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...
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=29218955077908166
