Posted by Some interesting points have been made recently, around the possible outcomes for publishers amidst the launch of Apple’s long-awaited iPad. Can iPad do for newspapers what iTunes has already achieved for music sales?
It’s a tough call. Let’s look at the basics first.
iTunes as an online business model fitted exactly where customers wanted it to be – and has continued to deliver innovation to their doorstep. More than 8.5billion songs have been sold on iTunes to date, making it the most successful music retailer in the world.
And talking of retailers, an insightful look here into the changing nature of what newspapers are providing for their readerships: it’s been argued that for news organisations to survive, they need to become news retailers – just as Apple is the middle-man music retailer with iTunes.
Now, I’m not saying that publishers can’t adapt – we’ve seen attempts online, indeed, the New York Times has announced it will be taking much of its content behind paywalls, although the blogs will still be freely available.
To a large extent, audiences online still expect and demand large amounts of content for free. The FT bucked this demand early on, by introducing payment models for prime content, exclusive access rights and a premium-level offer for those customers willing to pay for market intelligence information.
This is not, however, your average online customer. People are notoriously promiscuous when it comes to brand loyalty online and where they source their news of the day. There is no concept of brand loyalty for many products and services on the web.
And, ultimately, can the iPad create that loyalty for publishers and newspapers? Only time will tell, of course.
If it comes down to the usual method, you flip the coin – I’m calling heads for Apple. They’ve already got the market covered, seeing as however news is sourced and bought online, they are providing what will probably become the preferred platform. That doesn’t mean, of course, that print newspapers will survive and thrive from it. Online news platforms are more popular than ever.
How’s your news publishing platform looking today – Robust? Scalable? Customer-led? Innovative? Profitable? Online, even?
Bristol Editor is a newsroom-trained media blogger, who has worked on daily newspapers across the region, launched online business sites for publishers, edited business magazines, and more recently developed social media services for companies and individuals across Bristol and the wider UK. He is now writing a weekly column exclusively for Bristol24-7
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While several applications can be peculiarly usable in the initial stage is short, just a topic of time earlier numerous of its applications programmes will be exchanged by iPad earned for bigger screens. Many of them are not needful, only used as a normal browser, like Facebook, for example, rather of a little edition of the iPhone to use …
As I started to type that, I intended to mention something historical as well. Use Google to search for “Acorn NewsPad”
It never came to be, and lacked many of the features of the modern equivalents like the iPad or Touch Book (eg the touchscreens) – but consider that the design is over 12 years old and, if memory serves, the idea was primarily to provide news content. Literally, your daily papers delivered electronically to your NewsPad.
I would have thought the iPad is a bit of a red herring in all of this. It just happens to be a very high profile device, but there are many other (portable) devices that can be used to access online content, paid or free. For example, yesterday I ordered a Touch Book from alwaysinnovating.com – which is a particularly good example, because the keyboard is optional; it can come as a touchscreen controlled device, and is a similar size.
With iTunes there were a number of combined factors – as you said, it’s what customers wanted – but the other factors were that it had both hardware (the iPod) and software for existing computers to back it up. With the iPad, that’s much less of a clear cut case:
The online side of the equation is coming from the content providers themselves – not Apple.
The software is already covered – it’s your web browser, whether that’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or a lesser known one such as the excellent NetSurf.
The hardware? Everything from smartphones to desktop computers. Even limiting it to people on the move (and ruling out smartphones due to screen size limitations), you have existing laptops and notebooks or, for more convenience, netbooks and similar – including the Touch Book I mentioned above, as well as the iPad.
Having said all of that, there’s no doubt the iPad will itself be a success – Apple has a large enough, loyal fanbase to be sure of that – but I predict that people will credit the iPad unduly with successes in other areas; things for which it won’t deserve the credit.