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Amazon Alexa began the launch of a long-form news report feature in the US on Monday, per TechCrunch.
Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR and Newsy will all provide audio content, and CNBC and Newsy will also offer video content on screen-equipped Alexa devices. Smart speaker users can issue voice commands to select which provider's news content they’d like to listen to, and to skip past certain stories.
Here's what it means: The new feature represents publisher's latest attempt to nestle their content into consumer's daily routines via smart speakers as uptake has been sluggish.
Consumers are unenthusiastic about news consumption on smart speakers, both in desire and in action.
Even though many US consumers said they preferred shorter news briefings — 56% said they feel more informed at just listening to headlines when using smart speakers — the current, quick news briefings available on Alexa haven't taken off. In fact, only 18% of US smart speaker owners reported using their devices for news on the daily in 2018, per the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Negative consumer perceptions are likely to blame: Only 1% of US consumers see news as the most valuable feature on their device.
The bigger picture: Even though relatively few people are listening to news on smart speakers, the addressable market is large enough that publishers should continue to experimenting with the format.
Smart speaker adoption is growing rapidly in the US. In the US, smart speaker ownership doubled year-over-year (YoY) from 28% in 2017 to 55% in 2018, per Business Insider Intelligence exclusive data, with an expectation that there will be 200 million smart speakers in US homes by 2023. Amazon's Alexa leads the space, with Google Assistant in second place.
And audio news partnerships are likely low effort for publishers, as many are already producing the content for other mediums, like podcasts. Partnering with Amazon to distribute long-form news through Alexa is an easy way to potentially reach a broad swath of consumers.
And if longer-form stories catch on among consumers, they'll have more potential for monetization than shorter-form opportunities. Publishers should continue tinkering with formats to see what will move the "value" needle in consumers minds, and get them to engage with content.
Long-form content could provide more value because it gives users greater control over how they consume stories through its skip funciton, for example. If the format strikes a chord among consumers, it could be more lucrative than short-form anyway, as there would be more opportunities to insert ad units throughout.
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