iPad and the Future of Publishing
Popular Science+ on iPad
Now there is a lot of excitement about iPad saving the publishing industry. Even though I love my iPad, I doubt that it can do anything for the print media. The only real difference between an iPad-optimized website and an iPad App is the price expectation. We come to associate the Web as a free medium whereas we expect to pay for “Apps”. But this will change rather soon. The prices of iPhone apps keep dropping, and if any apps are more than 99 cents, people complain that it’s too expensive. It’s just a matter of time before the vast majority of Apps are free.
Although the novelty of iPad magazines like Popular Science+ may be worth paying for it now, the excitement will wear off pretty soon. Ultimately I don’t think there will be any advantage with reading magazines on an App. Google has done a great job of optimizing Gmail for iPad, and I actually prefer using it within the browser over using iPad’s native email App. Gmail has many great features, some are built-in by default, while others can be added. The features like labeling and filtering would not work on iPad’s email App. There is no chat or SMS features from within the email UI either.
App-based magazines will have the same problem: While some features are going to work better on the App versions, others will be better on the Web versions. The App version could only be used on the device you installed it on, while the Web version could be accessed from any device, iPad, iPhone, or desktop. Your own machine or someone else’s. You have to manage your copy of the magazine App; installing, upgrading, and backing up. The Web version would not require any of them.
As more websites start to take advantage of HTML5, the differences between the App versions and the Web versions will be virtually none. There will be less and less reasons to publish anything as Apps.
Also, less popular magazines could create an iPad version and make it free to take the audience away from more popular magazines, which could force all the magazines to go free.
Another situation publishers are facing now is that the brand names of magazines and newspapers are less relevant now for the readers. Because of the efficiency of the search engines, I can find relevant articles in any publications. I don’t really care who published them. I’m often reading articles from magazines that I’ve never heard of. And, I surf from one publication to another.
The same phenomenon is happening on TV. Because of DVRs, we no longer care what channels our favorite shows are on. In the old days, people were loyal to certain network channels, and watched whatever shows that came on those channels. This was mostly due to the fact that we could not watch what we wanted whenever we wanted. We were at the mercy of network schedules. DVRs and other on-demand video technologies freed us from this. Now we can search and play what we want to watch, just like on the Web. The concept of “network” is no longer relevant.
The same holds true for magazines. Much of the existing conventions and our reading habits are tied to the physical limitations of printed media. Because it did not make sense to print and sell one page at a time, they published a set of articles at a certain time interval. This is no longer relevant.
Furthermore, with printed magazines, we could only buy and carry a limited number of them, so we were stuck reading everything in the magazine we bought. This too is no longer relevant. With the Internet, we have access to thousands of magazines at our fingertip. There is no reason for us to read all the articles in one magazine cover-to-cover. We can jump from one great article in one magazine to another great one in another magazine. We don’t really care who published them. In the end, it’s the content that matters. This is yet another disadvantage of App-based magazines: It’s disruptive to have to go from an App to another App. It’s much easier to surf within a browser.
In the early days of blogs, most of them had no specific topics. Now, the idea of general interest blog is almost an oxymoron. On the Web, there is no point in grouping a variety of unrelated contents because the Web itself is doing that. There has to be a good reason why you would want to group contents into one site. I would rather follow a particular writer than to follow a general news media outlet like New York Times. The latter is too general to be useful. The differences between various news media outlets are too subtle. “New York Times” is just a way to group a variety of contents, and what ties them together is their editorial vision. But the difference between their editorial vision and that of, say, “Washington Post” isn’t great enough to offer any real value in those groupings. In our digital age, such groupings are no longer relevant.
In comparison, “Engadget” and “Gawker” are groupings that make sense. Many of these popular blogs started out as ordinary blogs operated by one person, but they have now become institutions. Blogs are becoming closer to traditional media as traditional media are becoming closer to blogs. I believe somewhere between the two is the future of publishing. iPad is a great device, but I do not think that it can save the traditional business model of publishing. If anything, it will probably accelerate the demise of it.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Very interesting and timely topics, but I would disagree with you on many of your conclusions. First, and this is just my own personal experience, I find that I am much more willing to pay for iPad apps than I have been for iPhone apps. And, I’m willing to pay more for them. I suspect this is because the iPad feels like a real computing platform, whereas running apps on the iPhone seems like a compromise, especially compared to the iPad.
I agree that many publishers are going to have to find a new business model, but I strongly disagree that all content is going to be low- or zero-priced. Finding good, reputable content through a search engine is becoming increasingly difficult. I believe there is a significant opportunity for publishers to become curators of quality content – with quality being a factor of the price you pay. Readers wll also be willing to pay for a particular editorial slant. To say that there is little difference, editorially, between the NYT and the WSJ, is crazy. They’re worlds apart. In fact, in marketing terms, that’s how the two publications differentiate themselves. The same can be true of digital publications.
As to the pros and cons of web apps vs. native app, I agree, it’s not so clear cut. However, I suspect native apps will have access to functionally that will be difficult to emulate with web apps – think responsive animated graphics fast search, etc.. Apple have shown that customers are willing to pay a premium for a better user experience, and i see no reason why this wouldn’t apply to apps. Just to offer an example, although not from the news magazine world, I’ve been working with a developer who offers a native app that duplicates content and functionality that has been available on his web site for several years. His iPhone app was one of the top grossing reference apps of 2009, and his iPad app is also doing well.
In the end, it really does come down to branding. Traditional publications have very well established and trusted brands. If publishers can figure out a way to maneuver their brands into the app world, they will do well. But I don’t think they have long to find out how to do it. Print media is going to be obsolete, for the large part, fairly soon.
Hi Nigel,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I agree that some people will pay for quality content. I think Stratfor is a good example of that, but that is a very different business model. Wall Street Journal gets close to that as well because they are so specialized. The major difference between these paid sites and advertising-driven websites is who pays for them. Quality matters a lot when it comes to business. It’s an investment or business expense. But for the majority of people, news is a form of entertainment. If plenty of free contents are available, they are not going to pay for it. As a matter of fact, paying for contents doesn’t actually guarantee that you get better quality contents.
Furthermore, by charging a small number of people, the publisher would lose a huge number of their current readers. So, the question is whether they can make more by charging or by advertising. For most publishers, the latter is the better option. iPad would not change this situation.
As you point out, Apps have its own advantages, but as I pointed out, they have disadvantages too. So, overall, Apps are not offering “better user experience” than that of the Web versions. Sooner or later, most people will realize this, and balk at the idea of paying for the content that they could get free from the web.
“To say that there is little difference, editorially, between the NYT and the WSJ, is crazy. They’re worlds apart.”
This may be true for you and other hardcore newsreaders, but I don’t think most people would agree. Suppose I pick a news topic from Google News. Let’s say the riot in Greece. I copy the entire article from NYT and also from WSJ, but I don’t tell you which came from which. Do you think you would be able to consistently tell which articles came from which on any given topic? I don’t think most people can. In other words, for most people, they are not “worlds apart” at all. They are in fact, identical for all intents and purposes. This is why I would argue that the brand of news contents don’t matter to most people.
I don’t know that this is an either/or situation. The products that publishers create can focus on entertainment, or quality, or any number of other differentiators. The trick is going to be to find a business model that works and I suspect it will involve a combination of native apps and web apps, paid for by advertising and fee-based sales. The point is, the business model doesn’t need to look anything like the business models that publishers have relied on up to this point. In fact, if they do persist with those old approaches, I suspect they will not last very long.
Publishers need to ask themselves: What is it we do? Provide entertainment is one answer, but like you say, a lot of entertainment is cheap, or free, these days. Curate quality reporting on news and current events is another answer, but as you point out, small publishers can claim to do the same thing and may have more pricing flexibility (although I doubt it). It seems to me that what publishers are really selling is time. Yes, you can find the content/entertainment you want by going to a search engine and ploughing through all of the junk to find those occasional nuggets of good reporting or interesting news, but it requires an investment of time from the consumer. Time is valuable and consumers will pay to have their content curated and delivered.
The idea of a one-size fits all product offering from publishers is obsolete. Why wouldn’t publishers have multiple products, tailored specifically to the consumers that want them. Consumers want basic generic news? Give them advertising-based web apps. Consumers want customized curated content with lot’s of bells and whistles – personalization, better user interface, social features? Give them native apps. The possibilities are endless. And the branding comes into play at the highest level of perception of the news organization, not the individual items of news. You want content with a progressive slant? Download the NYT app. Want a more right-leaning editorial voice? Download the WSJ app. Smart publishers will offer apps to fit every demographic.
Sure, you could do this with web apps, but the big benefit of native apps – aside from the superior user interface – is control over distribution. And that’s something publishers recognize as having a lot of value.
Hi Nigel,
Interesting points. I’ll respond to some of them:
In using Google News, I do not see this problem. The way most people consume news is to scan the headlines and see if any of them sound interesting or relevant to them. They do not search for a specific news item. They scan. These are different concepts. Consumption of news is mainly about keeping up with what other people are talking about. Popularity is the key concept. If you are looking for a piece of information that nobody else cares about, that’s not really “news”. That’s research, and in that scenario, I agree with you that we all have to “plough through all of the junk”. But when consuming news, we do not do this. We just want to scan through the popular news topics. For that, Google News is superior to any news websites because any individual website is just a small subset of what Google News offers.
For instance, I scan through Google News and see “Riot in Greece”. This interests me, so I click on “All 1,234 news articles »”. I then get a long list of articles all about the riot in Greece. I see articles from NYT, WSJ, LA Times, Washington Post, etc., etc.. I see different headlines and short descriptions. I again quickly scan through them to find the one that sounds most interesting. NYT is just one of many that I can choose from.
For me, the idea of limiting myself to NYT is silly. For each topic, an article is only as good as the journalist who writes it. I don’t care if that journalist works for NYT or WSJ. And, each article highlights a different aspect of the same topic. Some people might be interested in the financial consequences of the Greek riot while others might be interested in the cultural aspect. There are many different ways to write about the same topic. Although I like NYT, they are not always going to write about the aspects that I happen to be interested in.
Again, this is why the brand of the publisher is rather irrelevant these days.
The only area where the editorial vision makes a big difference is opinion columns. Here, there is a huge difference between NYT and WSJ. So, for a particular topic, I might want to know what NYT thinks about it, and also what WSJ thinks about it.
But even for opinions, ultimately what matters is individuals who write the opinions. If you like Thomas Friedman, would you care what paper he writes for? Individual writers are like the individual shows on TV; we don’t care which channels our favorite shows are on. We just want to see the shows. The same logic. It’s the writers whose opinions we care about, not the newspapers. The only reason why we cared so much about the brand of newspapers in the past was because individual writers could not print and distribute newspapers on their own. So, the news organizations were a way for them to combine their efforts. With the Web, we don’t need to do this. Now we have individual bloggers whose opinions are read by many more people than the readership that the average NYT writers get.
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Dyske, sorry I let this conversation drop – the real world intervened. It’s a fascinating topic and it will be interesting to see how things look in a few months.
As I get more accustomed to having my iPad around all the time, I find I’m looking to it for more features than are currently available as apps. I suspect for many users, an iPad will become the equivalent of a super intelligent mobile TV, where you can bring up an app (or a web page) and view personalized content at anytime and in any place. It remembers what you’ve seen, queues up new selections, and offers all kinds of bells and whistles that haven’t even been thought of yet. Some of what is provided will be news, but a lot will be entertainment. I have a feeling apps (native and web) are going to become like channels on cable TV and the battleground will be the home screen of the iPad. Branding comes into play in the ability of the app to offer the user personalized news/entertainment. If one brand fails at providing a suitably personalized experience, users will just try another app (brand of entertainment). I remember personalization being a hot topic in dotcoms 10 years ago. iGoogle and MyYahoo are crude approaches. Could be that now is the time for all that personalization technology to really shine.