The Sunday papers got me thinking

I enjoyed reading The Sunday Times this weekend, I sat in the sun with a glass of champagne and some strawberries, all sounds normal (maybe not the champagne bit, I was on holiday) but this week it was on my iPad. I really like the new format as I have talked about before and it works brilliantly on the iPad.

Worth noting that as a non paper buyer The Times have gained me as a new reader, certainly for now until they start charging me.

As I was browsing I was thinking the app and wondering that with such a strong web experience why would I bother paying another £9.99 for the app?  Surely the information is the same just presented in a different format.   I assume it can be accessed offline which is a bonus but potentially not one worth paying for in my opinion.  I think that apps developed for iPad will have to offer something very compelling for a user to not just use web based content that they know and love especially as increasingly websites will be updated and developed with mobile access in mind.  It is different on the iphone because of the screen size and apps make the content more digestible.

Anything you can imagine and more

Everyday it seems that someone tells me about or shows me a new iphone app.  Today Tim Mitchell showed me Acrossair and Nearest tube, both are augemented reality type apps and they really are very cool.  Nearest tube shows you the options laid out geographically and then allows you to click through to a map with directions.    Acrossair pulls in a number of feeds including restaurants  which again get displayed geographically on the screen.  So simple and smart.  Check them out.

App-itite

I do love apps, well iPhone ones anyway.  I am currently loving the Ocado App.  Very clever and simple.   Upmarket food shoppers who love waitrose probably also have a good chance of owning an iPhone so Ocado have made it even easier to order your groceries on the go.  The App is fast and simple and will get your groceries to door by the next day.  Now that last 5 mins of down time has been filled.  Thank you Ocado this is branded utility at its best.

Making money from apps

There a two main ways to make an app pay, firstly you can charge for its download and usage and secondly there is an Ad model that can be used.  The current average price for a paid for an app download is around 99p, that said this price point is seeing decline.  The number of apps available are on the increase and total number of people installing are on the increase but choice will outweigh the number of participating users.

All time top iTunes apps.  Predicting success is hard, if you study the rankings the list is quite random, interesting the top paid app is actually the most expensive one in the store at $5.99, it does appear that people will pay more for better products.    Assuming you have built an app that is truly useful then the best path is to take is pay to download, if you take the free model and want to monetise it though advertising you will need to be in the top 5% to get close to making the same amount of money as you would from a paid download.  The problem is that you probably won’t know how successful you app will be until you release and test the market.  If you release it for free initially you can’t really start to charge once it is successful.  One way around this is to release a ‘lite’ version first.  For example ishoot is one of the most successful iPhone apps achieving 2.4 million downloads of the iShoot Lite.  From this free product they then promoted an upgrade to the full game iShoot which saw 320,000 downloads at 99p a go.  If you can start broad and create appeal and advocacy amongst an audience then asking them to pay 99p for more is very acceptable.  Our recommended approach is to either release a lite version first or if there is nothing inherent about your app that screams free then sell it, if you are hugely successful and heading for the top 5% of the market then you can switch to a ad funded model to gain more users.  For example a free newspaper vs a paid for newspaper in the real world would have a tough job asking someone to pay get that content on the iPhone unless the product was very compelling.

As of 21^st May 2009 the top 2 paid for apps are the Moron Test and a game called StickWars, the top free apps are ‘What’s your Sex Appeal and Brain teaser.  The lesson here is not to aim to high if you want to be popular!

A new model – Simple, useful content on the go

I have been thinking a lot recently about how content owners can make more revenue from their digital content.  Ad revenues online don’t compete that well with their print equivilants so there has be other ways to make online content more profitable.  One area that I think is worth exploring is export.  What makes people prepared to pay for some content and not others?  Partly it is about the uniqueness and the relative importance of that content to that person and the other is what people are used to having to pay for.  The itunes model prepared  iphone users for a pay as you go, for what you want model, so the launch of the apps store was a natural progression and I was stunned to read that the most popular apps are earning the creaters a decentprofit, for some a living.  For example the Night Stand app which turns your iphone into a retro digital clock earned £480k in downloads.  Most apps are cheap, a few pounds at most and this makes them appealing to a very broad audience.  Since launch over 500 million apps have been downloaded from the apps store.  So if I was a content producer and owner I would be spending a lot time right now thinking about how I could turn my content into simple useful applications that people would be prepared to pay a few pounds for.