wouldn’t do it. They needed the iPhone to come around before they would do actually bother to have Internet on their phone, because it was just too complicated. But thanks to MXit (and I think it has around 12 million people now) there is an entire generation of South Africans who understand how to interact with the operating system on their phones.
So what makes it so interesting? I guess because it’s always on. It’s an extension of your body. It’s private, if you think about it, the possibility of someone actually seeing over your shoulder what you’re doing on your phone is not as high as if you’re using a desktop computer, and because it’s mobile you can move it away from people if they’re trying to see what’s going on. So it’s an environment that’s very much your own. And its very connected to your self image, sort of like a fashion accessory in some situations it’s an indication of your status. A very personal connection with this device. And you use it to speak to the people that are the most important to you. So it already is a critical part of your actual real world social network. And it contains your addressbook. The people who are on your addressbook in your phone are the people who are generally the most important to you in your life. Some people are so important to you that they are not even in your addressbook because you know their numbers. (But gone are the days when people could remember more than three or four phone numbers.)
So what have I been doing since I got to Vodacom? It’s a different kind of culture there. Like, in that culture, you don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, because … In fact, the entire notion of a product is very different, a product can be that “Next week we’re going to charge people less”. That’s the product. You don’t dare leak that because the competition, whoever they are, will do the same thing a bit quicker. [indistinct] essentially leaking communication. Whereas all the web publishers say, why don’t we just take all our statistics and amalgamate them in the Online Publishers’ Association so that everyone can see how much traffic we’re getting, and where it’s coming from. So it’s very different. In this social media portfolio of mine, I’ve said to them what I’m doing. I am not doing the whole bureaucratic vibe. I’m not filling in forms, I don’t want an official project manager. There’s a document if you want to launch a product at Vodacom that requires 27 signatures. On the one hand it’s good, because it stops people from launching frivolous products. On the other hand, if you really do know what you’re doing, it just gets in the way. So I’ve got a team of people that work with me, I’ve got a group of guys in Bangladesh and some guys in Cape Town. Everything we do is done via interfaces that are publically accessible through the WASPA services. Now the WASPAs are the people who essentially do bulk SMSes that essentially integrate with the networks. Vodacom will not be the ones who send your bulk SMSes There’s an entire other layer of companies and application developers. The reason for that is that the network’s core business is not to do that kind of thing, it’s just to provide the service. And the other thing is that everybody else needs to make money too. It gets very dangerous if there are just three or four companies that control all that sort of stuff.
Everything I do, I do as if I’m not doing it in Vodacom. The benefits are that I get to skip the entire process of project development, except for getting budget. But beyond that I don’t need to talk to the engineering people. There are a lot of different groups within Vodacom who can get in the way of a fast-moving project. So, when I got there, there was this thing called The Grid, which had been live for 6 months. A bit of a shocker really. A website, data application, [indistinct] the idea was really good though. If the network can know where its users are and by triangulating their location in relation to the cellphone masts, and if everyone is chatting and sharing content, then why not take a really powerful map and build a really cool social network where you can put content on places and share those places with your friends. So it’s a project that combines all the normal things in a social network for mobile, you’ve got the social graph aspect, you’ve got content creation, and generally with mobile you’ve got the potential to charge someone 10 cents. On a credit card, you can’t do that. And it adds location to that And that forms the whole of the service.
Philosophically what you’re doing there is you’re digitally tagging physical places, and it took me about three months to stop thinking that was a strange concept. The sense of physical emotion within the content environment. By that I’m referring to the real world the digital layer on top of it And it works on a lot of platforms, you can do it by SMS or MMS. Whatever you really want to do with it. The idea is that you can be some guy with a Nokia 1100 on a prepaid sort of situation, and you can still in interact with this service. So to kind of take down the barriers to entry in terms of the cost of the technology.
Once you realise that you’ve got a person’s location you can start to target advertising to either within a polygon area, like say a weird space like a suburb, or within a particular radius. I’ll give you a practical example. The BMW dealerships constantly have this argument because their dealership areas do not correspond to the areas that are serviced by the local newspapers. So you have the situation where one dealership is advertising in another dealership’s area. So it’s a practical real-world problem.
You can start to deliver advertising to within 500 metres of where a person actually is. You can also say, “Look dude, you’re next to a Vida e Caffé do you want a free donut you can get one by buying a coffee right now. Do you want to do that?”. So it becomes a very effective system for delivering highly targeted ads. And obviously the more targeted, the more effective, because there’s a direct correlation to relevance. And so you can charge more money and build a system that’s a little bit more sustainable. So we marketed this thing by putting skate spots on the map, we sent a group of people about 40 people to the coolest [indistinct].
Now that to me is obviously very different to being in the Mail and Guardian space. We’re aimed at the youth, but not under sixteen. The Mail and Guardian is a bit fuddy duddy, they get quite serious about the way you interact with news. This space to me is much more exciting on some levels, although it’s less important in the grander scheme of things. That’s the journey I’ve taken, and I’m loving it. Obviously when you get out there and start working you’re going to follow a different sort of path I think you’re really going to enjoy it. Keep in mind that maybe this is where it will go, in terms of the numbers. That’s the journey I’ve taken, and I’m loving it. Obviously when you get out there and start working you’re going to follow a different sort of path.
Mobile media in South Africa 