I had some nice things to say about the mobile application for the UKs Guardian newspaper earlier this week – so it pleased me today to see that it has been downloaded over 9,000 times, despite costing over two pounds.
What’s the app?
The Guardian released the iPhone app in an effort to transform your iPhone into a newspaper. It’s not aimed at getting you to connect to the Guardian website through your phone, but rather at creating an experience that it is right for the mobile medium. So it cuts down on search and text entry time by having a powerful categorising system that lets you get the stories you’re interested in pushed straight to your phone. It also has an “offline” function so you can download a lot of articles to your iPhone that you can read later, even if you’re in an area with no mobile coverage.
What are the figures?
The app costs £2.39 if you’re in the UK. It costs €3 euro in Ireland and $4 in the States, which is a very slight markup. And according to figures released through Guardian subsidiary MocoNews, it has sold over 9,000 units in the first two days – which puts immediate revenue from the application at over £15,000 in 48 hours (after Apple’s traditional 70/30 split).
What we think?
In the past, I’ve been somewhat dubious about the possibility of making real money from application sales. It seems that people gravitate naturally towards the free, ad-supported apps – often at the expense of higher quality, ad-free apps that only cost a few quid. But the Guardian has somewhat restored my faith.
Now, the big question is whether or not this is sustainable over a long period. Certainly the advertising campaign behind this app would have attracted the money conscious – the Guardian has been selling this as the way to pay just once for Guardian content for the rest of your life… and at less than £3 for infinite newspapers, that’s a good bargain. A bargain that, by the time this article is published, probably over 10,000 people will have taken.
But does that represent the spike of income here? I know it’s early days yet, but it will interesting to see how quickly sales trail into the long tail. On top of anything else, the chances of any of those 10,000 people buying a Guardian paper ever again has just gone down a lot.
However, it’s also worth remembering that the Guardian now has an app in place on 10,000 phones. And for the people who paid out for it, it will probably be an app they access quite regularly. You can be damn sure that the Guardian has the next step in the monetisation process planned out. The pay-once, read-forever policy is really just a flourish that allows the Guardian to say “now that we’ve got your attention…”
The Guardian like many other newspapers are faced with declining ad revenues and are looking at ways to monetize their content. But rather than choosing the best option which is using a billing system to charge for their content, they’ve gone for the lazy option and developed a mobile app. Apps are fun to design but a nightmare to deliver. The bigger question for newspapers is that if advertising revenue isn’t a sustainable business model, how do you deliver content that mobile users can easily pay for?
Read a full review here http://bit.ly/8DHTYC
Let’s ask why the Guardian is selling the app rather than giving it away for free like everyone else. They want to see if people will pay – and guess what, people will. But getting people to pay for an app is not going to solve their revenue problems or solve declining ad revenues. For that they need to sell access to their news stories – either per read, for the day or as an ongoing subscription. So to be honest messing about with apps may be cool and trendy, but it’s really all a bit of a waste of time.
The sooner the newspapers realise that customers will pay for the convenience of reading well written premium content on their phone and get on and implement it the better. It’s really easy to achieve using a mobile billing platform like Bango Payment (http://bango.com/payment) so why are they are wasting time taxing iPhone users that are not smart enough to work out how to access the same news via their browser for free.
So my message to the folks at the Guardian and other newspapers – if you have confidence in the value of your content just get on and start charging for mobile access.
See my other comments at http://bit.ly/8DHTYC.
Pingback: Tweets that mention Guardian iPhone application proves that people will pay for quality on mobile -- Topsy.com
Thanks for the review. It’s safe to say (and I’m the product manager who worked on the app) that we obviously appreciate a one-off charge is not a sustainable commercial model for a product that requires continuous investment. That said, we needed to consider numerous elements; including desire to pay in a still nascient market. We took this project very seriously and we’re delighted with the response and reviews. At a very basic level – we realised (unlike many others it should be noted) that quality is key. We hope our entry level product has raised the bar – consumers needed it frankly as too many of the apps in our category simply aren’t good enough. We’ve got very exciting plans in the pipeline for 2010 – we will ask, learn and listen to our audience as they represent the most important marketing channel of all…
Quick blogpost on the philosophy behind the Guardian iPhone app here: http://www.discombobulatedpm.blogspot.com