All Posts Tagged With: "ipad"

There. I’ve said it. Now that I have an iPad (and love it as a device for media consumption), I really don’t ever want to see a print magazine again. If I could, I’d happily convert all my remaining print magazine subscriptions to iPad subscriptions, and be a happy guy. (And yes, I’m willing to pay, of course.)

For now, I still have a handful of print-magazine subscriptions, though most of my reading is done online on my laptop, on the iPad, or on my iPhone. What’s left of print for me: Wired, Columbia Journalism Review, and some cycling magazines (Bike, Bicycling, Mountain Biking). I also receive a few unasked-for print magazine subscriptions. That’s it. I receive no print newspapers and haven’t for some time.

Wired for the iPad: For now, that’ll be $3.99 per iPad edition, or else go to print

My reasoning is simple enough:

1. I dislike the waste of trees and energy for physical delivery of my magazines; a digital edition delivered to my iPad is preferable environmentally.
2. Print magazines pile up in various places around my house and office, and often don’t get read. Having them all in my iPad would be so much more convenient, and I’m pretty sure that they’d get read more (vs. now, when many of them get tossed in piles for later reading, and then I find them again when they’re months old, at which point they often get tossed in the recycling bin unread).
3. Many digital editions are better, since they can include video, multimedia, interactive forms, etc.

Alas, the current state of iPad magazines is maddening. Apple, as has been reported recently, isn’t letting magazine publishers use iPad apps to sell subscriptions. Instead, we have the situation where Wired in print is $8 for an annual subscription (I just got my renewal notice). The Wired app on my iPad (free download) allows me to buy individual issues at $3.99; no subscription discount, courtesy of Apple’s resistance to permitting publishers to offer subscriptions. No thanks.

Ditto for Newsweek, but it’s even worse. The weekly per-digital-issue price on the iPad is $2.99 (no subscription offered), while a print subscription can be had for as little as $21 a year (54 issues) via magazine-subscription discounters.

Zinio offers a digital, save-trees alternative for many magazines. Via the Zinio app on my iPad, I can buy digital subscriptions for many magazines. Alas, the only one from my list of remaining print subscriptions is Bike, for $9. For the rest of my list: no option other than print. Wired, Newsweek? Not offered on Zinio.

I hope this is a temporary situation. It’s absurd for digital editions to cost more than print, considering the high costs of delivering print magazines to subscribers: printing, trucking, postage, direct-mail renewal reminders, etc. I’ll settle for the same price I pay now for iPad editions.

Here’s a tip for magazine publishers, once Apple relents on permitting subscriptions from within iPad apps:

• Low-cost digital magazine subscription for what is essentially a replica edition of the print magazine.
• Higher subscription rate for enhanced iPad edition with video and multimedia bells and whistles.

Oh, and those unasked-for magazines that show up in my mailbox? Sometimes they are publications that I’m interested in (such as our local city magazine), but please, offer me a free iPad or Zinio subscription; I don’t want print!

When is this going to get fixed?

I’ve installed The Guardian’s new Wordpress plug-in on this blog, and this is my first try at publishing a FULL Guardian article. Bravo to The Guardian for having the vision to push its content out in this way and leverage the power of letting go and turning the Web outside of its walled garden into a revenue opportunity. To the rest of the legacy news media: TAKE NOTE! -Steve

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The content previously published here has been withdrawn. We apologise for any inconvenience.

I’ve had an iPad for a couple weeks now (sharing with my wife and two daughters; it’s a popular gadget around our house). And I’m starting to notice some patterns in buying apps for the new tablet. I’d love to know if any of you share my behavior. (Comment below, please.)

1. I don’t think much before purchasing a low-priced iPad app that is “permanent.” For instance, the Weather HD app looked cool, and even with its limited functionality (compared to the free Weather Channel Max for iPad app), I enjoy the quick look at the current weather and brief forecasts for the next few days and the app’s slick animated photo graphics. 99 cents? Sure, why not.
2. Family members and I have purchased a few more expensive iPad apps: Scrabble ($9.99); Crosswords ($9.99); Pages ($9.99); Starwalk ($4.99, and highly recommended!); and some more low-priced ones: Magic Piano (99 cents); Glee ($2.99); Set ($2.99). Again, each of those apps is “permanent,” as in they will stay on the iPad until we tire of them.

Buy a digital edition of Time magazine on your iPad! … For $4.99?

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news apps, all of them free. Frankly, the news publishers that are giving away these apps are leaving money on the table. Of the apps that I downloaded for free to my iPad, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying 99 cents or $1.99 for those from: New York Times, NPR, USA Today, BBC News. I would pay for these because they are permanent.

Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing. You can even bookmark, say, the NYTimes.com homepage and put an icon on the iPad screen permanently. The reason that someone like me would pay for an iPad news app from a specific news provider is if the experience is superior to viewing the news website on the iPad’s browser.

(At this early stage of iPad news apps, the websites as viewed on the iPad browser sometimes are as good of a or a better viewing experience than viewing the iPad app versions. NYTimes.com viewed on the iPad’s browser is quite nice, for example; in fact, it’s better than the only iPad app available from the New York Times currently, NYT Editors’ Choice.)

Within the news iPad apps I’ve used so far — and I’ll concede that it’s early, and publishers I hope will figure this out soon — the business model seems to be something that the companies will get to later. USA Today’s iPad app, for instance, has a banner ad on the homepage (Marriott Hotels at this writing), but ads don’t show up in much else. The NY Times iPhone app has ads from a single advertiser, at the bottom of the homepage (where banner blindness will make them mostly ineffective due to that positioning), and on the second screens of most news articles.

These apps are mostly “shovelware” from the news websites, and lack even web basics such as allowing user comments.

One nice ad technique used on the NY Times iPad app is an occasional “interstitial” full-page ad, which appears after you click a homepage or section-front headline and appears before you get to view your article. I don’t find this that annoying, but if I did, the Times would be smart to give me an option in the app to turn off such take-over-my-screen ads by clicking a setting and, say, paying a dollar to avoid seeing them for the next month,or maybe $5 to not see them for a year.

There are lots of ideas for “upsells” within an iPad news app to persuade (not demand!) people to pay extra beyond the initial, inexpensive download fee. Let’s say that USA Today’s iPad app had a setting where for $1 a month I could turn on a commenting feature and be allowed to leave comments on stories. This should be the topic of another blog post about how to make money from upsells in news iPad apps, so I’ll leave that for another time.

While major news brands are not taking advantage of obvious revenue opportunities with iPad apps yet, Time magazine, until this week, has been going about it wrong. Initially, an iPad user could purchase a single issue of a Time weekly edition, an enhanced digital edition of the print magazine, for $4.99 per edition. That’s compared to the street price of a printed Time magazine at $4.95.

It’s not just that the iPad single-edition price is a few cents more than the paper edition (which I think is ill-advised, considering the printing and physical distribution costs saved by Time with digital editions), but it’s also absurd that Time was selling each edition as a separate iPad app.

Getting back to my earlier comments, there’s no way that I’m going to pay for individual magazines as individual iPad apps! This approach completely misunderstands the device. First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted (since if I don’t and I continue buying iPad Time editions, my iPad screen will fill up with Time icons for various editions).

Time has now fixed this blunder and offers a Time iPad app for free. From within the app, the iPad user can purchase digital versions of the magazine for $4.99. Old issues are stored in the cloud for later reading, and there’s only one Time icon on the iPad screen. But pricing should be more realistic, I believe, and subscriptions offered. While I don’t think that this is the best iPad business model for Time, at least if its executives want to charge per digital issue, they should get a grasp on what’s likely to fly in digital-content pricing when there’s free content (like Time.com!) available on the iPad browser.

Count me as an iPad fan. I love the device, and more specifically I love the form factor of a tablet and can see it becoming an important part of my media life, taking much time away from my laptop. It does concern me that news publishers, out of the gate, appear to be missing the boat in working on an innovative business model for the tablet. Geez, I hope we’re not seeing the big news brands repeat the mistakes of their past when it came to adapting to new digital devices!

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.