AP Gateway: Learning from AP Mobile
AP Mobile — the news app for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android — have seen more than 3.5 million downloads, a success of a sort (Tetris: 100 million paid downloads), as AP tried for first time to create one big aggregated product, its own content and that produced its member papers. National advertising revenue’s been small, and local advertising — to be sold by member papers — never took off.
So, round 2. AP CEO Tom Curley announced AP Gateway today. It’s got big ambition: the aim is to re-position the newspaper industry for the next phase of digital, and that would be mobile. AP Gateway aims to focus on gathering up member and AP content, through its AP News Registry, and then produce paid and free products for the emerging tablet culture. The idea: state-of-the-art, all-in-one-place news products that take full advantage of our multi-touch future — and may avoid the middlemen of the non-mobile web, especially Google.
Aggregation, as nurtured through the News Registry ingestion-and-tagging process, is the key, and that’s been largely proven out. Among the big challenges:
- creating a compelling user experience that transcends old news conventions. Give AP Mobile a B here; what’s needed is an A product;
- taking the next steps with news video as its Online Video Network has received a ho-hum response from members;
- taking a new approach to ad sales, with the evolving sense that the bigger-format iPads will be far more popular among marketers than the tiny-screen iPhones;
- figuring out what people will pay for. One strong possibility: the Guardian model of charging once for the application. It’s sold 100,000 downloads at about $3.65 apiece.
That’s on the product end.
For AP, and its increasingly contentious and own-path-going members, it will be a big test of whether the cooperative can transform itself into the industry-leading company it wants to be. The jury’s out on that, as Rupert Murdoch’s talking “Alicia” networking, Hearst pushes forward with Skiff, the New York Times plans its own future and all try to divine just how much value newspaper collegiality has in the new world.
