I recently attended the seminar Internetdagarna here in Stockholm, a big event discussing trends in internet usage.

There were all the usual stats, like 85% of all Swedes having access to internet at home. 97% of the internet users have broadband and 81% of them use internet daily. Mobile internet is increasing rapidly.

The keynote speaker Jeff Cole from USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future talked about the ongoing disruption in the whole media industry sector.
Here is the video from his excellent speech: “Falling Apart or Coming Together: Media and Consumers in a Digital Era”
Some tidbits:
“Now everything is falling apart.”
“Newspapers have 5 years left in the US, 8 in the UK.”
“People don’t live by schedules anymore. Schedules don’t work!”
“Consumers are beginning to abandon subscriptions to print media and have little interest in paying for digital content, at least for the next five years.”
“Advertising is still preferred method. People who opt out might have to start paying.”
“All media will survive, but most will be smaller players in the digital era.”

Many of the other sessions discussed the disruption in the media industry, everybody seemed to agree on:

1. The digital transformation will continue, faster for some types of media and slower for some.
2. Most print media business (especially newspaper and news magazines) will be badly hit by the digital transition.
3. Media consumption is increasing due to ubiquitous internet access and all the new mobile devices.

Pontus Schultz, head of business development at Swedish publishing giant Bonnier’s R&D department outlined it wisely:
“Everything goes digital. Digital is free.”
“People want to pay, but so far we have packaged stuff that people don’t like paying for.”
“You don’t pay for news, you pay for identity and for being part of a community.”
“The challenge is to stop being a broadcaster and become a part of the conversation.”
“Reader interaction: don’t ask what they think, ask what they know.”
“Tablets like iPads is a chance for media to do it right this time.”
See his talk (in Swedish, starts at 18:20)

Strategies are necessary, but they are worthless without action!

Pontus ended by saying that media is usually quite good at creating new strategies, but lousy at implementing them. This is a key insight for me!

All this means that today’s media conglomerates are like ocean-going super tankers. When they see icebergs they have big difficulties changing course due to their massive inertia based on their 100+ years of traditions. Some of them have smart crew members like Pontus and will be able to change course a little quicker and perhaps launch some smaller experimental vessels that will take off. Other will hit icebergs or continue slowly into oblivion.

The time is now!

So there are now unique conditions for small speedboats to run around the tankers and cruise on top of the waves, adapting to the ever-changing conditions in the digital ocean and building new types of media content and services. These speedboats can of course be launched from existing media companies (and some already are) but I think the biggest part of the expanded digital media business many will be built by a new breed of media companies.

They need to be small, creative and agile, populated with a multi-cultural mix of  techies and communicators combined with experienced, open-minded media savvies and some hybrid thinkers like me.

These new speedboats can now be built by small groups of open-minded people anywhere in the world. The tools needed to build a new media service are now far less expensive, faster and easier to use. Sweden is an ideal location for this due to our crop of talented developers and internet-savvy early adopters.

This tickles my mind, what about yours?

                 

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I have enjoyed various forms of eBooks since the early 90s (when they were sold on floppies…). But it is not until April this year I have started to really see eBooks and eMagazines replacing some of my boos and magazines in my ever growing piles of things to read.

The reason for this is of course my iPad. It is a delight to use, not only because of its wonderful screen, but because of two features that are not so often mentioned:
1. It start up in half a second. This is changing my behavior a a lot.
2. The form of the iPad makes it usefull in all sorts of “laidback” reading positions, in the arm chair, in the TV sofa, in the bed etc.

Since I have worked since the 80s producing interactive “multimedia” I really like the rapid development of eMagazines and eBooks now. For example embedded videos, animations and various forms of user interactivity.

I have bought and read a number of eMagazines and eBooks and to my surprise I now begin to feel that I enjoy the eBooks more than the eMagazines. I have read both crime novels and business eBooks bought from Amazon’s Kindle app and from Apple’s iBook store.

I find eBook reading on the iPad to be a better experience than reading most physical text books:

1. It is much faster and easier to buy an eBook.
2. I can read my eBooks on my computer, my iPad and my iPhone, and the reader software always directs me to the place in the book where I was the last time, independent of which device I used.
3. I can highlight text, make bookmarks and write notes etc, just like in a physical book, something I always do for my learning.

eMagazines are now appearing in many flavors and I really like this development. But it feels like we are bnow seeing just the frist wave and that there will be a lot of further development needed befor eMags will seriously compete with paper mags.

I wrote about my first impressions of eMagazines in my post “iPad Media apps; CD-ROM revisited, where I complained about the lack of social functions like being able to share articles, make notes, interact with the ads etc.

Now I have spent many hours reading dozens of eMagazine titles, and I still miss all those functions. But also, I still don’t feel as comfortable reading eMags as I do reading eBooks.

I feel that  my vision of the beautiful magazine layout is hindered by looking at it on the iPad screen. The image is sharp and bright, but I have to scroll a lot and I don’t have the overall view that I have with a paper magazine. It is not just that a paper magazine is usually bigger in size than my iPad screen. It is about rapidly turning the paper pages, reading them in any order and get a feeling of how long an article is before reading it.

Am I alone in feeling this? Will I get over it? What do you think?

So I think that we need much more research in user interface design and layout for devices like the iPad before the eMagazine market will really take off. I am convinced that all magazine publishers are now working to address those issues and I really look forward to reading the second generation eMagazines.

Hopefully they will look more like Bonnier’s promising Skiing Interactive concept, which is much more active, lean forward type, scheduled for launch in October 2010. It will be for laptops, hopefully an iPad version will follow.

Enjoy their sneak peak video:

Skiing Interactive Demo Video from Skiing Interactive on Vimeo.

                 

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iPad media apps – the revenue solution for media publishers?

The extremely sucessful iPad launch (3 million iPads sold in 80 days) has created a tremendous buzz and excitement in the media industry. I am certainly one of the very happy iPad owners.
Many publishers see the iPad as a solution to their main headache: How can we charge for our media content when our web site users don’t want to pay for it and there is such an abundance of free content on internet?

With the iPad, the argument goes, we can deliver an improved user experience that looks more like our print media but with some added features like video, then people will want to pay for it.

But are we really seeing improved user experiences with the current iPad media apps? We are now seeing the first generation media apps from big publishers, like Bonnier’s Popular Science, Time magazine, Wired magazine, Washington Street Journal and many others.

Many people react against paying for these apps, some with the rather strange argument “but there are ads in it, so I should’t have to pay for the app”, as if print media were ad-free. Well, that reaction of course stems from that we are so used to free media content on the web.

I don’t mind paying for interesting media content, provided that:

1. I can’t access equivalent content for free as nicely packaged somewhere else (hint: build your brand and work hard on your interface design and user friendliness)
2. I feel that my money goes to an organisation that I want to support (hint: tell me your corporate story and mission)
3. The payment process is simple and quick (this is one of the iTunes Store key success factors)

But I don’t want to pay for media apps that I feel are giving me a worse experience than online media.

Today’s media apps feels like CD-ROMs

I and many others also react against the walled garden of these apps, most of them are not connected to internet at all. We are suddenly back in the 90′s world of interactive CD-ROM media that looked great but were all one-way communication that could not be updated.

In my opinion most of them represent a step backwards compared to web media:

• I can’t copy text in the articles
• I can’t comment the articles
• I can’t share  articles with my friends via email, Facebook, Twitter etc
• I cant’ search for keywords in the articles
• I can’t bookmark or write my own comments in interesting articles
• I can’t interact with the ads
• I have to wait for apps to load
• I find the user interface unintuitive

Interface standards

The current breed of iPad media apps are using a multitude of different interface standards. Even basic functionalities get confusing when you don’t know how they work.

Two examples:
We are used to reading articles in columns from top to bottom. This is the way all our printed media have always worked. Still, Washington Street Journal manages to introduce a horisontal article layout, it even has another column to the right of the story which hides the continued story to the right, making it difficult to find. This also forces them to repeat the headline on each screen, a clumsy and unintuitive solution.

Menus: Publishers want an uncluttered interface design, so they hide the menu buttons, and they all do it differently. Some make you tap anywhere on screen, others use more obscure tricks. Worst so far is Bonnier, introducing a totally incomprehensible two-finger vertical swipe from the bottom to reveal the menu buttons. Sorry guys, I think the only way is to have small, constantly visible, easy to interpret menu buttons.

App download time

I don’t mind downloading utility apps, but when I want media content, I want it immediately. The current crop of iPad media apps weighs in at 150-500 Mb, which takes a loooong time to download. I just bought Wired’s July issue at 375 Mb, it took 25 minutes to download. Bonnier’s Popular Science July issue, 147 Mb, 51 minutes to download! Both of these magazines’ web sites load in about a second… This is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges, sine their websites don’t contain the same content, but the user experiences the app download as a pain that does not exist on the web.

What should be done?

I see two paths of development:

1. Since users are still so reluctant to pay for online content in a web browser, apps will continue to grow for some time. The second generation of apps will soon be connected and solve most of the problems described above.
2. Meanwhile, HTML5 and other emerging web standards and tools will enable publishers to improve media sites with smarter interfaces and functionality. In this process they will experiment with new types of online revenue models, (see my post “Experiment or die“). This will also eliminate the problems of adapting your content to multiple mobile platforms like iOS and Android. Eventually this will to a large degree replace downloaded apps, but it will take a few years.

The key here to media publishers is that they have to be more innovative and develop smarter interfaces and functionality that all the other free online media sites cannot offer.

Things like:

1. Connect the apps to internet, link them with social media and have moderated and well designed comments and discussion forums
2. Reinvent the navigation
3. Develop smarter personalisation tools, letting me create a dynamic media app according to my interests and mood for the moment
4. Work with the advertisers to increase the user value. I want to see ads that are relevant to me and my needs, and I want to be able to access more information and buy products easily via the ad

The best way to find out what will work best is to be innovative, start experimenting with all sorts of solutions. I am convinced that the development pace will be very fast in the next couple of years and look forward to enjoying media like never before.

                 

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The enormous hype around the iPad has also generated a lot of backlash against the flow of paid for iPad content now pouring out from media publishers all over the world.

Pay for content, are you kidding?

Many different payment models are now tested on a large scale:

Time magazine is charging $4.99 per issue of their iPad ‘magazine’. A social media blogger calls this “An act of insanity“.

Wall Street Journal charges $3.99 per week.

Financial Times has a different model with a sponsor that offers the Financial Times iPad app for free for two months. From the article about it in the Guardian:
“Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson says his mag’s iPad app is an opportunity to “reset the economics“. What that means – mobile apps, as a new technology, have no pre-existing culture of only-free content consumption, as the web does, offering an opportunity to charge from the start this time.”
And Chris is the author of the famous article “Free“!

The Swedish publisher Bonniers have launched Popular Science on the iPad at the same price as for printed mag, $4.99 , this is the first magazine using their online platform Mag+

Lots of critics are complaining about charging money for online content and just say that it will never work. The Harvard Business Review has one of the more refined articles: “The iPad won’t save the publishing industry from itself”

These critics are right about that in many cases it will be difficult to charge for online content, but how about coming up with some new, better revenue ideas then? This is much harder than just complaining, but it needs to be done now.

Start experimenting with payment models!

The iPad itself will not be the universal solution to the problem of online media revenue. But I am very glad that the iPad has started this flow of payment experiments that can also be used for all other forms of web-based media. There will of course not be just one successful model. There will be many different models that will eventually work for different types of content and target groups. We also need new, smarter forms for advertising and sponsoring of content.

There are many other ways to finance media production and distribution online. For example, why not have a credit system that encourages people to contribute and get credits that they can use to buy more content? For pictures, stories, comments, local news tips etc.

There is a big need now for lots of creative experiments!

People want to pay for content

When Apple introduced the iTunes music store, the sales of iPods exploded and they have since then sold billions of songs online. Apple understood and solved the consumer’s need; “I like this song, I want it now” and made it easy to buy and listen to music.

And look at the cable TV companies: millions of people gladly pay lots of money per month to get commercial-free programs.

The whole media sector is in a global digital disruption period now that we have only seen the beginning of. The only thing we can be certain of is that our media consumption will not be the same in only a few years time and that some old media companies will die the dinosaur death while others will manage to transform themselves and evolve. There will also be many new players out the, creating totally new types of media experiences online based on the new platforms that we see now.

Exciting times are ahead!

                 

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