All Posts Tagged With: "apps"

Recently, I’ve been noticing new iPhone apps coming to market that are adopting interesting business models. Generally, they can be categorized as using the “freemium” (or semi-freemium) model; i.e., they give away some valuable content and entice you to upgrade for more and better features.

1. This American Life iPhone app. … This app costs $2.99 to purchase, and what that gets you is well worth that small amount of money if you’re a fan of the public radio show (as I am):

• All of the This American Life radio broadcasts from the most current to the program’s beginning in 1995, which are streamed to your phone. (In other words, you need to be in range of a cell-phone tower or wi-fi network.)
• Easy search for old programs, including by contributor (e.g., David Sedaris, John Hodgman, et al).

The premium part of the model is if you would like to “own” any episode. You can download any program to your iPhone or iTouch (via Apple’s iTunes) for 99 cents, which you might want to do for a favorite episode to keep, or if you want to listen to several episodes on a car trip where you’re not likely to experience quality (or any) streaming.

This app is a great example of selling an app for a modest one-time fee, but also having a recurring revenue stream from the app. In this case, This American Life can make money from it’s 15-year archives with no work involved other than promoting the app to iPhone/iTouch owners.

2. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2010 iPhone app. I only downloaded this app to my phone to look at the business model, not the female models. Swimsuit 2010 is a mobile version of the infamous SI annual Swimsuit issue of the magazine, featuring photos and videos.

This is a full-on freemium app, since it’s free to download to your iPhone/iTouch. That gets you only the basics: single swimsuit photos of several (but not all) SI models, and several 1-minute videos.

SI (and Apple) will get your money if you want more. (No, I did not pay for the upgrade.) For $1.99, paid from within the app, it is upgraded to see multiple photos of all the swimsuit models, and all the videos.

Which model (business, that is) should you choose: Free download with paid upgrade from within the app? Or paid download with much more given away free, but upgrades still sold within the app?

I think it depends on your audience. This American Life is a great radio program with a small but dedicated audience. SI’s controversial annual Swimsuit Issue is a mass-market offering worth $1 billion-plus in revenue for the publisher.

It’s in SI’s interest to get the limited app on as many phones as possible, and hope that lots of them will spring for the $1.99 upgrade. (A few days ago, the Swimsuit app was seeing a 7.8% paid-upgrade success rate.)

For This American Life, its loyal fans are more likely to pay the $2.99 both to show support for the program, and because what you get for that price is pretty darn nice for the show’s fans. (I didn’t hesitate to buy the app when I first saw it promoted.) I’m betting that the show will make more money by asking an up-front fee for the app than if it gave it away free and upsold the content.

For SI, I believe it will make more money giving away the sparse free app and selling upgrades than if it tried to charge an upfront fee for the app.

I’m not sure that we’ll ever know in these two cases, but I’d like to see some research on most-lucrative mobile app charging strategies for content. Indeed, I hope to be doing that at the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder before too long. (Hint, hint… need funding.)

If any traditional news publishers are still thinking that the Apple tablet — finally, it has a (strange) name, iPad — points to their salvation by bringing a new business model, they’ll likely be proven wrong.

No doubt, the iPad is an incredible, slick piece of technology. It’s not the “Jesus Tablet” that many of us hoped for (no camera?! no multi-tasking?! no Flash support?! it won’t answer my prayers?!), but maybe by version 2 or 3, it’ll get there. But even if the iPad fairly quickly evolves to be the kind of market pleaser that Apple’s iPhone became, I don’t think that it really changes things profoundly for news companies.

If you watch Apple’s slick video introducing the iPad, much is made that this is “the best experience ever created” for surfing the web. Fair enough. I’d love to have an iPad for when I want to read news on the web (and a lot of other things); my laptop would get much less use.

But does this mean that I’m suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. I’m always surprised when I open my browser history and see how many sites and media brands I’ve hit on any given day.

So if Rupert Murdoch or any other publisher puts up a mandatory paywall to keep me away from their news content on the iPad, I will move on to a similar site that’s free. If NYTimes.com decides to strengthen its proposed porous paywall by the 2011 implementation, then there’s WashingtonPost.com, which will receive my loyalty.

Am I a cheapskate? Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each. There’s too much free choice, and I’d prefer to support the news and media brands that I like best.

So, if NYTimes.com had a premium membership that gave me special privileges, but all its web (and thus iPad-viewable) content remained free to those who chose not to pay, then I’d probably pony up in order to show my support for the New York Times, since I admire its quality journalism, read its content regularly, and want it to continue. The key for me is that what brands I will pay to support, when it comes to commodity news, will be a voluntary decision on my part.

There are so many pointers to the diminishment of news brands, though the owners of those brands don’t want to see it. We’ve seen the “atomization of content” as the news story gets tossed around, linked to, and sometimes goes viral via Twitter, social networks, search engines, and news aggregators. Just as iTunes killed the music CD and reintroduced buying single songs, our new digital ecosystem is doing the same for news stories as it emasculates old news brands.

I used Personalization in the headline, and now I’ll finally get to it. For me, news personalization offerings to date have been unsatisfactory. Sure, I can spend some time setting up, say, an iGoogle personalized page and fill it with news (and other stuff) that I want. But it and the other solutions I’ve seen just haven’t grabbed me. I get plenty of serendipity in my news consumption, but it’s not because of any personalized news service, it’s because of pointers to good news content from the people I follow on Twitter and my Facebook friends, and the blogs I read regularly (or stumble upon). Article continues below photo…

My iCurrent personalized news: Many news brands, not just one

However, I recently tried out a private beta of iCurrent, a personalized web news service that I think is pretty darn close to having what could become my home base for news. Just this week the California company opened up a public beta, so you can try it out. iCurrent also has an e-mail component (which I find to be weak in its current state), and an iPhone app is coming soon.

I’ll write another blog item another day about iCurrent with more detail, but here’s the thing that makes it stand out: iCurrent is to news as Pandora is to music. (In fact, they share investors.)

With Pandora, you pick a musician, song, or genre that you like, then the application selects similar music that it thinks you might like. Pandora learns what you like as you click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a song that’s playing; it lets you tell it to stop playing a particular song or artist. It’s dead-simple to create new channels of music. Most importantly, it makes complicated personalization technology super-easy to use.

ICurrent applies Pandora’s model to news. Initially you choose a few topics of personal interest, but then as you use iCurrent over time, it learns what you want to see. Like Pandora, stories that it selects for you have an up and down arrow to click, if you want; click the up arrow and you get a few choices about what you’d like to see more of — simply “more like this,” or more about specific components of the story that it’s filtered out.

iCurrent’s homepage also devotes 2/3 of the space to your personalized news, and the other 1/3 to important news that everyone should know about (Haiti, Afghanistan, top political stories, etc.).

We’ve been talking about personalized news for a long time; you may remember “The Daily Me” project from MIT in the early 1990s. It’s taken a long time, but I think technologists are close to getting personalized news right.

So, back to the iPad. Assuming I get one (oh, I’ll probably succumb), I doubt that my behavior toward news using it will be much different than it is on my laptop. I’ll bounce around from story to story, not always aware of the news brand that’s hosting a specific story.

From what I’ve seen of iCurrent, it could be a great news home base for my iPad usage.

The iPad, it seems to me, leaves news publishers in much the same predicament as the PC web. Their content will become more and more atomized, especially if — as is my prediction — personalized news advances to the point of real value and Pandora-like simplicity.

The trick to survival for many news organizations in the digital world, then, will be in figuring out how to monetize their content as it flies the coop and first shows up in a consumer’s news stream outside of the news company’s property line. This issue will be as critical to solve on the iPad and like devices as on the PC web.

One last point: The iPad does represent an opportunity for news companies to develop apps that iPad users can buy. Just as selling apps for the iPhone has become a massive business, this will probably repeat for the iPad. I would suggest to (non-niche) news providers that they’ll have an easier time selling specialized applications than selling content. I’ve written this before, but consumer psychology favors spending money on things you can keep (an app, a song) than commodity content that is viewed but once then forgotten.

If I had an iPad, an app I’d pay for: iCurrent. I wouldn’t be paying for the news content, but rather for the convenience and value that a really good personalization app would provide.

Yeah, I know, that’s not what journalists want to hear.

The Guardian has introduced a new iPhone app, and its model is one I’ve endorsed in the past:

• iPhone app provides a much better experience than the mobile website
• Mobile version of Guardian website remains free
• iPhone app costs to download ($3.99 US, £2.39 UK)
• iPhone app content is free (beyond buying the app), but option is left open for charging for some content and/or services down the road from within the app

I bought the app this morning and I’m impressed, mostly. Best part for me is the ability to personalize the sections I want to see and prioritize them. There’s audio, but no video yet. Photo galleries are nice. Ditto for off-line reading.

I’m perplexed that some newspaper companies that have developed mobile apps still give them away free. Seems like a no-brainer to me to charge a fee to purchase the app, on the grounds of giving the mobile user a better viewing experience than the normal mobile site. As long as a more bare-bones free mobile site is available, consumers can’t really complain if you ask for a few bucks for your app.

As I’ve written in the past, I think it’s psychologically easier to get online users to pay for an app (which they get to keep and use over and over) rather than pay for news (which they can get in many other places online or on their phones for free).

The Guardian starts with the iPhone app (which seems the typical pattern these days), and then will create matching apps for other platforms: Android, RIM, Symbian, and Microsoft.

My latest Editor & Publisher column was posted today. I think you’ll find it provocative.

Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers

Admittedly, the headline overstates things a bit (hey, just trying to get you to pay attention!), but my main point is that whether online or on mobile devices, news publishers need to figure out how to offer something that’s tangible, not ephemeral. Selling fleeting digital news stories is a non-starter. The mobile platform offers some alternative opportunities.

Since EditorandPublisher.com doesn’t support comments on my column posted there, please feel free to engage in a dialog with me and anyone else interested in this topic in the comments area below.

What do you think?

A while back I noted that a new iPhone app from Men’s Health magazine broke some new ground by selling add-on content within the app itself, beyond the initial price ($1.99). Now the magazine is trying again, this time by taking one of its regular features, the “Jimmy the Bartender” advice column, and turning it (him) into an iPhone app.

The Jimmy app costs $2.99, and this is what you get: “Jimmy the Bartender serves up his legendary no-nonsense answers to hundreds of life’s questions, a GPS-enabled guide to his favorite watering holes near you, can’t-lose tips for approaching any woman, cocktail recipes, Eat This: Not That! At the bar, and dozens of other features.”

Frankly, I don’t find Jimmy particularly appealing and wouldn’t pay for this app (disclosure: Men’s Health sent me a free download code so I could review it), but that’s because I don’t hang out in bars or try to approach eligible women. A younger man sans wife and kids might find the content more appealing.

So let’s assume that there is a market of iPhone-toting men who would find the Jimmy app worth 3 bucks for such features as the “Ultimate Wingman,” shown in the image at right. Dial in your social situation or dilemma and Jimmy dispenses some advice on how to approach the desired woman. It doesn’t do much for me, but with the promotional power of Men’s Health magazine’s printed edition, I bet some decent money will be made from guys buying the Jimmy the Bartender app.

If Men’s Health is ahead of the curve on this, it’s in taking a media personality and turning him into a phone app. It makes sense. If I’m a fan of Jimmy’s feature in the magazine, I might be inclined to pay a few bucks for his phone app; whereas, a Men’s Health iPhone app holds less appeal since I can just visit the magazine’s website on my phone’s browser for free.

Other media companies might want to consider creating their own personality mobile apps. For instance, why isn’t there a “Dear Abby” app? A regular newspaper reader whose favorite feature in the paper is Abby probably would buy a Dear Abby phone app, if it was well done and included features such as searching for Abby’s archived answers on a specified topic, and conveniently sending in questions to Abby via the phone. Hey, Abby’s syndicate: How about it?

I think it will take some star-power to sell personality phone apps, but certainly Abby, Dan Savage, Ask Amy, and other media personalities could spin some cash from personal iPhone apps.

I dare say the right individuals could do better in the mobile-apps sales game than the media brands they may write under.

The trend already has shown up with professional athletes. Cincinnati back-up quarterback Jordan Palmer even started an iPhone app development company to create apps for athletes to allow them to better connect with their fans. Cincinnati quarterback Carson Palmer has a SuperFan iphone app that costs 99 cents. Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong has a new Calorie Tracker iPhone app for $2.99.

OK, media companies, take the hint. Which stars are in your stable worthy of having their own paid mobile apps? And MSNBC, why is Rachel Maddow’s iPhone app free?

(Please include any media personality mobile apps I may have missed in the comments section below.)