When the 24.com team set out to create a bespoke platform for News24 to track the happenings around SA's elections in May, they knew they had to think mobile first.
They set out to develop something that would rival the New York Times application that was created as part of the 2012 US elections. "For us, the New York Times elections experience was just phenomenal. That was our benchmark," said 24.com CEO Geoff Cohen during his presentation at AfricaCom in Cape Town yesterday. "We wanted to make live election results available to all South Africans in real-time, regardless of what device they were using."
One of the big promises was that everything would be live, which Cohen believes was the big draw card. "On Election Day, we broke all sorts of audience records, which was interesting for us because the majority of the News24 audience is made up of people accessing the site from their PCs at work. Given that Election Day was a public holiday, the audience records we set were based on the behaviour of people who engaged with our product with their mobile devices specifically."
While Cohen acknowledged their numbers are nothing when compared with the level of activity enjoyed by the likes of Facebook or Snapchat, he did point out the figures on the day were not too bad for a home-grown technology team at the tip of Africa. And the amount of traffic on results day was even better, he continued.
"What this apparent success taught us was that the scale of the addressable audience out there is massive. This audience is waiting to engage with products and content and we aren't serving them," he said. "We certainly are not serving them on the devices they are using, in the way they would like to consume content and at a time that is convenient to them."
This is a problem for so many content providers, Cohen stated, adding the experience around the elections called for News24 to rethink much of what it was doing. This saw the team reimagining what a modern digital media company would look like in sub-Saharan Africa. Part of this involved dedicating all of their focus on mobile - spanning tech, products and commercial offerings.
In addition to the importance of always thinking mobile, Cohen highlighted that users in African markets want content that has the lowest possible data footprints. "Yes, there is value in sexy, responsive design. But if this design slows down content consumption, this creativity is more of a hindrance than a help."
Echoing much of the sentiment discussed throughout the conference, he stressed the importance of personalisation and providing users with content that is locally relevant.
According to Cohen, all of the key metrics improved following these changes. Page views are up by 55%, 60% of visitors are accessing the site on mobile devices, and depth of engagement has improved 400%.
But he admitted there is still so much to learn. "When one looks at the size and depth of opportunity across the continent, you can't help but be humbled by the extent of the growth rates we have already achieved."
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