All Posts Tagged With: "iphone"

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.)

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?

On the latest Journalism Now Podcast (where I’m one of the regulars), we interviewed Jacob Colker, founder of a very cool “micro-volunteering” service using the iPhone (and the web).

The Extraordinaries is a brilliant concept in empowering the crowd to do good things. Foremost, the idea is to allow people to use the little bits of spare time they have (riding the bus home, waiting at the DMV, waiting for the movie to start, etc.) to do small bits of volunteering using the Extraordinaries iPhone app. Examples include tagging photos for the Smithsonian or other museums. The San Diego Voice investigative news website is asking people to use the app to record location and photos of city agencies and buildings wasting water during the current drought period.

This app and model of micro-volunteering has potentially huge implications for journalism. Reporters and editors should be thinking about how Colker’s project can help them improve and expand their reporting and research projects. I hope you’ll listen to the interview.

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.)

I recently purchased the new iPhone app Men’s Health Workouts for $1.99 on the iPhone App Store. Yes, I really should use it to get in better shape, but rather I bought it to try out a new form of mobile app payment made possible by Apple’s recent release of the 3.0 OS for the iPhone.

Till now, iPhone apps could be purchased for a one-time fee (typically ranging from 99 cents to $9.99), and as a buyer you get free upgrades as new versions come out. But now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.

As the news industry tries to figure out a model for making money from mobile content, Apple has (at least for the iPhone) offered up a valuable new tool. We just need to figure out how to use it.

There are numerous news-related iPhone apps available already for free. USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times … all have an app that offers a better experience than reading their content on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Some publishers have experimented with paid iPhone apps: People magazine charges $1.99 for the “People Celebrity News Tracker,” which give celebrity junkies breaking news on the stars’ latest (scandal, baby, breakup, marriage, etc.) on their iPhones.

For a news publisher to take advantage of the ability to charge for premium or special content within its own iPhone app, it will have to charge something for the app itself. 99 cents is a reasonable price that should not scare too many people away, as long as there’s real value in using the app even if you never buy any premium content or service subsequently.

So let’s think about what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app, a la Men’s Health. I’ll toss out a few ideas and thoughts, but I hope you’ll add some of your own in the comments section below.

1. Perhaps the best opportunity is for one-off premium purchases, as the Men’ Health iPhone app demonstrates. If the phone user is reading a news organization’s coverage of climate-change (free, of course), then the publisher can sell an e-book, say for $2, via the app which may be of interest to those truly passionate about the topic and wanting more. … The current day’s interactive crossword puzzle on the phone app can be free, but the app user can pay 25 cents to scan older puzzles and instantly download another to play. … Reading free football coverage on the phone app, the user might be able to pay 50 cents for an audio interview with the winning quarterback.
2. Enable premium services for an added fee. For instance, a news phone app for the New York Times might disable the ability to leave comments on stories on the basic 99-cent app, but allow a user to pay an extra $1.99 to turn on that ability. Or perhaps an extra $9.99 turns on the NYT searchable article archives feature, which is disabled on the basic app.
3. Delay the news by an hour. I’m not sure how I feel about the wisdom of this idea, but it’s a possible revenue-generator. Charge 99 cents for the basic app, but delay delivery of all news content to the phone app by 1 hour. The app user can, from within the app, pay an additional $1.99 to remove the hour delay. This might make more sense on a niche advertising app, say the “Washington Post Rental Finder”; for-rent listings are delayed on the basic 99-cent app, but for an extra fee the app delivers new listings right away, and even notifies the user when a listing that fits requested criteria is first published.
4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
5. A news app might have a paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house. With the iPhone 3.0 OS, push notifications are now possible for iPhone apps; personalized push alerts could be a nice paid upgrade to the basic app.

It wouldn’t be difficult to spend the rest of the day dreaming up ideas for news-related iPhone apps and premium paid add-on, a la Men’s Health Workouts. But what ideas do you have? Tell me in the comments.

Created by the artist with an iPhone painting app.

So on Wednesday, Amazon will be introducing a larger Kindle e-reading device. I’ll be away from the Internet on my mountain bike in southwestern Colorado so will probably miss the announcement. But I can’t help but ponder the significance of the advancement of the portable e-reader.

While I do believe that Kindles (medium and large) and other e-readers will grow in popularity, I still can’t get too excited about them. Now, if a Kindle device ran the Mac operating system, was a serious replacement for my Macbook, and of course had a color screen, then I’d really take it seriously.

But for now, I can’t imagine wanting to add another device to carry around with me.

Here’s my personal history with extra devices (it’s short). Years ago I bought a Palm Pilot clone, called a Handspring. It was cool at first, and was one of my many attempts to find a to-do and calendar system that worked for me. Trouble was, I seldom took it out with me; I simply wasn’t comfortable carrying a cell phone AND a Handspring PDA in my pockets. The Handspring gathered dust for years; it’s probably in a box somewhere in my office.

I suspect many people will have the same experience with the Kindle, including the new one. Sure, there will be Kindle aficionados who are never without their e-reader. (I have a friend who fits that description.) But I don’t see the Kindle as a device that you’ll always want to carry with you.

For me, the iPhone changed my life, and for the first time in my life I have an organization system that I regularly use and is always with me. Between Google Calendar and Remember the Milk on the iPhone, I’m now more organized than I’ve ever been. The reason is simple enough: My iPhone is always with me (even on a mountain bike ride miles away from cell service).

The larger screen of the new Kindle may be appealing to newspaper and magazine publishers, and it well could be a boon for them. But if I had a $1 million development budget, I’d allot a small portion of it to publishing to Kindle and e-readers, and spend most on developing apps for delivering content and services to smart phones.

In my view, the small size of the phone’s screen is far outweighed by another positive factor: The phone is nearly always with me. Want to get your news content to me any time I’m awake? Get it to me on my iPhone.

As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, and at the end of the workout send the data to a website where you can later look at a map of your route. It’s pretty cool stuff, for a phone.

The first app I tried (and one of the first introduced) was RunKeeper, for which I paid $9.99 to download from the iPhone App Store. I’ve also tried out several free competitors that do pretty much the same thing: Fitnio, Trailguru, and Path Tracker. Peruse the Health and Fitness category of the App Store, and now you’ll find even more fitness-tracking applications, some free and some that cost anywhere from 99 cents up to several dollars. It’s getting really competitive in this little segment of the iPhone apps market.

So I was interested to receive an e-mail yesterday from RunKeeper’s developer, announcing that the app is about to become free. The reason is obvious: The company wants to become a dominant player in the mobile GPS tracker space and build up a large user community. The best way to do that with so many competitors is to give away the application.

Developer Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper Inc. says the company will shift to a business model based on selling advertising and possibly premium paid features (to be determined). For now, “We are … foregoing short-term revenues with the hope that our community will get to massive scale.”

I wonder if this will become a trend in the mobile-phone application community? Sure, you can charge if you’ve got an application that’s unique or has very few competitors. But for segments where the phone app market gets flooded with competitors, developers may be forced into the free model.

Well, it’s certainly a nice thing for consumers. We’ll see if companies like Jacobs’ can figure out how to make money from free and survive.

I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, but we’re not there yet.

This morning I took a mountain bike ride on the Walker Ranch trail near Bouldler (CO), and I had TrailGuru.com‘s iPhone application track the route. The software worked well, and when finished I uploaded the track to the TrailGuru website. Here’s it is:

Steve and Pete’s slow tour of Walker Ranch

There are several problems with the track:

1. Maximum speed: 46mph (umm, no; 20mph hour would be more like it).
2. Total ascent: 4268ft (that would have been a great workout, but the actual trail ascent is around 1750ft).
3. Distance: 8.15mi (my bike odometer and the trail map agree that it’s really 7.5mi).
4. A chunk of the map route shows as blank; that section is in the trees, where GPS didn’t work.

Also, the battery on my iPhone was nearly dead at the end of the trail.

My trusty Garmin GPS unit would have done a much better job — more accurate, and the batteries would last for a much longer ride.

It’s exciting that we’re starting to see smart phones that can work as GPS devices. But at this point the hardware isn’t up to the task even for the short ride that I did this morning, though the software is already getting pretty good.

I especially like TrailGuru, since its website collects tracks from the iPhone as well as tracks uploaded from traditional GPS units. I may still track some short rides with the iPhone, but for long ones I’ll use the Garmin. With TrailGuru, I can store everything in one place.

I’ve also tested RunKeeper, which is similar but not as full-featured as TrailGuru. RunKeeper’s big drawback is that it doesn’t track elevation gain/loss; for me that’s an essential thing. Its developers say they’ll add that soon.

It’s no fault of those app developers, but the other thing that’s a pain is that the application must be running to collect GPS data, so you can’t use the iPhone for anything else (other than to answer a call, which puts the apps on hold while you talk; and you can listen to music using the phone’s iPod functionality, as long as you launch iPod before starting the trail app). The iPhone will work better as a GPS at the point the iPhone operating system supports running more than one application at a time.