Applications like Flipboard and TweetMag for iPad create your personal magazine based on what the people you follow on various social networks share. They get their content from your Facebook friends, Twitter followees and your RSS feeds. Flipboard has been lauded extensively by Apple, receiving the 2010 “App of the Year” award, and recently received $10.5 million in funding.
There are a few problems with this approach to content delivery. One: you’ll never see the content how the publisher meant you to see it. Websites are getting prettier every day, and while the bare bones of an article is still the longform text, any effort from the publisher’s side to make the reading experience more pleasant is immediately lost (See: MSNBC articles) . Instead you get the same reading experience for every website. One could argue that this is a good thing, since the “default” experience of a (news) website is pretty shoddy, and apps like FlipBoard raise that “default” bar. This raises the question: if RSS is enough, why bother to design content at all?
The second, most obvious problem for a publisher is that a FlipBoard user does not see the website’s advertisements. Contradiction: the lack of advertisements is one of the main reasons the Flipboard experience is better than the website. Your news loads fast because only the relevant content is pulled in.
If everyone is viewing content through RSS or apps like FlipBoard, the websites get less eyeballs and subsequently less clickthroughs on advertisements. For publishers, applications like FlipBoard are parasites.
One of the solutions to conquer this “stealing of content” is to instantiate a paywall. This breaks sharing and content longevity: two fundamental parts of the web. A website could delete RSS functionality to solve part of the problem: but now their content is harder to reach. One solution is to put the ads inside the RSS feeds; I’m not sure how FlipBoard handles that.
But you don’t necessarily have to serve your content through a website. Some high-profile tech bloggers — like Jason Calacanis — have their own newsletter instead of an RSS feed. Technically, it’s way easier to charge for a newsletter than for an RSS feed. Daring Fireball used to have a paid RSS feed, but it eventually dissapeared because it was confusing to visitors, and a technical hassle (see: Regarding the DF feed). Daring Fireball makes most of it’s money with weekly sponsorships where a sponsor gets highlighted, and some innocuous ads via The Deck network.
The newsletter and sponsorships approaches only seem to work when you’re already high profile and read. My guess is this approach is great if you have 1000 true fans and low income expectations. It doesn’t scale up to the size of an organization like The New York Times Company.
A new kid on the block then: Readability. This service used to be a bookmarklet to “sanitize” web pages of ads and offer a proper reading view (similar to: the “Reader” feature in Safari; Instapaper’s text view). Now it kinda does the same but as a web application, charging $5 a month (or more, if you want to) to do the same. The gist of the idea is that 70% of the income goes back to content publishers if they registered a Readability account. For example, I sign up for Readability, I give these guys $10 a month, then I read 2 articles through readability. $3 goes to Arc90 (Readability) and $3,5 to both publishers.
How can a service that essentially warps publisher’s content to another form expect to get any respect from publishers? They must be proud of what they created. If you build a good website, there is no need to make it extra readable anymore. I understand Readability’s success as a (free) bookmarklet. But setting themselves up as a middleman for the publishing industry is probably a bridge too far.
Taking a cut of the action is a valid business model (see Kiva; Kickstarter) but it creates a new problem: you’re dependant on a third party now. There is one overseer who decides whether you get paid or not. And that’s just horrible. The best example is of course, Apple’s app store. Why 1984 won’t be like 1984? We’re getting closer and closer when one singular entity can make decisions that affect whole industries. It just screams “YOU CAN’T BUILD YOUR BUSINESS ON THIS”. You can’t invest in the creation of a kickass iPad/iPhone application only to have Apple tell you the next week you can’t give people who PAID for the content they already paid for. You can’t make this up, right? Every transaction has to go through Apple’s store, so Apple can get it’s cut.
(Related: Transmit Update half-available. If you have a security update you want to push it out as fast as possible. Not possible when you let the overseer handle your software distribution.)
So what’s the solution? How can content publishers charge for their content in a meaningful way? The only sensible model I can think of is freemium, where the basics are free and you charge for advanced features. You need free to spread the word; you need to charge to be sustainable. Light users pay less, heavy users pay more. It should be easy to pay for the advanced features or extra content (think SMS, micropayments). Content should be accessible on any device. The browser will continue to rule: native apps will die once the browsers have enough capabilities. Apps will become shortcuts to websites (like on the Chrome Web Store. Digital and physical need to be interwoven. Books, newspapers and magazines won’t die anytime soon, but will eventually be replaced by digital technology. I’m talking way in the future here.
These were a few of my thoughts on publishing. What do you think?