Why Publishers Don't Like Apps

emedia/vitals reporting:
...Advertising is the real business of media, but traditional publishers couldn't compete with Google and new-media companies for selling digital ads. Apps would interrupt that decline, returning media to its proper, historical structure: publishers could sell digital versions of the same ads that appeared in their print publications (perhaps with a markup if they had interactive elements), valued with the old measurement of rate base.
Expressed like this, the delusion is clear enough, but I succumbed myself—at least a little. I never believed that apps would unwind my industry's disruption; but I felt some readers would want a beautifully designed digital replica of Technology Review on their mobile devices, and I bet that our developers could create a better mobile experience within applications. So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of single-issue sales. Easy, I thought.
Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.

Apple demanded a 30 percent vigorish on all single-copy sales through its iTunes store. Profit margins in single-copy sales are thinner than 30 percent; publishers were thus paying Apple to move issues. Many responded by not selling single copies of their magazines. Then, for a year after the launch of the iPad, Apple could not figure out how to sell subscriptions through iTunes in a way that satisfied ABC, which requires publishers to record "fulfillment" information about subscribers. When Apple finally solved the problem of iPad subscriptions in iTunes, it again claimed its 30 percent share. From June of last year, Apple did permit publishers to fulfill subscriptions through their own Web pages (a handful of publishers, including Technology Review, enjoyed the privilege earlier); but the mechanism couldn't match iTunes for ease of use, and most readers couldn't be bothered to understand it.
...Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites. Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew. Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.
But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, "walled gardens," and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media...
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