Any journalist who’s led a redesign or introduced a new product knows the danger of paying too much attention to the immediate, often passionate feedback of individual users.
On the other hand, ignoring the roar of even a self-selecting crowd carries its own risks. Especially when the shouting makes some sense.
The iPad App Store invites users to rate the apps that were launched along with the device on Saturday. By Monday evening, I’d scrolled through several dozen raves and rockets aimed at apps created by The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal. I wanted to learn what users value — and don’t — in the early versions of news-oriented iPad apps.
Most interesting were the challenges raised to the $4.99 per-issue charge for Time and the $17.29 that the Journal would like to bill to your credit card each month. (Tuesday afternoon update: Time’s Betsy Goldin e-mailed to say that “subscriptions will be available soon at a discount from the newsstand price.” She said she added the information to the reviews section of the App Store, but got a message that “it could take some time” before it posts.)
This early in the game, publishers are experimenting a lot with price as well as presentation. Publishers have learned the hard way that it’s tough to ask for more money after initially offering something at a low price or free. As Josh Tartakoff pointed out on paidContent.org, the prices of iPhone apps also started high — but fell fast.
Still, publishers run the risk of alienating otherwise-willing-to-pay customers by charging a price so high — or so out-of-touch with consumers’ reality — that they cause sticker shock and drive them away.
By early Tuesday morning, the Journal had picked up 55 ratings of five stars but more than ten times that number — 605 — of single-star pans. Time was doing a bit better: 67 one-star ratings vs. 30 fives. In both cases, much of the criticism focused on aggressive pricing.
“Excited to read the WSJ on my new iPad (but) find that this is NOT a free app… False advertising.” — Customer review The basic Journal app, which provides limited content from each day’s paper, can be downloaded without charge. But access to the full paper requires the pricey subscription. The description of the Journal app on iTunes bears the familiar “free” label, and users have to click the “more” link to learn that only a limited selection is free.
“Very excited to be able to read the WSJ on my new iPad only to find that this is NOT a free app,” user Moreada wrote on Sunday. “You have to pay a subscription to get almost any content. False advertising.”
“Great App,” reads the headline atop comments left by a Time user identified as TR Riverrat. “Bad price.”
Rating Time at three stars out of five, the user wrote: “The app is great, nice pics, good navigation but Time should just be plain embarrassed to charge $4.99 per week. You get the actual magazine for a whole year for 20 bucks.”
I’m sure many readers appreciated Time’s user-friendly guide to navigating its app. In an age when people discuss business models for news almost as much as the price of a latté at Starbucks, wouldn’t it make sense for the magazine to share its pricing rationale, too?
One Time user argued that the sale of a single copy is hardly an app at all — it’s simply a single issue of the magazine. Perhaps most troubling was the number of users who said they plunked down their five bucks without realizing they’d only get a single issue.
My quarrel is not with the price itself, whether $4.99 for this week’s Time or $3.99 for six issues of the Journal each week. It’s the silence from the publishers about how and why they settled on those prices.
Customers like “zxspectrum” are quite willing to fill the void: “So they don’t pay for materials, shipping/distribution anymore … but the magazine is 15 times more expensive!!! You can get 56 paper issues for $20! Seriously, you guys are finished.”
Despite the pricing opportunities created by iPad publishing, Time still bears the burden of its legacy costs. The economics of publishing across platforms, as Dick Tofel, Martin Langeveld and others have pointed out, is nowhere near as simple as App Store reviewers would have you believe. But don’t expect consumers to know or care — unless someone provides the details and makes the case.
Ultimately, a price must make sense to most consumers before they buy. And publishers are leaving the sense-making around their app pricing entirely to the crowd.
As user SuperDeano told Time in awarding its app three stars over the weekend: “Beautiful! But not worth price. Help us help you. Offer an annual subscription close to price of print subscription. I’ll pay more, but not 10 times more.”
Remember when news organizations would publish a controversial investigation and not bother explaining their decisions to readers, arguing that the work “speaks for itself”? Most editors have learned the wisdom of explaining themselves on Day One rather than scrambling to respond to outraged readers further along in the coverage. Isn’t it time for the business side to do likewise?
Time may end up selling enough iPad issues at five bucks each to affluent readers who pay no attention to price. More likely, absent a plausible explanation, the publisher will leave a lot of readers — and revenue — behind.
