Content Matters

During the past week, my Twitter stream has been filled with various thoughts on the demise of News Corp’s (NWS) tablet-centric news app, The Daily (including my own). Some, perhaps in an effort to be provocative, have suggested that the end of The Daily signals the idea that tablet-based publishing itself has proven a failed model. Here are a few of those stories:

Felix Salmon on The impossibility of tablet-native journalism.

Mathew Ingram: Why Rupert Murdoch's bold bet on The Daily was doomed from the start.

The failure of The Daily says little about the future of tablet publishing, and mostly tells the tale of a failed publishing initiative. Let’s take a look at what The Daily was:

A tablet-only (to start), paid subscription, consumer app, providing general news content, with a very high budget. 

Now, let's break that down into its parts:

Tablet-only: By the end, The Daily had moved beyond tablets to include smartphone, and also had integrated the ability to share content via the web. But to start, it was a single-platform (iPad) product. And the fact that it was optimized for the iPad was both a strength and a weakness. 

Paid subscription consumer news app: the good news is that we are seeing paid content take hold in various markets. But consumers are only willing to pay for content not perceived to be readily available for free elsewhere.

High budget: one of the challenges large companies have when trying to launch something new is that they bring with them high cost structures. Startups don’t dangle 7-figure salaries to attract talent, but large companies fall into an expense base that’s not sustainable. Oh, and The Daily was the only app to run a Super Bowl commercial.  

Yet, despite that high cost structure, The Daily really only faced a challenge once News Corp split into two companies. As part of a single, diversified entertainment business, a $30m annual budget for the Daily was almost a rounding error, easily covered by box office proceeds for the movie Avatar in Poland. Not much to pay for a real-time R&D lab, whose learnings can be applied throughout the multi-billion dollar company. Yet, split off into a business already wracked by difficulties, it became an expensive luxury.

So, what lessons can we learn from The Dailly

Mobile First vs Tablet-Only: There’s a real difference between being Mobile First and being Tablet Only. The Daily became a walled garden, making it difficult to share content or to shift your reading from one platform to another.

In building digital products, it’s critical to understand user behavior. Will users skim your content on their mobile device during the morning commute, marking content to read on the desktop when they get to the office? Or, are they marking content during the day to read later on their tablet on the ride home? Do users need to share your content with peers? Particularly for b2b content, the need to shift from one platform to another is critical.

User Experience Matters: While The Daily ultimately failed in reaching their goal of a half-million paying subscribers to a consumer news product, they did exceed 100,000 paid subs. That’s pretty impressive considering the ubiquity of free news sources on tablets and the web. User engagement was high and they created many real fans. Rather than a boring “replica” app, the Daily created a compelling user experience, leveraging the iPad in ways few others have done.

Specialized, hard-to-find information beats generic news: This one almost goes unsaid, but while many companies are finding that users will continue to pay for information they can’t find elsewhere (particularly in b2b),there’s no appetite to pay for content where there is a viable free substitute. Editorial quality and a big marketing budget can’t overcome “good enough” free alternatives.

I’ll be exploring these and related issues this Thursday at the Specialized Information Publishers Association (“SIPA”) Digital Publishing and Marketing Institute conference in Miami.

SIPA members, by definition, should not face the problem of selling generic information to consumers. These companies offer niche products aimed at b2b markets. During this session, we’ll be exploring trends in mobile and tablet use, particularly among business users and explore how to develop an appropriate mobile and tablet strategy. We'll take a hands-on look at publishers who are doing it right (and a few who appear to be on a misguided path). I hope to see you there.

Related articles

In Defense of the Daily (RIP)

Why Magazine Apps Suck

News Corp.'s The Daily: Successful Experiment, Failed Publication

The Daily closes shop: why the news app was doomed from the start | Jeff Jarvis

There's an interesting discussion going on this morning on Fred Wilson's A VC blog in a post called Rethinking Mobile First. I'd encourage you to read the entire post AND the comments, but here's a short recap, along with my thoughts.

Fred's post is in response to a post by Origami Labs and Everyme co-founder Vibhu Norby questioning whether mobile is the right platform for many new app developers to focus on and why Origami is pivoting from mobile first to web first.

The Norby post highlights the fact that mobile-centric startup success has been limited to a handful of apps:

Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others 

The challenge, as he notes, is that the conversion process from download through true engagement eliminates most users. In the case of Everyme:

At best, we retain 5% of users through the entire onboarding process. Attempts to fix it have raised it only nominally. We are not alone on that count even amongst apps with much better onboarding and many more app versions than our own.

In his response, Fred notes that despite the fact that it's hard, it's necessary:

But just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it. I am convinced the next set of large and valuable consumer facing services will be built with mobile as the primary user interface. You can see it in the success of Uber and Etsy this holiday season. That's where your users are most of the time. And if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.

I tend to agree with Fred on this one. Mobile IS difficult. It's hard to get your app noticed in the first place, hard to get users to download it and even harder to get them to return to it a second, third and fourth time. But that's not altogether different than the web experience. In the early days of the web, people bookmarked sites all the time. I had hundreds of bookmarks in my Netscape bookmark manager. Of those hundreds of bookmarks there were even a dozen or more than I returned to frequently, but most just sat in the list, never to be clicked again. 

Your platform is not the biggest factor in user engagement. Your application is. Are you providing a compelling experience that users rely upon in their daily life? If so, I'm convinced you can deliver that experience on any platform. That's not to say that the experience won't differ on the mobile platform than on the desktop, but if you deliver value, users will return.

That said, the platform is key in how users interact with your app. Does your onboarding process require users to type a lot? That's fine on the web, less so on tablets and a real challenge on smartphones. Does your business model depend on running tons of ads on every page? Again, that may be fine on the desktop (though I could argue otherwise), less so on mobile devices.

The key, of course, is understanding what you are enabling users to do, then optimizing your offering (whether a native app, a mobile web app or a web page) to deliver that capability as simply as possible. Understanding your audience is critical. Are you aiming for smartphones or tablets? Do you expect a lean forward or a lean back experience?

And mobile first doesn't have to mean app-first. For publishers, mobile first can simply be rethinking your content so that it thrives in a mobile and/or tablet experience. That may mean creating shorter articles with more images and video content. If you build web pages that look great on tablets, they'll probably serve you well on the desktop. The reverse is rarely the case.

So, is mobile development easy? Not at all. Is there a simple path to success? No. But does that suggest that mobile-first is not the right strategy? No. Your customers are shifting more of their time to tablets and mobile devices. Mary Meeker's latest study shows that 29% of American adults currently own a tablet or eReader. And it's safe to say that after this holiday season, that number will probably be more like 33%. Is that a trend that you're willing to bet against?

Success will come to those publishers and developers who understand their audience and delight them with engaging products on the platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.

 

Related articles

Why We're Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first

Beware the Mobile-First Strategy

Rethinking Mobile First