August 24, 2015 at 13:20UX-Wednesday No.24 Microconference: Long Reeds and Advanced Publishing Tools
On April 1, the office of Mail.Ru Group hosted the twenty-fourth UX-Wednesday microconference devoted to long-reads and modern publishing tools. Invited guests, as well as specialists from different departments of the company made a series of presentations about their work experience and participated in its discussion. This time we had Nikita Obukhov (Tilda), Maxim Pavlov (Notamedia), Igor Kochmala (KP), as well as Kirill Danchenko (Readymag) on Skype. The discussion was moderated by Tanya Smirnova (DepositPhotos).
Like last time, we started with a teleconference. Kirill Danchenko , co-founder and CEO of one of the first Readymag publishing platforms , spoke about the history of its creation, current opportunities and development plans. He showed early versions of the interface and described how the second co-founder Anton Gerasimenko saw for himself a future in which the designer himself can create promotional sites, presentations and journalism on the web without the help of developers. This was at the dawn of the current boom of such services, so Readymag can be considered co-authors of the trend.
After the break, a panel discussion began with the participation of Nikita Obukhov, Maxim Pavlov and Igor Kochmal. We prepared a list of sensible topics for discussion from experts in advance and alternated them with questions from the audience. About 130 people came, many of whom represented the leading domestic media - Sanoma, Channel One, RBC, NTV, Esquire, Russia Today, TASS and others, so it was interesting to communicate both during the panel and during the breaks.
The experts represented three key parties working to create long reads - the media ( KP ), the platform ( Tilda ) and the web studio ( Notamedia) This allowed us to look at the problem from all angles. After a brief talk about themselves and the projects that the discussion participants worked on, a discussion began about trends, successful techniques and patterns, market features, the nuances of working with the editorial staff and advertisers. Here are some of the topics:
The event is open - we invite not only speakers, but also listeners from other companies. If you want to speak with us, write to me at y.vetrov@corp.mail.ru and we will choose an interesting topic of the story and a convenient date for it. You can find out the schedule and program of future events, as well as sign up for them on the micro-conference page on Facebook . Photos
are available from UX-Environment No. 24 , as well as a feed of announcements on Twitter . Read also reports on previous events .
Like last time, we started with a teleconference. Kirill Danchenko , co-founder and CEO of one of the first Readymag publishing platforms , spoke about the history of its creation, current opportunities and development plans. He showed early versions of the interface and described how the second co-founder Anton Gerasimenko saw for himself a future in which the designer himself can create promotional sites, presentations and journalism on the web without the help of developers. This was at the dawn of the current boom of such services, so Readymag can be considered co-authors of the trend.
After the break, a panel discussion began with the participation of Nikita Obukhov, Maxim Pavlov and Igor Kochmal. We prepared a list of sensible topics for discussion from experts in advance and alternated them with questions from the audience. About 130 people came, many of whom represented the leading domestic media - Sanoma, Channel One, RBC, NTV, Esquire, Russia Today, TASS and others, so it was interesting to communicate both during the panel and during the breaks.
The experts represented three key parties working to create long reads - the media ( KP ), the platform ( Tilda ) and the web studio ( Notamedia) This allowed us to look at the problem from all angles. After a brief talk about themselves and the projects that the discussion participants worked on, a discussion began about trends, successful techniques and patterns, market features, the nuances of working with the editorial staff and advertisers. Here are some of the topics:
- Komsomolskaya Pravda is one of the pioneers of the format in Runet. Due to the fact that the content for large articles is always ready in print and the need to synchronize online publication with it, they collect long reads within a week. Their first experience, America boarded up Skyscrapers , also fit into that framework. At the time of the UX-environment, they were preparing to switch to Tilda and new materials are being collected on this platform.
- A year ago, Nikita Obukhov was preparing to launch Tilda and wanted to make life easier for designers and publishers. In fact, he had to actively engage in grocery work in addition to improving the supply of materials and expanding the collection of modules. It turned out that the need is not so great - many do not think about the effective content, do not know how to do it and why. So Nikita also has to form a market, this activity has been especially noticeable for the last six months.
- It was not possible to collect a clear opinion on one of the main business issues - what kind of exhaust is given by long reads? The participants in the discussion largely agreed that this is just another format for submitting publications in addition to the existing arsenal, which also provides an image exhaust. We at Mail.Ru Group have so far little experience in launching long reads, but one of the recent examples with the TV series Fizruk gave a powerful exhaust - 33% finished this long page to the end, 90% of page visitors watched the series. For us, this has become an example of how the effectiveness of such publications can be considered.
- Most agreed that advertising in such publications does not make sense - rather, the long read itself should be a commercial special project if it is planned to make money on it.
- The mobile web continues to actively increase its share, and the publication’s transitions are received largely from social networks, which are also consumed more and more from smartphones. Support for these devices is easy to organize if the long read is done on your own or third-party platform, but for manually created projects it is quite a long time and expensive.
- One of the promising directions for the development of the format is the addition of interactivity and game mechanics, when the reader actively interacts with the long read. B-Oh-S is trying to do something like that .
The event is open - we invite not only speakers, but also listeners from other companies. If you want to speak with us, write to me at y.vetrov@corp.mail.ru and we will choose an interesting topic of the story and a convenient date for it. You can find out the schedule and program of future events, as well as sign up for them on the micro-conference page on Facebook . Photos
are available from UX-Environment No. 24 , as well as a feed of announcements on Twitter . Read also reports on previous events .