Digital entrepreneurs turn to mobile for users, revenue

Leo Prieto:betting on "mobile first"

Versión en español aquí.

Leo Prieto is a digital media entrepreneur in Chile whose 10 communities attract an audience of 10 million users a month from all over the Spanish-speaking world.

Late last year, his company, Betazeta, decided to go "mobile first" and optimize the design of all its sites for mobile devices. More than half their traffic comes from mobile.

"Mobile phones are always with us," Prieto told me in an interview via Skype from his office in Santiago. "On the street, at home, we check them every two minutes, a hundred times a day."

And now that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are getting as much as three-fourths of their traffic from mobile devices, digital media publishers can see growth in social traffic by optimizing for mobile. "It's a virtuous circle with the social networks and mobile devices," Prieto said.
 

Making money Part II: custom content at MedCity

This weekend I spent a day and a half participating online in NewsU's Revenue Camp for Journalism Entrepreneurs, an intense session on some of the new ways journalists are making money on the Web. (The entire course will be available to view online in a few days; Twitter comments from the course are at #revcamp.)

Chris Seper, a digital media entrepreneur who started MedCityNews.com, a portal covering innovation in the life sciences and healthcare, talked about how to make money from custom content. He defined it as any content made to order for a client -- it could be a research paper, a blog entry that runs on the site, a video, an event, or an article. 

"We'll create content for anyone with a vested interest in innovation and health care," he told attendees. The publication's audience is C-level executives, entrepreneurs, investors and other stakeholders in those fields.