Can Responsive Design Be Applied to Content?

As things started to grow and change in the mobile advertising landscape, publishers quickly realized that responsive design was going to be super important for their content to morph to the screen that it was being shown on. As a publisher, you’d want your readers to have the same great experience whether they were on their phone, iPad or desktop computer.

Using proportion-based grids and flexible images, the method of building websites provides an optimal viewing experience for users no matter what device they are utilizing to read the content. Time, FortyOneTwenty and Somewhat have all received great feedback on the new layouts that they had rolled out and how each one made the experience much better across devices. As a result of this traction, we are starting to see the same idea work behind the creation of content.

There are now several content sites that have started designing their site so that the content moves page location during the day depending on what their reader is looking for. Talk about things that make sense! It’s not about making the site prettier or showing off a publisher’s tech chops, but rather it’s about molding the site to the consumption patterns of the people reading it. For example, you wake up and want your hard news – that news will be the stories on top of the page. Later on, you are thinking more about your sports games for the night and entertainment focused stories, so now those have a presence on the top part of the page. See Philly.com or Yahoo.com for examples of how they have implemented responsive content.

As publishers make this move, we are going to have to keep in mind how this will impact the advertising across each page. If publishers start moving around content to what the readers are spending the most time on, how will this affect their pricing? Do advertisers pay more for additional eyeballs? Do they pay less for the continual change of what content their ads will be next to? This frontier is still very much in its infancy stage and there will be growing pains as the media industry figures out what will be the best course for advertisers to work around these changes.

Both responsive content and responsive design have been great strides in pushing publisher content out to readers in the way that they will consume it with the most attention.