The new challenges around information consumption 

The traffic of information websites is constantly increasing, especially via the smartphone: the need for a robust and responsive technology.

The Covid crisis has accelerated a double phenomenon, already well underway before 2020.

The first is the increase in traffic to news sites, with a particular appetite for the major press titles. For example, the digital media of 20 Minutes are in the lead (with a remarkable redundancy: 50% of users consult the site at least three days a week). 

In second place, the regional and local press (15%) ahead of Le Monde (14%)* which completes the podium. (source: REUTERS INSTITUTE - Digital News Report 2021).  At miLibris, we have observed this global trend with an increase in digital publication consultations of 13% in one year, between 2021 and 2020, and this becomes more pronounced when we focus more specifically on the daily press titles (national and regional), which have recorded growth levels of up to 30% in consumption of their titles in digital version.  

The second phenomenon observed, both at the market level and at the level of miLibris, is the confirmation of the smartphone as the preferred consultation medium for the French. In the space of a few years, the telephone has become the favourite medium for accessing information. In 2021, 65% of French people will use their phone for information, a figure that is 6 points higher than in 2020. 

We also share this observation when we look at the usage data among our customer base: the ratio of the use of our iOS and Android applications has increased by 3 points and the share of the mobile web (the fact of consulting a website from one's phone) has climbed by 10 points in just one year! Consumption on smartphones now represents more than 70% of all consultations. 

miLibris accompanies this phenomenon by offering fully responsive solutions on mobile. All the functionalities of our products are also, and increasingly, designed for these new uses. In fact, we have four developers on staff who are exclusively in charge of the mobile experience (two for iOs and two for Android systems) and, in particular, of the creation and maintenance of the more than 200 applications deployed for all of our customers.

Customer knowledge, a key issue in developing your reader base: having the appropriate tools to successfully anticipate and analyse the expectations of your audience.

For a content publisher, knowing your reader is an essential step in the success of your digital strategy.

Before the 2000s, we were in an era when content sold itself and customers went to the newsstand to read their favourite newspaper. Today, the publisher's job has changed: it is now up to the publisher to go out and "find" each reader by sending him or her personalised content, at the right time of day and in an adapted format. 

The challenges of customer knowledge, or the collection and sorting of the right information (from big data to smart data) are now at the centre of any content producer's concerns. Since our creation (in 2009), we have been anticipating these challenges from the start: today, miLibris supports all its customers in this area of data by providing them with dedicated access to an analytical back office, "the console". Thanks to this back office, our customers can, on a daily basis, consult consultation statistics in real time, such as, among others, the number of downloads per edition, the number of downloads per edition per period (custom on the choice of periods), the volume of transactions, the study of behaviours and uses, the distribution of the number of devices used, the follow-up of customers... 

The console also allows three other major levers. The first is the export of raw data from the platform. The second is the tracking of events available in the reader by direct integration of the statistical SDKs of the solutions chosen by our customers (Xiti, Google analytics, Batch etc.). And finally, the last lever is the delivery of data from the miLibris back-end to the publisher back-end.  For these three levers, miLibris' aim is to offer the greatest possible modularity and completeness of its solutions within the publisher's global digital ecosystem by enabling it to aggregate all the data from its different environments directly into its own analytical solutions. 

These solutions are designed to help our customers to better manage their digital strategy.

The digital reading experience, the spearhead of a successful digital strategy: the importance of focusing on both form and content.

In an ever-changing world, the digital experience should no longer be a barrier to reading, but a motivation. Our customers at miLibris have understood this.  Today, there are many uses and the experience offered by publishers is essential to engage and retain an audience. Arousing interest, capturing attention, making the reading experience intuitive, immersive and addictive are all challenges for content publishers.

The objective is to invent and evolve with new modes of consumption, offered by innovative formats that are different from the simple reading of a text. This is all the more of a priority among young people, according to the results of the survey on reading among 7-25 year olds commissioned by the National Book Centre (CNL) from the Ipsos polling institute.

It is clear that the new generation is now turning to new practices in terms of digital reading. 40% of the young people questioned have already read a digital book, 60% have already listened to an audio book or a podcast and 30% of them consider that the Internet (and in particular social platforms such as Youtube, Instagram or Tiktok) are a source of information for finding out about books.

More generally, 82.3% of French people will be listening to audio content every day in 2022* (Source: Mediamétrie Global Audio study)

Podcasts are also on the rise, with more than 2.6 million additional French people having been introduced to this new information format in the space of a year.

At miLibris, we quickly grasped this reality: innovate to continue inventing the consumption modes of tomorrow. This is also why multimedia enrichment (and in particular audio reading) is now a major feature of our e-readers. We presented our audio solutions to some forty publishers who are members of the National Federation of the Specialised Press (FNPS) on 15 April: from text to speech to dynamic mode (with the ingestion of podcast content, video, interviews, etc.) and article narration.

You will find below some elements of our proposal around audio 

29 September 2022

NEWS