PLATFORMS
|
THE CHANNEL
THE CHANNEL
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ISSUE 2 2014
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55
sources – global, regional and local.
These stories will be available 24/7
from multiple perspectives and in
many languages.
Users can tag brands they
appreciate – not only making their
experience more relevant, but also
benefiting the brand as they’re able
to communicate directly with their
consumer’s brains and hearts, not
just their eyeballs.
The same applies to charities and
causes as users will be able to
redistribute the value they create on
projects that are relevant to them.
This allows the NGOs to create
awareness more efficiently.
Through this tagging of news,
brands and NGOs, users can create
relevant connections and make a
difference. Together the crowd will
help index and curate content,
creating an experience that is
human, not algorithmic. Our
tagline “Newstag – you’re it” has a
certain playfulness, but also implies
responsibility. There’s an impetus
to share the news that matters.
How will the relationships between
the different stakeholders work?
We have developed a new
complementary business model
that re-balances the relationship
between stakeholders. Content
producers, brands, users and NGOs
are all inter-linked and, in the
modern world, it’s important for
this to be recognised.
Together the stakeholders will
create value. Individually they can
create new connections to re-
allocate this value within the
system. Users will get relevant
news and brand experiences and
make a difference, NGOs will be
able to create awareness more
efficiently, and brands can
communicate directly with their
consumers. Brands can sponsor
NGOs which in turn could inspire
users to tag the brand. As a result
news from around the world, such
as a natural disaster, could
immediately spark crowd-funding,
giving users the chance to make a
real difference there and then.
Content owners and other
stakeholders will get relevant
feedback from the data generated.
What about the costs?
For news to be sustainable, there
has to be funding for content. This
has traditionally come from brand
placement so we’ve tried to resolve
some of the issues faced by
advertisers in order to create a
platform that benefits everyone.
Just as content providers are
struggling to reach their target
audience, so are brands.
Newstag empowers the user to
select the brands or campaigns that
interest them as individuals,
reversing the traditional
advertising model. When users
share content, they’re distributing
to their own social network, with
interests that closely match their
own, creating a kind of advertising
that’s relevant and intimate.
And as a result, we are able to
offer our users the world’s largest
professionally-produced video
network for free, and pay the
content providers fairly too.
What challenges did you face?
Architecturally, it’s very
complicated to develop technology
that uses video in the way we do
and to develop our intelligent
tagging system. As a result, we’ve
spent over 25,000 hours developing
Newstag – it’s been an enormous
project. It’s also a complex business
model and we’ve had to work
together with many diverse parties.
That’s been a long process, but a
rewarding one.
Clearly mobile use is a priority?
There’s two ways to develop a
service like this – you can start on
the desktop, and then translate
your product into an app for the
phone. Or you can do what we’ve
done, which is to start with the
phone and then scale the service to
work across all devices. But when
you look at the growth of
smartphones, along with levels of
consumption and traffic, it makes
sense for all technology to be
designed with mobile use as a
priority today, especially if you
want to reach a global audience.
Technology has to evolve with
consumption behaviour.
Newstag content will be
available to users wherever they
are, on any device – including
smartphones, tablets and desktops
– and in the environments where
they consume content, including
social networks, blogs and apps.
Newstag will be where the users are.
How does the product design
reflect the service’s features?
We thought a lot about design,
trying to reflect the many layers of
Newstag and the time we live in. So
the logo, for example – a twelve
sided figure – echoes the multi-
faceted nature of news in the 21st
century and our relationship with it
in today’s complex world. One of
the interesting design features is
our user avatar – it’s a profile
picture blended with the user’s
interests by using superimposed
images and video, and it’s
constantly changing. It represents
the overlapping and combining of
different perspectives that news
and individuals use.
What’s your background?
I’ve worked in the media and
digital industries for more than two
decades. Recently I was Director of
Digital Partnerships and
Distribution in EMEA and Asia at
Associated Press. Before this, I
founded Kamera – one of the
world’s leading mobile and online
distributors. I also founded PAN
Interactive, one of Europe’s leading
game publishers and distributors.
I think one of the things that
makes Newstag stand out is the
collaboration with my partner
Camilla Dahlin-Andersson, whose
experience comes from outside the
media industry. She’s currently an
academic with a special interest in
social enterprise and she’s
previously been a member of
parliament and also served on
several boards for large institutions.
This background, combined with
her skills, has helped to create a
new, collaborative approach to
what can feel like intractable media
challenges. She’s helped to navigate
the politics of NGOs and research
organisations, both large and small.
Thank you, Henrik Eklund.
A natural
disaster
could
instantly
spark
crowd-
funding
“
”
Newstag’s
Editor’s Choice
Camilla
Dahlin-Andersson
