04.06.10
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iPad app pricing: You’re not fooling consumers

As I mentioned in one of my comments on my previous post about iPad app pricing, the gap between the value assigned by publishers and the value perceived by consumers was one of the big issues in terms of paid content.

Now, we’ve evidence of this. Mediaweek is reporting that “Mags Get Pushback on Per Issue Price on iPad“. They quote this comment on Time magazine’s app.

As one customer of Time magazine’s app ($4.99 single issue) wrote, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re … passing the savings on distribution and raw materials to themselves. I can get 56 issues of the paper version for $20. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

Some consumers also misunderstood the pricing, thinking that the per issues pricing was actually a subscription. They also quoted an unhappy, although not antagonistic, comment from a Popular Science customer, who wanted to be ‘help’ and buy the iPad edition but couldn’t bring himself to pay the $4.99 per issue price. Sara Öhrvall, director of research & development at Bonnier Corp., publisher of Pop Sci, put a brave face on it saying that they were working to prove the worth of the per issue price. She said:

We have to do a lot of work to recreate the magazine for the iPad.

However, that’s the problem. Rather than recreating the magazine for the iPad, why not think about the iPad how it changes what you can offer. This has been the problem when it comes to digital content. Most content creators think of recreating a legacy experience instead of creating a new experience. We have digital audiences now. They are natively digital. They don’t want a magazine experience on an iPad. They want a premium digital experience delivered on their device.

That they might pay for, although it’s doubtful that they will pay more than you’re charging them for a print experience. You’ve got a long way to go to prove that to consumers.

04.06.10
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Blogging is a journey, not a destination

Seth Godin emphasises something that I think it’s very, very easy to forget: Blogging is not just about the finished blog post, but the process of thinking things through and having a conversation around ideas.

It doesn’t matter what context we are blogging in: business or personal, inside the firewall or publicly, anonymously or as oursevles. We are all writing ourselves into existence, and the important thing to remember is that this is a journey, not a destination.

04.06.10
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Useless artificial divisions

I’m increasingly of the belief that trying to split social media into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ uses is a totally pointless waste of time. Equally I hear people talking about B2B and B2C social media case studies as if they are somehow different, but they really aren’t. These are shallow, superficial divisions that have no basis in reality.

Social media is about people forming relationships with each other. The tools they use are irrelevant. The context is irrelevant. This is about people, whether they are colleagues, customers, clients or vendors. It’s not the what, it’s the who.

Creating these social media silos of marketing and internal communications and B2B and B2C just seem to me to be doing the very thing that social media is often used to combat: putting up walls between different groups of people who are doing very similar things and who could do with talking to each other once in a while. Frankly, I think a lot of the really focused social media types, who zoom in on one tiny application of social tools, could do with getting out a bit more. And the people who focus on using social media for marketing, rejecting the idea that they might actually gain something from using the tools between themselves, are idiots.

We don’t need social media to turn into just another branch of marketing, or just another thing done by internal comms teams, or something that customer-facing companies do but B2B companies don’t. Start thinking like that and we’ll end up with the very sort of blinkered stupidity we’re already struggling to combat. Letting social media become what we’re trying to replace would be, to put it mildly, dumb.

Instead, why don’t we just accept that social media is rather like a hammer: you can use a hammer to build a garden shed or the Taj Mahal, but at the end of the day you’re still using it to hit a nail. Social media can be used to build a garden shed or the Taj Mahal, but at the end of the day you’re still using it to build relationships with people. I’d rather see businesses set up a separate Social Media Department populated by people steeped in social media culture who then helped everyone else in the company, regardless of who they are or where they sit, get the best out of social tools than see it eaten up by marketeers or managers who want to turn it into something safe, comfortable, familiar and vapid.

Let’s face it, most companies need to be shaken up a bit. Internal business cultures often suck, based on command-and-control and he-who-shouts-loudest-wins. A lot of marketing is just brainless drivel based on an out-of-date assumption that we’re all passive consumers just waiting to absorb your ‘message’. Social media can humanise all aspects of business, empowering any and all individuals touched by the company, whether employees or customers or just idle bystanders. But not if we let ourselves get caught up in these artificial divisions, cutting ourselves off from the wide variety of ideas that could so easily inspire our thinking.

I know this blog is called The Social Enterprise, but it is in fact this name which has lead me to writing this post. I sometimes worry that what I’m writing isn’t ‘enterprisey’ enough, but I’m not even sure that ‘enterprise’ has a meaning relevant in the context of social media. Does it matter if you’re a multinational or an SME when you’re trying to improve collaboration? No. What matters is that you understand how collaboration works, how people function, how social tools fit into that landscape. The underlying concepts and constructs are the same in both contexts. How people work is the same in all contexts.

I suspect that this splintering of social media comes less from intrinsic differences and more from the way that existing powermongers re-interpret social media through their own lenses, attempting to remake it in their own image so that they can control – i.e. defang and declaw – and own the change, whilst not really caring whether the change is genuine or meaningful. Social media therefore becomes a tool in the constant game of empire-building, either as a prize to be squabbled over or a stick to beat others with.

So I’m calling time on these pointless divisions. It’s all about social media and people. Fin.

04.03.10
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links for 2010-04-03

04.02.10
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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.

04.02.10
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links for 2010-04-02

  • Technology Review: Rethinking Apps for the iPad
    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.'
    (tags: MIT TechnologyReview iPad development interactivity gesturalinterface)
04.01.10
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links for 2010-04-01

  • Johnston Press halts paywall experiment – Press Gazette
    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."
    (tags: newspapers paywall regional local UK paidcontent)
  • Journalism jobs and news from Holdthefrontpage.co.uk
    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).
    (tags: paywall newspapers regional businessmodels internet paidcontent UK)
  • How Social Media Can Complement Radio Listening: A 'Weekend Edition' Case Study : NPR
    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."
    (tags: npr research socialmedia twitter audience facebook survey)
04.01.10
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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.

04.01.10
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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.