Tag Archives: Newspapers

Don’t charge for digital when printed is free…

Leave a reply

You’ll remember from my recent posts (“It’s official – the 6 year old’s verdict is that digital magazines are better!“) that I’m now a convert to digital newspapers, when done well – like the good old London Metro (which is free for both the printed paper and the digital iPad version).  So this week, starting the London commute again and picking up the free London Evening Standard each night on the way home (at the London tube stations), I was excited to read about their new iPad version.

All looks good, so where do I get it and how?  But then reading the smaller print, what’s this, you can get a free trial?  And then what?  Oh then it’s £4.99 per month.  But the printed one, the one everyone picks up at the tube and train stations is still free – yes with ads (lots) but it’s free.  The iPad is pretty much the same version, with ads, but I have to pay for it?  That’s all wrong!  Ok, the printed one used to be paid for but it’s not now, and hasn’t been for some time.

I’m now one customer the Evening Standard won’t get with their new digital version.  With this new planned business model, I’m not even going to go for the trial.  Why should I?  It’s too easy for me to get the printed one every evening and hey I could get a few if I wanted, and all for free.

Digital is not about a new way of making money from subscribers.  It’s about a different, and yes new, channel for how we as the customer want to be able to access the same content.  That’s it.  Why should it cost me more to consume?  It cost you more to build it?  Ok, but that’s all about investment for the future – digital is the way it’s going so get on-board quick and get some earlier adopters with you to iron out problems etc, then maybe look at new pricing.  Like a monthly charge for premium content, not the normal free content.  But not a short term return, that won’t work.

Some reviews of the Evening Standard iPad app from the Apple Appstore…

… it’s not just me!

The Metro are still – by a long way – the only newspaper publisher (in the UK at least) who are doing this well.  Their printed and digital versions are free, and their digital version offers more than the printed version, and hey yes I may now be willing to pay extra for the digital one because it offers more.  I said may – still not 100% convinced.

The end of content ownership?

Leave a reply

Following on from my earlier post on going digital and what content we’ve gone digital with , I want to go back to the thorny subject of ownership.  Do you ever own content?  Do you need to own content?  What does it matter?

Over the last few years I’ve been reading a series of books called “50 xxx Ideas You Really Need To Know.” – where the “xxx” is not something pornographic but a specific topic or area.  Like Digital, Economics, World History, Physics, Maths, Genetics, Management, Philosophy and more.  They’re all great books, at a bargain price and very very readable.  A little plug here to where you can get them on Amazon – do take a look…

One of these books is aptly titled, “50 Digital Ideas You Really Need To Know”, written by Tom Chatfield (British author, writer and commentator) and is well worth a read.  It covers all digital and technology topics in this space, including:

  • Internet service provision
  • Web 2.0
  • Blogging
  • Aggregation
  • Privacy
  • Hacking
  • Cyberwar
  • Games consoles
  • Mashups
  • Culture jamming
  • E-commerce
  • Location-based services
  • Virtual goods
  • eGovernment
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Free software movement
  • Digital distribution
  • Cloud computing
  • Net neutrality
  • Semantic web
  • Augmented reality
  • Convergence
  • The internet of things
  • Distraction

Quite an extensive list and all in nice chunks of a few pages long.  Under the section on Digital Distribution, Tom talks about the end of ownership and covers many of the points I wrote about before…

Why are we worried about ownership?  Does physical ownership matter?  No it doesn’t.  The content never really was ours and we’ve simply been granted rights to use it – through payment (by whatever means that was agreed etc).  What does physical ownership give us?  Something to put on the shelf and look pretty?  It’s more from an technical era gone by where physical media was the only way to consume the content – that’s it.  Very simple.  We’re now in the digital age and we’re making the – sometimes painful – transition from physical to digital.

It is a transition and as I said before, we’re not talking a big bang approach here where one day everything becomes digital.  No, we need to make a controlled change that suits us, when the technology is right, at the right price and when it works well (with a nice user experience to it).  Some areas aren’t ready yet (e.g. newspapers) and some have been ready for a while (e.g. music).

My on-going experiment with digital newspapers is interesting and the current front runner is the Metro (the free London morning newspaper).  It’s available in the Apple Newstand and is fantastic.  It’s not just a digital scanned version of the paper (as some other digital newspapers are) but a fully interactive version with great ads that are fun, videos, hi-res photos that you can zoom in on and scan around and lots more.  And it’s free every weekday.  Interestingly I’m not alone in my high ratings for this app – it actually won the Newspaper App of the Year Award (at the 2012 Newspaper Industry Awards).

The subject of content ownership is one that’s being actively debated and discussed online and elsewhere.  Here’s a link to an interesting article by PCMag.com from mid-2011.  A few changes since mid-2011 but still relevant…

The Future of Entertainment Summit 2012 was held this week in London, with some great speakers from across the content, entertainment, digital and broadcast space and some great discussions.  I wasn’t able to attend this year but was watching Twitter closely for the updates on what was being said.  See a few of the Tweets from the day below all around content and consumption…

It isn’t about ownership anymore and it doesn’t need to be.  It’s now about consumption and access to content, and yes now the digital consumer!  The next challenge is guaranteeing that access – keeping your internet connection (as it is now) up and running and what happens when it goes down.

How digital are you? Videos? Music? Books? Games? Newspapers?

Leave a reply

Having worked in the digital media, online and content space for over 10 years and being a big fan of the latest and greatest technology, I like to think that this Noble household is pretty digital.

But how digital are we when it comes to consuming content – it’s very different depending on the type of content.

Music

CDs? We don’t have many. The ones we do have, are for in the car and even those are getting used less and less, replaced by the iPhone and Bluetooth connectivity. The CDs we did have, have all been digitised into our iTunes library that neatly syncs with the other devices around the house.

Videos

VHS tapes? None. We got rid of those a few years back and moved to DVDs. I don’t think the little Nobles will even know what they are. For the home videos, we went through the painstaking process of hooking up a VCR to the pc and playing and recording digitally all the ones we wanted to keep. The quality isn’t brilliant but they’re more than watchable. DVDs? Not too many. We still have some of the classics in our library but every so often even they’re cleared out. The neat little AppleTV is the home video consumption hub for us – nice and easy to use, great selection of content and no more popping out to the local Blockbuster. Am I bothered about owning a collection of physical media? No.

HD-DVD? We tried it and yes I thought it would win the HD format war. But it’s no more. We didn’t have a big collection and we’ve sold them all now, including the player. Blu-Ray? We also tried it but found the PS3 user interface not too friendly, so gave up on that as well.

Games

We still have some console games on physical media but even they’re getting fewer. You can now download games on most consoles and it’s often cheaper and there’s no difference in the experience. And coming up fast are games as apps on smartphones and tablets, for a fraction of the price and even streamed to the TV.

Books

This is where it gets interesting. I love books and yes there is something about holding a physical book and turning the pages and reading it, and it’s not the same with digital. Sure I get how convenient digital is and in some cases cheaper (but in many cases not cheaper thanks to Amazon)and how it can be more interactive and provide a far more immersive experience. Apple’s iBooks is great, it works very well and has that usual awesome Apple experience to it. Amazon’s Kindle is also good but with no colour version in the UK still and missing apps, browsing and more, its not for me right now.

Having said that, I read something the other day about what the author of a book is trying to say – he or she is telling a story and it is all about the content. The physical book is not the content, that’s just the medium and it shouldn’t impact the experience or story that the author is trying to get across. An interesting way of thinking and it actually applies to all types of content – not just books. But digital books aren’t there yet for me, I don’t doubt it will come in time but now we have more physical books than digital ones. Maybe it’s the little Nobles who’ll help make this transition for us.

Newspapers

This is the one that made me think I’ll do a blog post about it. Up until the end of last year we had weekend newspapers and one weekday one delivered only. The rest of the week there was no time to read them, for me at least. Then through changes at work I was at home in the mornings more than normal so went for the full 7 days a week of papers. Great, with the extra time to read them in the morning and the newspapers 7 days a week then stuck. But now I’m trying an experiment and dropping back to just the weekend and one weekday physical newspapers and seeing what I can do with the iPad the other mornings and how the experiences compare. It’s only day 4 in and I’m missing the newspapers, how long can I last? Maybe it’s the Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strips – even though they’re still delivered to my inbox via an RSS feed.

There are apps on the iPad or in the Newsstand app for the papers we read and yes they do have the cartoons. It’s now time to test these as well as news aggregator apps that I’ve been using so far.

Why I’m missing them I’m not sure yet. Maybe it’s just part of the transition of moving to digital as with everything and it will eventually make sense. I’m not convinced about the Sunday papers though, having all those sections to read is part of a Sunday morning for me and always has been.

One thing to look at is the whole idea of “owning” content. Do we ever own it? Do we need to own it? Even on physical media – taking up shelf space – we’re simply licensed to view it and within certain guidelines (e.g. not running our own paid for home movie cinema for lots of people). Why not just pay for content as a utility when you use it? Or even – and this is a big one – content becomes part of our internet, phone etc (connectivity) bundle and is all inclusive, for you to use whenever and wherever you choose, subject of course to your particular (license) agreement.

This requires a huge shift in how we pay for content, how content creators are paid, how artists are paid and how royalties are paid, and business models around creation, distribution and storage and much more all need to change, but it’s a possible option for the future. We need to think more about new models and new ways of consuming content.