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RT @Reynolds: http://bit.ly/cxiJPv Pretty much everything I'd liked to have said about iPad snobbery. >> spot on! #ipad #sa #technology
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Kevin: Via Adam Tinworth. A brief but excellent post on paywallss at 37signals. "The easiest way to get people to pay you money is when they think they’re getting something in return that will help them make more money."
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now using http://Packrati.us to save selected links from Twitter to Delicious. #sa #socialmedia #packratius
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interesting post on change and planning from Neil Perkin http://bit.ly/bWZB84 #sa
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Kevin: Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NPR Digital Media, explains why NPR chose to develop an app for Apple's iPad. "If you happen to be among the hard-core enthusiasts who plan to purchase Apple's new iPad — as much as 5 percent of the NPR audience — we'll be there for you day one with a fully redesigned app and a Web site that's optimized for the platform."
That's strategic thinking, thinking that is sadly lacking at many content companies and news organisations. Before you invest time and money (both finite) what is the market? What is the possible return? The development for the iPad also had other strategic goals. Wilson says, "we wanted to make sure that those who found us through search engines or social media links got a robust NPR experience."
Again, the thinking allowed them not only to create a site that was applicable for a single platform but had other benefits. Smart.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
iPad app pricing: A last act of insanity by delusional content companies
Looking at the iPad app rollout, you can easily separate the digital wheat from the chaff in the content industries, and you can see those who are developing digital businesses and those who are trying to protect print margins and who see the iPad as a vertical, closed model to control and monetise content.
There are those who believe that they sell content and that they should be compensated for it. Just as with the music industry, they couch this in terms of repaying content creators, when it really is more about wistfulness for the days of double-digit profit margins.
Those who view their primary business as selling content believe that not only can they charge for it but that they can actually charge the same or more for it, just because it is on the iPad. Time, for example, is charging $4.99 a week for their iPad ‘magazine’.
Scott Karp, CEO of Publish2 and editor of Publishing2.0, put it as clearly as it needs to be put on Twitter:
Paying $4.99 for magazine on newsstand includes cost of printing/distribution. Now you pay for iPad instead, so magazine should cost less.
What do you get for $4.99 a week?
Unique interactivity including landscape and portrait mode, scroll navigation and customizable font size
Oh, I’ve never seen that in a mobile web browser, I say with incalculable levels of sarcasm. That’s like morons in the 90s having Java animation that you actually couldn’t do anything with and calling that interactivity. You think that’s insane and delusional, just wait, it gets even better! No content sharing on the app, which I’m assuming means you can’t bookmark or Tweet your favourite stories, and you’ll have to buy and download the app every single week. There is also no indication that they will charge for their now free iPhone app or their website.
Note to Time digital strategists: Sorry caching your site so I can take it with me when I’m on the move isn’t a feature worth your premium pricing. I do that now, and have done it for years, with an open-source app called Plucker and an aging Palm T3. I’m truly sorry. Do you actually use the internet or digital devices or do you just indulge your bosses’ angry fantasies about the good old days?
Let’s look to Rupert Murdoch’s proud paid content pioneer, the Wall Street Journal. What is the Wall Street Journal selling? The past. Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor, online for the Wall Street Journal, says on MarketWatch:
We have come up with a version of the Wall Street Journal on the iPad that I think is closest you get to a newspaper reading experience on a digital device.
To be fair to Murray, he goes on to say that anyone giving their content away for free on the web won’t be able to convert those readers on the web to paid readers on the iPad. Murray says:
You have these apps, but you also have a web browser. So I don’t see how any newspaper that is giving its content away for free on the web is going to be saved by the iPad because the iPad makes it easier to access that free content.
Unless the Wall Street Journal’s app not only delivers me a ‘newspaper reading experience’ (which I frankly am not missing anyway) but also picks my stocks for me so that I can retire next year, I’m not going to pay $17.99 a month for it when I can subscribe to their website for $1.99 a week. I didn’t work on a journalist’s salary and still manage to be in a financially secure position by giving money away to grumpy old media moguls like Murdoch.
Paul Kedrosky, venture capitalist and private equity investor who writes the blog Infectious Greed, said on Twitter:
Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money.
As I’ve said before, Murdoch for all of his brash brilliance has no understanding of the economics of digital businesses. I give him props for still having the power to shift the discussion, and I think that his paywall strategy at the Times might help it stem its £250,000 a day losses. However, his paywall strategy is a defensive move, not a long term strategy. Unless he starts building credible digitally-focused businesses as soon as the paywall brings in some cash to stabilise the business, it will be a brief pause on the path to collapse.
Now, let’s look at other strategies for the iPad. Let’s look at the FT. Robert Andrews, UK editor of paidContent, says that the FT secured sponsorship that allows it to offer its iPad app for free for two months, after which time they will shift to subscription model with the promise of additional features. Much cleverer.
Suw and I talk often that one thing really lacking when it comes to digital content is commercial experimentation. The FT securing sponsorship for a free app for two months is a good step at not only experimenting with content but also with payment models. The Economist earlier this year released a report on social networking, allowing users to download it for free and giving sponsor prominent credit for the offer. This is clever. Premium sponsorship opportunities for special content or services.
Look at the development thinking behind National Public Radio’s iPad app. They did market research and found that up to 5% of their audience were planning on buying an iPad. They knew what the opportunity was. They also used iPad development to improve the experience for visitors coming from search or social networking services, explains Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media.
Compare the strategies and thinking. On the one hand we have a set of pricing models that deliver marginal value for premium prices and show very little that differentiate themselves from the web experience, although they expect to charge more. These pricing models are based on a sense of entitlement to set pricing as it was in the days of print. I won’t even call them strategies because they lack any kind of realistic strategic thinking.
On the other hand we have a set of strategic pricing structures. NPR takes a realistic look at the commercial potential, does market research and develops its app not just for a single device but also as a chance to make improvements to their overall service. The FT experiments not just with content but also with the commercial strategy.
In terms of who is positioning themselves for the future by delivering value to their audiences and experimenting with business models, it’s clear. If any company thinks that the iPad will allow them to rebuild the monopoly rent pricing structure of the 20th Century, then you’ve really fallen prey to the Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, and you’ve blown yet another chance to build a credible digital business. However, I’ve got a game you might want to check out, Final Fantasy.
links for 2010-04-02
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Kevin: Excellent brief piece on developing for the iPad. Christopher Mims at MIT's Technology Review interviews several developers including Craig Kemper from Little White Bear Studios, making of the iPhone game TanZen. "|His team was able to reuse 90 percent of the original code to make the iPad version of the game. But they had to reconsider how users would control on-screen game elements. The iPad interface encourages developers to use popovers and split views in order to keep the application's main screen visible at all times.'
links for 2010-04-01
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Kevin: Oliver Luft at the Press Gazette gives more details about the just 'halted' paywall experiment at Johnson Press, a regional (local) newspaper publisher in the UK. Oliver writes, "The scheme saw the publisher trial different access methods across the six papers; reader registration, uploading "teaser" stories which referred readers back to full versions in the print edition, and paid-for access."
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Kevin: UK local (regional) newspaper group Johnson Press has 'quietly' dropped its local paywall experiment. "The apparently dismal level of uptake for the JP trial is bound to cast doubt on whether paywalls are a viable business model for the regional press." I think it's important to keep the lessons focused on the regional press and not extrapolate those to other paywall experiments, most notably at the Murdoch's Times (London).
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Kevin: It's often difficult to come by hard numbers and agreed upon metrics when it comes to the impact of social media on traditional media so it's great that NPR in the US is sharing numbers publicly about how social media engagement strategies are reaping benefits. Ben Robins and Sandra Lozano write: "The results (of research) provided us with a first look at how social media is not only changing the way that news organizations report the news, but how some listeners are learning to engage in new and different ways."
The Tyranny of the Explicit
Johnnie Moore has a great podcast episode talking with Viv McWaters and Roland Harwood on how an undue focus on metrics can get in the way of real thought and understanding. I see this frequently myself, too, when people want to focus on ‘return on investment’ or ‘success metrics’ for social media at the cost of understanding the intangible results, which are actually more important than the measurable ones. There are some great nuggets, so well worth listening to. I particularly liked Johnnie’s discussion of how learning has become codified in unrealistic ways and how that relates to best practice documents that don’t get practised.
My leaving gift from the Guardian
It was my last day at the Guardian, and as a leaving gift, Peter Martin, the tags editor, made me a tag cloud linking to all of the stories that I wrote in my three and a half years there. Steve Busfield, media and technology editor, gave me a piece of paper with just the code for the tag cloud and this simple bit of BASIC on it all on classic VT100 green text on a black screen.
10 PRINT “Kevin Anderson has left the building”
20 GOTO 10
“I’m told that you’ll know what it is,” Steve said.
Friend and colleague Simon Jeffery joked that it was a bit of a joke to print it out. Fortunately, Peter sent me the code so I didn’t have to type it all out.
It was a moving farewell not only to me but also to colleagues Bobbie Johnson (in absentia in San Francisco) Mercedes Bunz, Laura Scothern and Stephen Brooke from the Media Guardian and the technology desk. Thank you to everyone at the Guardian who I worked with over the last few years, with a special thanks to Steve and everyone else on the Media and Technology desk who welcomed me so warmly during my brief sojourn last year and who really made feel a part of the team.
UPDATE: I meant to mention that Peter made this lovely tag cloud which not only displays the tags but links to my articles on those topics using a service called Tagul. He used it to create a 2009 end of the year tag cloud of people in Guardian articles.
The lure of the partial post
Friend and colleague Stephanie Booth writes about the blogazine, which I’ve covered here already, and the frustration she feels when faced with blogs that only post excerpts to their front page (and, I’d add, RSS feeds). I want to pick up on the point about partial posts and want to say in no uncertain terms:
Partial posts or excerpts are bad practice.
They are bad practice for media outlets, but they are especially bad practice for business blogs. As Steph says, partial posts put a barrier between your content and your readers and although it’s a low barrier, just a click high, it’s still a barrier. Trying to artificially inflate page views by forcing people to click through from the front page, or from RSS, is nothing more than an attempt to fake greater popularity. It doesn’t mean that you actually have more readers, just that they have to click twice. Like Steph, I seriously doubt that it makes any difference to SEO, and if you’re willing to sacrifice user experience for a potentially tiny bump in your search engine ranking, what does that say about how you treat your customers?