Content

Go Read This | How in-app purchase is not really destroying the games industry | Sealed Abstract

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

On the face of it this is just a piece about the gaming industry, though a fascinating one. In fact this article raises issues for all content industries from games, to books, to newspapers, magazines and music.

It covers the gamut, the explosion of content, the role of market makers (in this case Apple – though to a lesser mentioned extent, Google), the use of price as a lever and the challenges of making money in markets that have become so large, diverse and saturated.

I’m reminded of two realities most forcefully when reading it, firstly that while digital unleashes greater freedom to create and make content of all kinds available, thus empowering the creator relative to the middlemen and women of the previous era, it also (in its current guise by power of platform) shackles them to the power of another middle-person (for books, mostly Amazon) AND makes a sustainable career even less likely because of the huge increase of content such freedom unleashes. Secondly, I am reminded of just how little information is publicly available to those looking at the book trade. Consider the information in this article about the nature of games sales in the iOS store and ponder how different our conversations might be about ebooks if these facts were more openly shared (some notable exceptions on that front would be Smashwords who share quite a lot of data).

Getting people to play your game in a market of 150,000 alternatives requires a different kind of marketing. For example, if the user can choose to pay $0.99 for your app, or pay zero for another app that’s probably just as fun, they’ll pick the free one. The result follows: 90% of apps are free in 2013 when weighted by monthly average users. And when you look only at those apps that use an experiment/test/data-driven approach for their pricing, you see a strong upward trend in more free apps. So the pricing experiments that these developers are running (you know, actual flipping research, not just speculating baselessly in an HN comment) are telling them it’s better to go free.

via How in-app purchase is not really destroying the games industry | Sealed Abstract.

Interesting Move >> Byliner Weekly on the App Store on iTunes

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

One of the original longform content plays, Byliner is operating in an incredibly busy space (how you classify that space is tricky it does after all include gaming, video, books, articles, music and lots more), one is that is getting busier and more competitive all the time. Like everyone else in that space it faces the challenge of monitising (is there a better word?) its content base:

Byliner Weekly is a lovingly curated selection of the best stories from Byliner, collected around a theme. Each issue is crafted to be read in two hours or less, and includes exclusive or rarely seen stories by Byliner’s community of award-winning writers. Enjoy stories by bestselling authors Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, Mary Roach, Jon Krakauer, David Mamet, Jennifer Egan, Jane Smiley, Mary Karr, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, and many more.

Delivered in time for your weekend, Byliner Weekly presents the most surprising, delightful, and entertaining fiction and non-fiction. Read a story with your morning coffee, or cuddle up with the week\’s full collection in one fascinating afternoon.

via Byliner Weekly on the App Store on iTunes.

This is a damn good way to do it, essentially a subscription weekly magazine which is small enough to not seem like a lot but at $52 is a fair whack for a curated selection of articles. Given that the site charges $5.99 for premium subscriptions giving full unlimited access to the full content set, the weekly subscription is a clever way to boost their margins and suggests that the company is conscious a) of the value in curation and b) that there are multiple types of consumers, many of whom would never subscribe to the whole site, but might well consider the weekly option, because it limits the reading needed to derive value!

Byliner also publishes a series of original ebooks, again at a significant premium to the site subscription though also available as part of that subscription, (which are also published as Kindle Singles, Apple, Nook and Kobo ebooks) some of which I have purchased and are well written and suit the form.

It’s a sensible strategy to create multiple channels for sales (and indeed for customer acquisition) from the same content. It’s something more traditional publishers might ponder. I know I am!

Go Read This | Format wars

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

A great piece by Brian O’Leary on the opportunity to grow:

Forget about tablets, apps, physical or digital formats: every issue, nearly 8 million people receive a copy of Game Informer. That\’s 2.6 million more subscribers than Reader\’s Digest. That\’s more than twice the number of copies sold by People magazine.

A generation ago, there was no Game Informer. Today, its circulation makes it the largest magazine circulated in the United States, delivered to an audience that most publishers think won\’t read.

Implicit in the \”high cost, small market\” assessment are two corrosive beliefs: people will only pay what they have paid in the past (if not less); and the market is static, or shrinking. Those untested assumptions lead us to look at a new platform – in this case tablets – as fundamentally an extension of what we\’ve done in the past.

via Format wars.

Go Read This | Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX: power, with a helping hand | The Verge

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

You have to hand it to Amazon, its is just going at this market hard and not letting up and by the looks of things, it is learning as it goes:

Whether you’re in the market for an 8.9-inch or 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire HDX is a hard device to beat. Not just for the screen resolution or the high-end processor, either: at $229 for the smaller model or $379 for the larger, the HDX is among the cheapest tablets on the market that we’d even consider recommending at those screen sizes. Even the LTE models, at $329 and $479 respectively and available for Verizon and AT&T, are as cheap as you’ll find for their kind. (And they’re not even the cheapest of Amazon’s new tablets.)

If Amazon can deliver on all its promises with its core apps, from email to the updated Silk browser, and can make the HDX into both the best vessel for Amazon content and something more besides, these two tablets are going to be hard to beat. And Mayday’s going to have a lot of customers this fall.

via Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX: power, with a helping hand | The Verge.

Go Read This | Face it: your digital product is a service | NEXT Berlin

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Great post this! Like this piece:

This is why digital products are more akin to services. If you have a bad day in a restaurant, the staff talk, and they adjust what they offer for the next day. Mistakes can be more readily rectified, customer demands worked into the product at greater speed. If you apply an agile approach to the code underlying your digital product, you have the same opportunity – you just need a company structure that will support that sort of rapid decision-making and implementation.

via Face it: your digital product is a service | NEXT Berlin.