Digital Content Creation: Impact, Architecture, and Monetization

Unit 1: The Impact of the Internet on Content Production

Jump to Digital

Four decades may seem like a long time, but they represent a complete change in our world.

First ‘80s: first personal computers at home.

During ‘90s: first home connections to the Internet.

During ‘00s: mobile phone spreading.

During ‘10s: smartphone spreading.

The environment of content creation and consumption has changed, as have the habits of creators and consumers.

• From magazines and newspapers to digital media.
• From legacy radio to podcasts.
• From traditional TV to VOD (Netflix, Hulu, HBO...).
• From physical formats to digital for entertainment (subscription-based music, ebooks, online games...).

The digital environment is not just about information; it is also an entertainment ecosystem. After COVID…

• Up to 63.1% listen to online music or podcasts.
• Up to 51.9% access multimedia content.
• Growth: +25% digital TV subscribers and +12% billing in the videogame industry.

The whole environment has changed because consumers (readers, listeners, watchers) have also changed:

• We use new sources (influencers, social networks, search engines, voice assistants, AIs...).
• We are interested in new topics.
• Consumption patterns are new: anywhere, anytime.

This new environment has huge implications for the content itself, as well as for advertising, daily production routines, and strategies to reach the audience. And changes still evolve, and happen faster and faster, making it even more difficult to predict the future.

Chances and Challenges

These profound changes are based on one basic foundation: technology as an empowering tool.

The popularization of computers (first) and the Internet (later) meant that tools for creating and editing content (text, image, and video) and platforms for disseminating it were made available to everyone. Universalization of content creation: anyone can create their own media platforms to communicate in an accessible way: no licensing, printing, distribution, storage, or surpluses to deal with. No universalization is truly universal: significant technology gaps remain, and it became even more obvious during the COVID pandemic and lockdowns.

Global access to audience: geographical & time limitations disappear as everything becomes immediate. Immediacy and globalization have also meant major threats: problems such as the decontextualization of information or the acceleration of delocalization are emerging in an increasingly connected but also diluted society.

More voices and accessible information around. Having more voices does not necessarily imply greater plurality if these voices repeat the same messages, reinforcing the dominant views: 'infoxication' is emerging as a form of disinformation in a decontextualised consumption.

Less dependence following increased fragmentation. The universalisation of content production also implies the loss of the standards and quality controls that classical journalism pursued: we are no longer only exposed to information, but also to more interested lies.

But, as every advantage is accompanied by doubts, universalization also comes with it new challenges attached. Privacy is now a major concern: the more we consume and share, the more we are exposed to become a trade item. In fact, the user is also a product, since our privacy creates business models: who we are, what we do, where we are, what kind of content we are interested in...

Profile of Digital Consumers

Consumers are no longer just passive, and that means that communication is no longer one-way: we react to the inputs we receive and actively demand content that fits our interests. Two big trends shape our consumption: we look for instant gratification as we want things now.

Prosumer: The consumer not just consumes, but also has the capacity to produce content and to disseminate it: he/she creates his/her own community of followers, becoming a medium himself/herself. Multidispositive: Consumption is not limited to a physical medium, but to formats that are often combined (multimedia) and consumed on different devices depending on the circumstances.

Ubiquity: Content consumption is not tied to a specific place once the physical constraints (e.g. wires) are over: it is consumed at any time, place, or circumstance.

Mobility: Following the two previous characteristics, consumption takes place on the go, for which the mobile is the key device: its characteristics condition the content.

Social: The consumption and production of content takes place in a context of community: feedback and reactions are constant and condition the communication process from its very conception.

Customised: This community consumption takes place individually: the user has more possibilities than ever to shape his/her informative diet (selection) and to consume it individually.

Intensive: The connection is continuous, and also the demand for attention (notifications), which requires constant updating: there are no more closures or 'prime times', or at least not as there used to be.

Unit 2: Information Architecture

Content Management

Information architecture is about organising and structuring all the content (visual and textual) and its internal connections within a digital environment (app or web) to make it usable.

The huge amount of information around, constantly updated, from multiple sources and through multiple channels, needs a certain order, structure, and hierarchy in order to be processed. Otherwise:

• Poorly structured content.
• Difficulties to navigate.
• Difficulties to find the content.
• Difficulties to use the content.
• Poor user experience.
• Leaving not to turn.

Goals:

Accessibility: User-friendly access to all content and services offered.

Navigability: Users understand and assimilate the structure in order to be able to navigate through its different parts.

Execution: The user is able to accomplish the expected actions or tasks in the expected manner.

The universalisation of content creation is provided by a technical environment that allows it through CMS (Content Management System). But creating content is not enough: it is also necessary to think on how to make it 'findable' once created and, ultimately, 'usable'.

The process of content management can be summed up in four steps:

Tagging: Tagging content consists of giving it a univocal name to identify it, which is the basis on which search and information-retrieval systems work. It is what search engines use to connect the keywords typed by a user with the tags indexed your project to define the content, so its importance is critical to make visible or invisible your product. Tags also make visual content accessible to people with visual disabilities, because voice synthesisers can locate and read them.

Sorting: Once the content has been named, the next step is to create an outline of the content by grouping it according to common characteristics. This grouping process is not unique: it will depend on the nature of the project and its characteristics, and may be done following general categories (“International”, “Economy”), topics (COVID 29, “US Elections 2020”) or specific units of meaning (such as places- “California”- or formats “Videos”).

Structuring: Next step is to create a content tree, which consists of applying an organisational hierarchy to the scheme, establishing navigation levels and logical dependencies between parts. The first level contains the most recurrent or most interesting actions or content units, designed to facilitate user's action (or direct it). It is a graphic representation of the navigation structure that includes the information that will be offered, its internal relations and its distribution in different blocks.

Designing: The final part of content management is its design, not understood from the aesthetic point of view but from the organisational point of view. It consists of creating the in which the content layout of each screen is 'page', with its elements, its internal links and its usage spaces to allow interaction. It is done through mockups and wireframes.

Usability and UX.: If creating content is about making it findable and usable, usability and user experience become critical. Often considered as part of product design, usability and user experience go beyond those boundaries, emerging as new competencies for any digital content creator as they help make content understandable.

In general terms, usability aims to make the interaction between users and artificial environments -in this case digital environments- more intuitive and natural. Usability is not just about making something easier to use, but about thinking of how to match the product itself to the features and requirements of users in order to maximise their experience when using it.

But sometimes usability is not enough. Digital environment is characterised by the empowerment of users: they decide and demand what they want, so that it is not them who adapt to the products, but the products that adapt to them and their needs, which are often changing.

That's why every digital process is iterative: launching something is not the end, but the beginning of the process, in which every launch is a test. Knowing who our users are, their needs, and how they use our product is critical: we need to be able to track their actions and learn from their feedback.

Their feedback is a valuable source of information that allows us to learn from their needs and therefore adjust or fix our initial plan to provide them with a better user experience.

User experience involves attending to that process: seeing how the users use our product in order to adjust and match it to their preferences or needs. In many cases, the user's use is not exactly as expected, and may involve a mere adjustment... or a complete redefinition of strategy.

Unit 3: Digital Content

Digital Communications

It is therefore essential to take into account how content is consumed through screens in order to adapt production processes to the user:

• On-screen reading is slower.
• Users demand movement.
• Readers don’t go in depth, they just scan.
• Attention is focused on catchy content.
• Fast and on-the-go consumption.
• New reading pattern: from Z to F.

Digital content is:

• Collaborative: digital content depends on all the elements around it.
• Social: content production is multidirectional.
• Customised: content consumption is tailored and multi-device.

Everything depends on our goals and the audience we address with our transmission of content: and resources are defined according to both variables.

Content Characteristics

Many aspects of content do not change in digital, but many others do, especially those related to format:

• Digital content is multimedia.
• Digital content is hipertextual.
• Digital content is interactive.

The digital environment allows us to use different formats and to integrate them into a single multimedia content.

This opens the door to endless creative possibilities. But this also means a challenge for content creation: being able to integrate any format does not mean that it is the best option, because not everything will fit with what you want to communicate, hence the importance of selection.

When creating content, it is essential to relate and link it thanks to hypertextuality, which consists of connecting points (internal or external) and actions, breaking the linearity of static formats.

Starting from a graphical or textual source, links must lead to other content or action in a clear way: the user needs to know, not to wonder, what will happen when visiting the link. Images must be unambiguous, and text must be a short string of meaningful words.

Finally, the digital environment opens the door to interactivity, which implies a variable capacity of content creators to give more participative power to the user in the final construction of the content.

Interaction is a planned response to a specific action that makes it possible to create rich narratives where the user makes decisions.

This is more than feature: it is a structural change in which communication is no longer unidirectional because users are no longer passive.

Interactivity has different dimensions:

• Collecting: content contributed directly by users, such as photographs or videos of an event.
• Selecting: users as social mediators: their interests shape production agendas.
• Editing: Tools for direct participation, through comments, forums, surveys...
• Interpreting: hierarchisation of content by users: creation of lists by voting.
• Publishing: Direct input form users through personal publishing tools, such as personal publication spaces (social profiles, blogs...).

Threats and Opportunities

Digital communication is a business built on constant visual stimuli, in a highly competitive environment which suffered a sudden industrial shift during a huge economical crisis.

This means that the adaptation to this new paradigm, already complicated, faces many additional challenges.

Digital content is very much conditioned by the characteristics of the format: it is fast, constant, ephemeral. Users often nibble at it, without going in depth. It is the rise of the TL;DR ('too long, don't read') philosophy: textual consumption is often limited to short pills or decontextualised headlines because users do not go further than that. This leads to another problem: parachuting.

Traditional: Media loyalty: users are familiar with the sources of the content they consume (they search for the specific name in the search engine, open the app, type the URL directly...). The front page acts as a showcase and access door: content creators select and rank which content is most relevant and, therefore, should be seen first and most prominently.

Digital:

• Users may not even know the site where they are getting information from: they 'land' on the content after a generic search, following a link or through something shared on social media.
• This landing can be anywhere on the site ('landing page'), not necessarily something prominent (important) or even current.
• Control of the access paths to the content is lost.
• As they come, so they go: bounce.

The individual and adapted content rules: our digital devices are a physical expression of what we like (cases, backgrounds...), and our digital consumption is not different: we don't own but access (music, series... and information).

In the age of customisation and personalisation, content has to be transformed to avoid 'nibbling': we need to face frugal consumption with strategies to aim audiences to go beyond quick takes.

Headlines are not just a sentence: they are the essence and starting point of content.

This is why it is useful to think of multiple headlines, adapted to different environments and specific goals.

Headlines are entry points to content that must also be adapted to be consumed:

Content curation becomes an evolution of selection: it's not just about what's important, it's also about the approach.

Content is no more about just content, because it becomes an experience designed not just for your audience, but for your audience's community also.

Make your story so interesting that they not only want to read it, but also share it. Readability is the key, and not only applied to textual content but to the visual 'whole':

• Storytelling: how the content is narrated, in tone, language and rhythm.
• Narrative: not understood as just text, but also with multimedia resources & design.

Some trends:

• Landing page philosophy: the whole site is designed for retention and repetition.
• Newsletters with selected topics and author's signature.
• Evolution: from RSS to content shared and shaped by my community.

The digitisation of content means that all formats are unified and consumed through single frames: everything has to be adapted to screens, and it is not always easy to do this.

This leads to a variety of visual problems:

• Eye strain.
• Problems of legibility or visual accessibility.
• Lack of natural visual references.
• Usability problems.

Most of the time, the structure and elements of digital content depend more on functional issues (i.e. adapting to the format or device) than aesthetic, literary or artistic ones.

The solution again lies in design: working on content that is adaptable to each type of screen and consumption according to the used device.

Controlling sizes and spacing becomes essential to provide the best possible experience: font sizes, line spacing, column widths, distances between elements, layout...

Unit 4: Digital Editing

How to Create Web Content

It's not all about design, narrative or use of resources: good content is still more important than anything else. Good content must always be:

• Original and innovative.
• Immediate and current.
• Multimedia.
• Hypertextual.
• Interesting and informative.
• No spelling mistakes.
• With short and direct paragraphs.
• Adapted to every possible device.

In the traditional environment, communicators controlled the process:

• Selecting the information.
• Meeting the sources.
• Sticking to productive routines and verification / checking standards.
• Being narrator and spectator, but not the main character of the story.

In today's information environment, anyone can communicate:

• The protagonist him/herself is also the creator of the content.
• They master how to communicate but often neglect what is communicated and its impact.

To create web content, you must:

• Care for sources: Sources are the basis of information: they must be reliable; their interests must be balanced and the relationship with them must be based on ethics.
• Adapt knowledge: The digital environment has its own codes, logics, languages, and productive routines: a communicator must learn its ways and distinguish trends from temporary fads.
• Content management: Communicating is not just about writing or speaking: a multimedia environment requires adapting to the use of formats and languages, and this requires specific and continuous learning.
• Look for an approach: It is impossible to know everything and do everything: it is necessary to have an overview, but it is advisable to focus on specific niches in which add value.
• Community management: The creation of content is only one part of this communication framework: the dissemination of content is key, and it depends on building a long-lasting community.

Elements of the Content

Every communicative entity has its own structure, made up of specific elements that fulfill specific functions for the transmission of knowledge.

Navigation: Elements on the page which allow access to other content within the same environment, and which serve to relate units of content with their context. They often appear like anchors to specific parts, links to other sections or related content.

And have a dual function: to guide the user and to encourage the consumption of other content within the environment. The use of links is necessary within a text, but always taking into account that they:

• Are only useful if we do not abuse them.
• Are placed over a limited number of words.
• Appear only once in the text.
• Should be used without emphasis.

Heading: These elements are the most essential part of the content, the first part that gets user's attention and the only part which will consumed: whether the user goes further or not will depend on them. They must be informative and eye-catching, as well as use keywords that facilitate the search. Sometimes they are accompanied by preheads (for framing) or subheads (for clarification). A headline needs:

• To focus on the key issues, not the irrelevant.
• Independence to be meaningful on its own.
• To provide something useful to readers.
• A careful language and wording.
• To convey credibility (avoid conditional).

A headline must fulfil certain functions: To identify content and distinguish it. To inform by synthesizing the content. To appeal and arouse interest. To be a gateway to other contents.

The most common mistakes regarding headlines: Prioritising the creative over the informative. Making them dependent on other elements. Covering too many ideas. Being redundant or, on the contrary, vague. Using a flat discourse.

Lead/ Excerpt: it complements the headline without repeating what has been said in it, as it is an extension of the headline to pick up other relevant aspects. It is longer than the headline, but not as long as a paragraph; it can be sometimes replaced by a brief collection of key ideas.

Text: They should be concise and direct, avoiding unnecessary prose or periphrases; therefore, both sentences and paragraphs should be direct and brief, as most users use mobile phones to consume digital content. They must also maintain an appropriate visual balance between text and resources. Due to the type of reading in digital environments, scanability should be considered by incorporating highlighted elements with prominent keys that also serve as a visual reference. They should also include links that provide the reader with further information or serve as proof of what is being explained. Hypertextuality also helps conciseness, as you can link to other external information with a simple reference without the need to lengthen the text too much and without the need to add clarifications.

Highlights: in line with the scannability of the text, other prominent elements are displayed next to it to break up the uniformity and provide information. They can be top heads to structure the content, pull-quotes and, eventually, bold or links used as visual elements as they visually break up the text and help organizing the information. All these elements should be visually different from the text to help with its scannability.

Multimedia: In addition to the value of visual and interactive elements themselves, multimedia resources are also structurally enriching because they help to break up visual uniformity.

SEO and Social Networks

Distribution of content is a major part of the process. There are four ways of reaching online content:

Two directly depend on the reputation of your brand or product:

• Direct.
• Referral.

The same happens with the other two, but they can be improved with specific work:

• Search.
• Social networks.

To increase the traffic from search engines we must work with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or its equivalent to apps, ASO. It involves practices which promote the positioning in search engines.

The better the positioning, the higher your content appears as a search result in search engines.

SEO represents almost half of a site's traffic, so it's necessary... but risky. Relying on SEO for your strategy means that access to your audience depends on external companies and their decisions (same with social). SEO is complex, and involves many ramifications, although there are a number of basic common practices to make content findable:

• Maintaining your site’s code clean to increase site loading speed.
• Repeating and highlighting keywords in heading and navigation elements
• Carry out correct labelling, both for textual and visual elements.

Search engine traffic was the absolute king until the arrival of social networks, which have come to dominate to the point of conditioning the production of content. Social networks are a very powerful global showcase, as they are one of the few things we share globally: more than a common place, they are a node of connection and also a common language.

Not all of this information is reliable but it is equally (or more) influential, and flows unfiltered: it is harder than ever to hide or censor facts, but it is also harder than ever to know what is happening with certainty because of the multiplication of voices.

Social networks are for users, but also for content creators looking for their content to be consumed by others. They are the most powerful tool we have to reach the audience nowadays.

Unit 5: Monetisation in Digital Environments

The Profitability Challenge: The Monetization Challenge

Universal access to content creation opened the door to a multi-format content creation boom: huge audiences could be reached in an immediate and cheap way. This flourishing meant the emergence of a new online industry, with new players, which was gradually being joined also by the media, traditional players. After the initial euphoria, the maturation of the sector brought with it the first steps towards new business models and progressive professionalization of content creation.

Initially, everybody offered their content for free, which allowed them to create their own brands, around which significant communities of followers flourished quickly.

The step to monetize this content arrived soon: if the traditional industry was charging for it, why not do it online as well? The problem: competition.

But trying to charge for content means building a wall between you and your audience, not only because they no longer have access, but also because search engines and social networks have neither access to it.

Users have been used for a long time to have free content at their fingertips, so it is now hard to move them to pay for it.

The problem is that most of the content offered on the internet is not good enough to ask users to pay for it.

Monetization Formulas

1 Free: Not charging users for online content is the most common model, which seeks to offer everything in an unlimited way in order to reach the widest possible audience. Monetization is obtained through advertising: the larger the audience, the more brands pay to advertise. This modality plays with two dangerous variables to achieve greater echo in social networks and better indexation in search engines:

• Publish before anyone else, which often leads to errors.
• Publish more than anyone else, as there is no space limitation, which often leads to posting irrelevant content.

It works using traditional formulas readapted to online environment:

• Native advertising in defined and differentiated spaces.
• Branded content combining editorial production & sponsorship, aimed at creating added value and not just advertising content.
• Sponsored widgets or with external related content.
• Audience purchases by associating brands and adding traffic.

Other formulas: merchandising, events, intelligence, selling content to other publications...

2 Freemium: The freemium model combines free of charge options with indirect payment as the content is accessed, but with conditions:

• Consumption after registration, which means that the content is offered free of charge as long as the user creates a profile and provides his/her data (lead generation), therefore monetization is indirect (sale or exploitation of data).
• Two-level consumption, in which content is offered for free but the consumption options or the experience is enhanced through payment.

3 Premium: The premium formula means that the content is not accessible unless you pay for it; this is known in the media industry as a 'paywall’ and can be more or less porous.

First, the soft paywall means that some content (not all) is closed:

• Combined model: some content is open (plain information) and some other is not (featured authors, scoops, etc.).
• Metered model, which involves giving access to a limited amount of content for a certain period of time (ten articles per month, for example) and after that, access is closed until next period.

There is also a hard paywall, meaning that all content is closed and therefore inaccessible unless you pay; there are two ways to do this:

• By subscription, which means that for a monthly fee you have unlimited access to all content during the membership.
• Through micropayment, which offers more specific access to certain content, paying for it but not for the rest (certain articles, certain sections, certain authors).

Other: There are other payment formulas that can exist alone or in combination with aforementioned formulas for more specific functions:

• Partnership, which implies more than just financial support but entering a more personal or participatory association with the project, contributing to editorial decisions or even being offered more active participation formulas.
• Crowdfunding, where the community participates in a special payment for a specific purpose (a cover).

Donation, limited to socially-charged projects, allowing voluntary payment to help in the maintenance of the project

In recent years, many platforms have appeared which, based on the idea of crowdfunding, aim to function as a space for fundraising, designed more for individual creators than for established projects.