“Don’t charge for your wares, and experiment, experiment, experiment.” Thus Google’s advice to newspapers, paraphrasing. Of course, when your dozens of no-charge experiments – for example, Wave and Buzz – are underpinned by a cash engine that is a near monopoly which never slows, it is possible to dole out such advice with a straight face. It would moreover be irresponsible and a potential cause for shareholder litigation if any other advice were to be given, considering that every free-of-charge newspaper experimentation – at least the kind suggested by Google – would add to the search engine’s traffic. Well done.
At least for the near term, this self-serving position by Google is the right thing for Google. (And there is nothing wrong with self-interest, by the way, as long as it is unabashed, unapologetic, and to the point: I salute Google on all counts.) But in the longer term, newspapers will not survive as what essentially amounts to be high-tech blogs that offer access to games and social nets – which I believe is the suggestion – because there are places on the web that give us bells and whistles pretty efficiently already. In the long term, Google’s advice is bad for Google as well, because a healthy newspaper segment could be a good source of commerce, and Google’s advice would cause this segment to disintegrate. The place for newspapers remains in professional content, quality product, that readers can trust for being well researched and polished. This does not mean that newspapers should get out of the web business, but they must be careful to protect the core asset as migration occurs.
For starters, newspapers should consider (I suspect they already have) this statistic provided by Business Insider as its “Stat of the Day” last evening. No less than 63% of mobile web consumption is performed on Apple’s iPhone. This statistic is particularly noteworthy considering that the iPhone’s share of the smartphone market is only 25%, to Blackberry’s 42%. (Google’s Android is way down at the bottom, with 5%, but rising.) As a Blackberry owner, I can easily imagine why iPhone users are online so much more than owners of a more popular device. The browsing experience on the iPhone’s larger screen is no doubt pleasurable, while trying to read the content of a website on my teaspoon-sized Blackberry interface is not. With the magazine-sized iPad set to launch in a matter of weeks, that pleasurable experience will only increase. And at least one mobile service sees the iPad as a boon for wireless usage. It is probable that newspapers are mindful of these stats and these perspectives.
In a previous post I commented about the edge that Apple maintains in its competition for consumers’ entertainment attention, reflecting its CEO’s unique Hollywood background. (I would also point to Steve Jobs’s unique background in calligraphy, which he described with great eloquence in his Stanford commencement address some years back.) Apple understands design, presentation, style, and features that consumers will pay for. While others may have a good grasp on utility and “experimentation,” Apple has taste. While others may offer an efficient web experience, for free, Apple has figured out how to extract a premium price for a commodity product, and owns one of the few entertainment platforms that has consistently sold its goods into a mass market that is otherwise accustomed to free access.
Newspaper and magazine owners, who are struggling to redefine their business models for a new online and mobile environment, would probably be well served to align themselves with the platform that can offer a revenue model, and a mobile marketplace, and leave the experimentation and iteration stuff to young entrepreneurs and startups that do not yet have a franchise to protect. Rather than betting the future almost completely on an open-web presence that may or may not be competitive, these groups should focus on the production and maintenance of quality apps that can be accessed, at a price, in mobile app stores – the most populous of which is Apple’s.
Much has been said about the iPad and its ability to “save traditional media.” In the long term, it will be in traditional media’s interest to support a successful iPad. Style, design, quality control, are all characteristics that will do much more to facilitate the popularity of paid content than one more colorful website that may or may not show up at the top of Google’s search results.
