News Corp: iPad apps cannibalizing newspaper sales
updated 10:40 am EST, Fri November 12, 2010
News Corp says iPad taking newspaper users
The switch to iPad apps and other mobile reading apps has taken away from News Corp's newspaper sales, Rupert Murdoch's son and Asian/European operations lead James Murdoch observed today at the Monaco Media Forum. He explained that they were "much more directly cannibalistic" than the web since subscribers often read and treated them like the traditional format rather where web users read differently. The executive wouldn't give sales numbers, but these included both the Wall Street Journal app as well as News of the World and the Times of London.
Despite not making as much profit as would be possible with direct sales, the media giant was also comfortable with selling through iTunes since it was "frictionless" and didn't really change the cost expectations versus print. Whatever overhead Apple was asking would already exist in pressing and delivering physical copies.
"They charge a percentage but the guy on the newstand and the newsagent charge a percentage, and they don't even merchandise it properly," Murdoch said.
The executive's father Rupert has been enthusiastic about tablets and the iPad in particular. He has hope that the medium would reverse time and get users back to paying for news. News Corp's founder has been dismissive of free, ad-supported news and has lately been instituting paywalls on sites that were previously free, in many cases sacrificing as much as 90 percent of readership for higher profits.
Apple's tablet has been the near exclusive home to tablet-oriented newspapers, but the WSJ just on Thursday put out an Android tablet edition targeted at the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the future wave of devices that might use a similar resolution and screen size. Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader Daily Edition and other devices also get News Corp content but have to have much of the layout and imagery stripped out to fit the grayscale e-paper display.
Mac Enthusiast
Joined: Mar 2002
Merchandising on tablets isn't that much better if
The problem with going digital is that they've made the process too black and white, and killed the Try before you Buy experience. Great example, the New Yorker recently released an App for the iPad a friend of mine posted it on his wall on Facebook, I tried downloaded the App which was free, fantastic the process was seamless.
The problem starts when you first launch the App the New Yorker doesn't give you a preview of what's in the current issue not even the Table of Contents is accessible until you buy the issue the only thing I can see is the cover. If you take in contrast the newsstand approach, at the very least I can pick up an issue and flip through it maybe skim a few headlines and see if anything catches my interest.
The other problem is fair use, if I have a print copy I can drop it on my coffee table and anyone coming over can read it borrow it whatever. I can drop it on a co-workers desk with a stick to page 12... can't do any of that with the iPad version. What would be great is if you can copy text and send an excerpt and email it to a friend, alot of news sites including MacNN append the url of the article you're on if you copy text from the site... example below.
The switch to iPad apps and other mobile reading apps has taken away from News
Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/11/12/news.corp.says.ipad.taking.newspaper.users/#ixzz155L2eJlb