Atomisation

The two strongest trends in Internet content are atomisation/unbundling on one hand and sealed silos within smartphone and tablets apps on the other. This is contradictory. 

As we all know, many sites see the majority of their traffic going to individual pages rather than the home page, Tumblr and Pinterest disaggregate, reaggregate and remix individual pieces to content far away from where they started, and of course social sharing on Facebook or Twitter remixes and redistributes everything. Twitter cards and the trend for social messaging services to embed content within messages take this another step. In a sense, there is no home page for any site. 

Every piece of content becomes a packet that can be routed anywhere across any service layer - but the service layer is Twitter, Kik, Line or AirDrop, not TCP/IP or HTTP. 

But at the same time, after the end of the HTML5 head fake (as Bill Gurley put it), it seems clear that apps will also be a major component of content consumption. To hope that this will not be the case is to wish to turn the clock back to 2007, and of course to ignore a pretty clear demonstration of what customers want. The last 6 years were not a temporary aberration. 

So apps are a new, permanent part of the content landscape, just like social or search before, and apps are silos. Yes, you can deep link, up to a point (including with things like AirDrop), and share back to the unsiloed web version of many content properties from within an app, but the app experience itself is essentially exclusive. You go in, you engage, and then, often after much longer than you'd spend on a website, you leave and do something else. This is quite different from the promiscuous flitting from site to site and tab to tab that's the general model for the web. And, of course, it's the complete opposite of the atomisation that's happening in parallel. 

This is a real challenge for content owners. How do you think about editorial on the premise that it will both be shared everywhere and read in the course of a half hour session with your brand's app? Do you have to pick one model or the other? If you're in the long-form business already (the New Yorker, say) this is an easy conversation, but if you run a typical magazine with a mix of content of all different types and lengths, what does your 'digital' proposition look like? How many different types of engagement do you need to think about? What's your social messaging app sharing strategy? And, of course, how do you address this across 30 titles in three cities, most of which are only run by half-a-dozen to a dozen people who're only just keeping up with updating a Facebook page?