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March 28, 2024

iPhone May Finally Make Mobile Real for News Publishers

Important Details:  “Mobile” has been one of those just-beyond-the-rainbow potentials for news publishers for many years. Advertising applications have been slower to take root, as have subscriptions for content. Outsell’s new Annual Advertising and Marketing Study (July 14, 2008) shows a fast wireless growth of 12.3%, but notes that mobile is just 0.6% of current online marketing spending. In addition, formatting for the many types of smartphones and cell phones has involved much complexity and cost.

The advent of the first popular, mass, smartphone — the iPhone — may be a big step in changing that calculus. There are two reasons for that change. Apple’s stated goal is to sell more than 10 million iPhones this year, a large market. Second, the iPhone excels where previously phones have performed poorly — it’s an excellent web browser. At 3G speeds on both sides of the Atlantic, it promises to alter web access habits, providing a third screen choice, in addition to the desktop and the laptop.

As John Markoff discusses in the Sunday New York Times,  “When Mr. Jobs demonstrated the original iPhone, he proudly showed how it could be used as a window onto a full-size newspaper Web page. The iPhone user could navigate by moving the page under the window with his finger and then double-tapping on a particular item or article to zoom it up to take full advantage of the iPhone screen. Since then, however, the window metaphor has largely given way to custom-tailored, vertically oriented web sites. Text appears large enough for users to read comfortably, and mobile Web sites are redone so that the user scrolls only up and down, not sideways, to view information. The shift to vertical Web pages is a big step forward, says Donald Norman, an expert in user-oriented design at the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm. “A small window into a huge space is horrible,” he said. “It makes for a great demo, but it’s very frustrating to use.” ”

So there it is. Newspaper companies once again have to confront the reality of a new technology. Vertical pages may not mean just the aspect ratio of the little screen. Vertical gets to the kind of content publishers publish, and how they publish it. That means the world may be moving even more rapidly from “general news” to niches.

Certainly, we’ve seen faster adaptation to the iPhone by news publishers than we had seen previously:

  • AP’s Mobile News Networks aims to be a center of mobile news products for US publishers and has just launched with its first product, tailored for the iPhone, as well as one for the new Sprint-powered Treo.
  • The New York Times was ready as well, launching its specific-to-iPhone product. Its International Herald Tribune also announced its own.
  • Last fall, both Sky News and the BBC added iPhone-specific applications as well.

The new applications are part of Apple’s just-launched App Store.

Implications:  Outsell believes that news publishers’ ability to launch with a big, new product, one catching waves of free publicity, is a good thing. AP has been able to attract about 100 local publishers into the network, as others evaluate participating. On their own, each doing an iPhone app separately would have meant much delay. So there’s a lesson to be learned here, one that can be applied to non-mobile, tech-based innovations, and not just in the US.

In addition, Outsell believes the first wave of newsy iPhone apps is just that — one wave. As Markoff’s article points out, targeted information delivery is now more key than ever. Newspapers gather and sit on more information than most sites. Now the next-stage work is to unearth parts of it in ways that we as users will love to use.