gurupanguji's shared items
I’ve gotten hundreds of Twitter and email messages about my post on iPad-magazine ads. I thought I was being clear that this was simply how I felt, but that post has irritated a lot of magazine and newspaper people who seem to be misinterpreting my argument. So I’ll restate it, in brief:
I feel ripped off when I pay for an iPad or web publication and it still contains ads.
It’s not even an argument, really. It’s a feeling. From a customer. I’ve also gotten a lot of emails and tweets in agreement, so this might represent the feelings of a nontrivial amount of potential customers.
Ads as content
For many magazine genres, such as fashion or lifestyle, the ads are a desirable part of the content. I’m not talking about those here: I’m talking about magazines in which the most desirable content is the non-ad text. (“I read it for the articles.”)
“The problem isn’t ads, it’s intrusive ads”
No, the problem is ads. Ads signify to me that the money I paid isn’t enough to give me the product I thought I paid for. That’s what I called “double-dipping”: I paid with the expectation that I was paying for the entire product, and then I was unexpectedly sold out, which offends me.
(Again, this is my opinion.)
This is the same reason I find “Rate this app!” dialogs in paid apps distasteful. I paid for the app, and then it intrudes into my usage to solicit an advertisement from me to attract more buyers.
The tangible product
When I pay for a printed magazine issue — which only ever happens if I’m flying somewhere and pick up The Economist for taxi, takeoff, and landing — I don’t feel ripped off that there are ads in it.
Maybe it’s because the cover price feels like it’s paying for the physical product, and the ads feel like they’re paying for the content. But I don’t feel that distinction when buying a digital issue: that just feels like I’m paying for the content, since there’s no physical artifact. Again, I’m talking about feelings here.
“Subscribers pay far less than $4.99 per issue”
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me, as people from the industry respond, that ads are the primary business for most magazines and newspapers — that the business depends more on ad revenue than subscription fees or newsstand sales.
I don’t know the business, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that the reason subscriptions are so heavily discounted from the per-issue prices is that the publishers want to encourage as many subscribers as possible, which makes their ad sales more lucrative against a guaranteed minimum audience (for whom they have lots of reliable demographic information). If the per-issue prices were very low, it wouldn’t encourage as many subscribers and the targeting would therefore be more vague, weakening the value to advertisers.
But to a new customer — someone who just bought their first single issue — it’s pretty clear that they’re getting the worst deal possible. That’s not a good way to grow a base of recurring customers.
How are newspaper and magazine subscription numbers looking these days? Not great, right? Wouldn’t it be in their best interests to encourage new customers?
“Nobody would pay the full cost, so ads are necessary”
As I said, I don’t know what I’m talking about with the specifics of the business, as so many of you have pointed out. But permit me to let my mind wander for a minute:
Ads are supposedly necessary to subsidize the publications so they can be sold at an acceptable cost to most readers. But if ads didn’t need to be sold, the staff and operations related to ad sales could be cut, reducing the cost of delivering each issue.
If the publication went digital-only, the entire infrastructure for printing and distribution could be cut, too.
If all readership is on the website and an iPad app, how much of the layout staff is necessary? Web publications don’t need custom layouts for each post. On the iPad, I find that the magazine-like layouts get in the way and make the reading experience more difficult. iPad magazine content shouldn’t look like scanned printed-magazine pages.
Are incredibly complex and expensive-to-develop iPad apps necessary, or would simpler ones suffice? Are enough customers really demanding the expensive features — especially those with big per-issue costs, like all of the multimedia “extras” — to make them worth their costs, or would most of the readership still pay the same amount for just the text and a few optional photos in a nice, reusable template? That’s how most websites publish their content, and we’re all fine with it. In many ways, such a structure could result in much better apps: adjustable fonts, text selection, highlighting, and many other reader-friendly features become much simpler to implement in such an environment. Higher quality, lower cost. (And this is a business that I can speak authoritatively on.)
With a smaller staff, and with most resources allocated to content generation, how much management and support staff could be cut? And would the huge offices in prime Manhattan locations still be necessary?
What percentage of a major publication’s cost per issue is directly responsible for the authoring and editing of the content today? Much less than half, I’d guess. (I’d love to know real numbers on this.) How much could we increase that by cutting these departments that are irrelevant or unnecessary in a modern, digital-only publication?
You can continue to call me an idiot or tell me that I have no idea what I’m talking about. (Many do, every day. It’s the cost of having a blog, an app, or an email address, and I have all three.) But there are much more interesting questions I’d like to see discussed by the people who know this business, not how much of an ass I am for feeling like paying for ads is a bad deal.
Maybe the problem isn’t my opinion on double-dipping, or the need to “educate” consumers on how much we should pay and how many ads we should tolerate, or how ads and direct payments and selling our personal information are all necessary to pay the immense cost of production.
Maybe the cost of production is the problem.
This isn’t a new argument. (Not even close.) But it’s hard for me to justify excusing an industry’s high costs that pay for work I didn’t ask for and don’t need in order to have great articles and news to read on my iPad.
Those are big problems to solve. But they’re the publishers’ problems, not the customers’. They’re implementation details. I don’t need to know why $4.99 is insufficient to pay for 15 articles on my iPad. I just know that it feels like a premium price for such a relatively small amount of content, and I don’t feel right paying premium prices for ad-subsidized products.
Maybe I’m the only one. But what does it mean for the business if I’m not? If you’re in the business, wouldn’t addressing that question be a more productive use of your time than telling potential customers that their feelings are wrong?
In the past, I’ve always recommended the Kindle over other e-ink readers, and buying Kindle books instead of iBooks on iOS, because Amazon had the biggest library of relevant titles and strongest content ecosystem.
But Amazon’s advantage is no longer as clear in my casual searching.
This isn’t anything like a formal study, so take this with a grain of salt. I think searches like this are the best way to decide which e-reader ecosystem to buy into: search for a bunch of things you might want to read, plus the last few books you bought, and see which platform has the best availability for you.
Here are some books, newspapers, and magazines I’ve searched for recently in the four biggest ebook stores, plus a few new and old bestsellers for some diversity:
| Kindle | Nook | Kobo | iBooks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs | $16.99 | $16.99 | $16.99 | $16.99 |
| Stephen King: On Writing | $12.99 | $12.99 | $12.99 | $12.99 |
| Nicholas Sparks: The Best of Me | $12.99 | $12.99 | $12.99 | $12.99 |
| Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 |
| David Simon: Homicide | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 |
| Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore | $11.99 | $11.99 | $11.99 | $11.99 |
| George Carlin: Last Words | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 |
| Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics (4th Ed.) | $17.68 | $31.96 | $28.79 | $19.99 |
| Scott Berkun: Confessions of a Public Speaker | $9.99 | $9.99 | $16.39 | $19.99 |
| Michael Lopp: Being Geek | $9.99 | $9.99 | $16.39 | X |
| Steve Hagen: Buddhism Plain and Simple | $9.99 | $9.99 | X | X |
| Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin: Twitterature | X | X | $10.99 | $10.99 |
| Don Norman: Living with Complexity | $14.72 | X | X | X |
(Prices in yellow are noticeably higher than the others.)
Kobo and iBooks both appear to suffer with back-catalog and niche-publisher availability, and Kobo often has higher pricing on the less popular titles, but availability and pricing of current popular titles is even across the board.
I’m particularly impressed by Kobo here: they’re much bigger than I expected.
Periodicals are a little different, since iBooks doesn’t include them directly: they must have iOS apps. Assuming that most people don’t consider the iPhone an e-reader, I limited this to iPad apps.
All periodical prices are the per-month subscription price. Where a monthly subscription wasn’t available, I used the smallest time increment available above single issues and divided accordingly:
| Kindle | Nook | Kobo | iPad app | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The New York Times | $19.98 | $19.99 | $19.99 | $19.99 |
| The Wall Street Journal | $14.99 | $14.99 | $14.99 | $17.29 |
| The Los Angeles Times | $9.99 | $9.99 | X | free |
| The Columbus Dispatch | $6.99 | $6.99 | $6.99 | $28.99 |
| The New Yorker | $2.99 | $2.99 | X | $5.99 |
| TIME | $2.99 | $2.99 | X | $21.62 |
| Newsweek | $2.99 | $2.99 | X | $4.99 |
| The Economist | $9.99 | $10.49 | X | $13.33 |
| The Atlantic | $1.99 | $1.99 | X | $1.83 |
| The Nation | $1.99 | $1.99 | $1.99 | $1.99 |
| Car and Driver | X | $0.99 | X | $1.99 |
| Reader’s Digest | $1.49 | $1.49 | X | $1.99 |
Kobo suffered badly here: its periodical selection is very poor. (This is it.)
Kindle and Nook both did very well. I’m impressed with how much the Nook periodical selection has improved since my Nook Simple Touch review — at the time, the selection was very sad, but now it seems competitive with the Kindle’s.
Magazines that are mostly graphical or richly formatted, such as Martha Stewart’s Living, are better on tablets, not e-ink readers. I didn’t include them here, but if you primarily read them, you probably want an iPad or a Nook Color.
The newspaper and magazine experience on the iPad is very different from traditional e-readers, since they’re all individual apps instead of being built into the system reading environment. This can be good and bad: some of these publications, like the L.A. Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The Atlantic, have pretty poor iPad apps. Others, like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist, are much better experiences than any other e-reader provides.
The iPad’s color screen helps periodicals a lot, but the Nook Color and upcoming Kindle Fire have color screens, too. What helps most is the iPad’s fast and responsive navigation and interaction, and the highly advanced software components that the magazine apps can all easily use. You can read books well on any e-reader, but periodicals truly shine on the iPad. (And if your favorite periodical isn’t available, you can always go to their website — an option not usually present and usable on e-readers.)
If you’re going to primarily read periodicals, get the iPad. If you’re going to read books, all of these platforms look like safe options.
The Kindle still looks like the best ecosystem for the titles I searched for, but just barely — its advantage is much smaller than it used to be.
Hey guys, long time no see, toss me a PBR—actually, better make it a Coors Light. I know, I look different, but before you all start saying how I look like some midtown suit, let me explain. I haven’t gone pleb on you, I’m actually a neo-hipster now. It’s basically where you’re a hipster, but since hipsterism has gone so mainstream you dress and act like a regular person, ironically.
There is no joy in Round Rock.
Early this morning the database servers at Dell Computer went down hard. The company is unable to accept orders on its web site and almost 5000 Dell sales reps trying to meet their quotas in the last week of the quarter are unable to book sales. Today’s loss for the company is already over $50 million and rising.
The database system in question is Oracle running atop NonStop Unix on a Tandem NonStop (now stopped — what an irony) system made, of course, by Hewlett Packard. So Michael Dell is pulling his hair out at this moment while he waits to be saved by HP.
It could be a long wait.
I guess NonStop means never having to say you’re sorry.
Matthew Panzarino speculates on a possible “VoiceTime” feature in the future:
But the fact is that the voice technology used by most cell phone carriers hasn’t received much attention, as the concentration has been on building out data networks and coverage areas.
So now is the time for someone to improve the voice quality of our phones, and cut one more cord away while they’re at it.
This is a great idea.
Cellular voice transmission, like satellite radio and digital cable TV, lives in the sad world of extreme bandwidth conservation: it’s compressed, processed, and crushed down to the minimum quality threshold that customers will tolerate. (And then they crush it a little bit more, because what are you going to do about it, really?)
As we see with FaceTime, the iPhone’s hardware is capable of much higher audio quality if the bandwidth is available.
A theoretical “VoiceTime” feature implemented like FaceTime — a separate type of call that people must select each time — would be interesting.
But an implementation like iMessage, where it could switch over automatically whenever both ends of a call are compatible, and we’d all just start using fewer voice minutes… that would be the kind of ballsy move that I hope the post-Steve Apple keeps making.
Nokia showed off their first Windows phone, the Lumia 800, and it’s really nice. I hope it is as good as it looks and they sell a ton of them.
