Mobile War
Google, Apple, and Facebook are running to win the global news race. In contrast, controversy over news editing biases is causing domestic Internet business operators such as Naver and Daum a crisis that may scale down the sizes of their news services. So, they can hardly pay attention to the mobile news service race abroad.
According to major foreign news services and related industries on Oct. 26, Google launched a new technology that can upload articles and videos to websites of leading media companies and mobile devices such as smartphones almost at the same time. It is called Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP), and it enables content producers to make exquisite mobile web pages simply.
At the moment, Google has formed ties with 48 media companies around the world such as the Financial Times. An AMP-based story can hit smartphones within five to six seconds after the reporter sends the story.
Facebook, the world’s largest SNS company, introduced the Instant Articles Service through which media companies directly upload news to Facebook. So articles and news videos can appear on Facebook within ten seconds.
News stories are directly uploaded to a Facebook News Feed without attracting readers to links to media companies such as NBC News and National Geographic. At that time, Facebook bragged about both the qualities of content and article loading speeds. In fact, last year, videos uploaded to Facebook jumped 175 percent year on year. Videos to News Feed increased 3.6-fold.
“Clicking on external news links, news will appear after more than ten seconds,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook once pointed out. “People do not wait that long.”
Apple is planning to unwrap a new news application within this year, too. Apple’s new news service arranges and exposes articles from more than 50 leading media firms, including the New York Times, in the order that users want.
“In overseas countries, news consumption via SNS (43 percent) outweighs news consumption via portal searches,” said a representative in the Internet business sector. “IT giants are matching media companies and readers through various methods such as algorithms and editor algorithms.”