This post relates to the idea that many of the au courante iPad ‘magazine’ apps are leading the charge to destroy the information industry… This hyperbolic thesis is based upon the idea that man y online news, opinion, and culture sites are used as raw material for such tools as Flipboard, Tapgo, Instapaper, Pulse, or Zite (these are some of the aforementioned magazine apps…). You see, these apps pick the information out of the annoying cruft and advertisements which were on the original site. The end result is an end user experience about the same as if you were to use the ‘readability’ online app… And the content originator loses the potential revenue (based upon statistical click through results…).
This might be the solar plexus of online commerce and advertising…then idea that you can add enough mildly annoying advertisements around possibly worthwhile content to generate income… I would suggest that these ‘mild annoyances’ have spread to such a degree that the newer tools to eradicate them are quite popular…
I suspect that this will put content creators into a position where they will have to adapt…Perhaps the New York Times version of a porous subscription firewall…maybe the idea that giving away some content could (statistically) generate comparable readers who would pay to see the content…if the content were to have value…
In any case, I suspect that the current brushfire with content creators and online aggregators will generate more and more new methods to make a buck…
Read, Share and destroy
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/04/24/read-share-and-destroy
The social web’s economics are paradoxical: The more it blossoms, the more it destroys value. In recent months, we’ve seen a flurry of innovative tools for reading and sharing contents. Or, even better, for basing one’s readings on other people’s shared contents. In Web 2.5 parlance, this is called Social Reading. For this, the obvious vector of choice is the iPad: it possesses a (so far) unparalleled ability to transform online reading into a cozy lean-back experience.
A year after the iPad’s launch, the app store is filled with a swarm of forcefully competitive offerings. Like everyone else in the business, I stuffed my device with about ten (and counting) such apps, gathered in a “Daily Me” folder.
Last week, I dissected Flipboard, one my favorites because of its simplicity, neat look and speed. But I’m also enjoying News360, a Russian crawler that scans more 100,000 sources (“200,000 in the next few months…”). News 360 adds a semantic layer whose purported goal, in short, is to increase relevancy. Zite carries spectacular personalization features as well as Cease and Desists Letters from publishers (see Zite Response here).
Taptu is a more recent one. It takes a further step in customization by using the most advanced graphical features found in iOS. Many of these mobile aggregators are available on Android as well.
The paradoxical beauty of today’s web contents is this: On the one hand, 95% of all revenues are still ad-related. On the other, that same content becomes easier to read it without commercial distractions. Publishers didn’t merely accept it, they encouraged it. I already mentioned the negative effect of generous RSS feeds on the business: see RSS Lenin’s Rope. At first, the hijacking of RSS feeds by a new breed of apps was seen as an unfortunate consequence of publishers’ naïveté. After all, when the RSS mechanism was invented more than ten years ago, the idea of repurposing it into a bespoke e-journal wasn’t on anyone’s mind. Now, the media industry faces a completely different picture. Publishers of expensive contents can’t even console themselves by fantasizing their promiscuous supply of RSS links will bring back traffic. RSS super-readers are mostly self-contained and do not send any traffic to anyone else.
