By Adam Wakefield

“To be honest three or four years ago, I did not take mobile Internet seriously. I knew how big mobile was, we created great applications, we’d done all of this great stuff but in my heart I didn’t truly understand what a completely and utterly transformative process having a device that was always with you that could connect to the Internet was,” Cohen explains.

Still CEO of 24.com at the time, Cohen ultimately realised how important mobile was, and the necessity of building mobile products that were best-in-class, available across different devices and operating systems, and that updated both functionality and content all the time.

What consumers wanted was two streams of engagement. The first reflected their desire to dip in and out of content streams during the day. 

“If you think about it in your own day, I would guarantee you at some point you have some dead time where you waiting for a friend, you’re in a queue, you are wherever, and you spark up your browser and you read one or two things quickly,” Cohen says. “You hit social media, you find something that interests you, and bounce onto that. That’s a moment’s interaction.”

The critical take-away for Cohan was the flouting of the notion that consumers cascade through a media property from top to bottom. Instead, a platform where users could interact in bite-sized engagements across the day, which refreshed throughout the day, was what was required.

“Our promise was that people would always find something new when they come to engage with us,” Cohen says.

The second stream was where users carefully decided on which content they would invest in through a brand they trusted and engaged with over an extended period of time with a depth of information.

“If you look it, it is kind of an 80-20 split. 80% of your day, you’ll snack on whatever is available. Why? Because you know it’s that kind of guilty treat. It would be a picture of cats, or a story from a news site, maybe something from else, but you’ll nibble, nibble, nibble,” Cohen explains.

“Then somewhere along the day, you’d say, ‘I have 20 minutes or longer. There’s this one article that I wanted to read on The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or on Financial Mail and you will choose to engage with that piece of content. That will be your lean forward experience and you’ll probably end up paying for it.”

Paying for online content is still in its infancy in South Africa. The question was, according to Cohen, whether there was enough scale for a quality, qualified media play to work on a paid-content model.

“It’s not just about having the capital investment to create the content. It’s around having the business model to support the ongoing generation of that content. Are there enough people in this territory who care enough about qualified quality content that they would be willing to pay for it and at a price that makes commercial sense?” he says.

“I’m not so sure. We’re a small market with a high Gini coefficient spread across a whole range of different areas of interest, language groups, race groups, and literacy levels.”

Cohen felt there was probably going to be room for a paid offering of some kind, but how it actually played out in the marketplace, only time would tell. Ultimately, publishers needed to attract sufficient readers to build a viable business.

“How viable? Do you have to be the size of the New York Times to make a paid-media offering work like the Financial Times and what happens if you aren’t? You have to raise your prices to the point that it makes sense for you to do it,” he says.

“What is the right price point for consumers? You are never going to make a business of selling digital subscriptions at R50 a month if your cost base is half a million rand a month. Would you pay R100, R200, R300, R500 a month? Those are the sort of questions the industry has got to start asking more aggressively and not be shy to ask them either.” 

For more information, you can connect with Cohen on Twitter or on LinkedIn.