Managed expectations key to successful app development

Marius Cloete, head of research at the PPA, says for publishers the real game-changer isn’t developing that elusive killer app, it’s the realisation that end-users want our content and we continuously need to rise to the challenge of giving them access to it on whichever platform they prefer…

About two weeks after the iPad launched last year, I interviewed for my current position at the PPA. One of the interviewers eagerly asked me what I thought about the iPad and the impact it would have on the publishing industry.

I could see his jaw drop ever so slightly when my response was that I don’t view it as the game-changer it was being hailed as at the time and that I see it as another step in publishers’ ascent to becoming platform agnostic content providers, albeit a rather sexy and sleek step.

Nine months down the road the realities of harnessing a new platform to deliver content is starting to sink in and the headlines have taken on a slightly more critical tone.

Reporting on SXSW 2011 last week, MediaGuardian featured the headline ‘Novelty of iPad news apps fades fast among digital delegates’.  The introductory paragraph doesn’t really make for much more encouraging reading: “If Rupert Murdoch’s $30m iPad newspaper The Daily is ‘like using Real Player in 1997’, what hope does the rest of the industry have?”

Well, what were we expecting?

Although I salute News Corp’s brave and aggressive move and view it as a crucial event in the development of content apps, do we really expect The Daily to instantly define what a content app should look like?

Early innovators forge the path but they’re not always the ones who build the road.

If that was the case you’d be Webcrawling information on Netscape not Googling it on Chrome and you’d tell people to look you up on Friends Reunited instead of Facebook. Annoyingly you’d also still be poking a little stick at your smart phone’s screen.

Anyone expecting a single digital development to instantly transform the way we deliver content and revolutionise business models are in for a lifetime of disappointment and possibly, a short career in media…

So where does this leave the publishing industry, and specifically magazine publishers? The answer is very well positioned, actually.

The PPA recently interviewed 101 consumer and B2B publishers in the 2011 wave of its Publishing Futures survey, and the results show an industry taking an enthusiastic, but well balanced approach to digital publishing and app development.

Nearly 78% of consumer publishers have identified creating new digital or e-reader editions as a priority for the coming year. It’s also singled out as the top priority from a product development point of view (P.S. launching new print titles is still on the table as well in case you’re wondering!).

Yet when it comes to contribution to the bottom line, publishers have very sober expectations of the contribution these new developments are likely to make to their business.

Over the next two years publishers expect paid-for content to grow from the current 0.5% to 2.9% of total revenue, good progress but hardly a game-changer.

Consumer publishers are still very much reliant and focused on their print products. Hardly surprising given that it still accounts for 86% of revenues and that they expect growth in turnover to accelerate from 3% in 2010 to more than 5% in 2011.

Digital will of course be the primary driver of growth with contribution to turnover set to grow from 4.7% to 13.3% during the next two years – but driven largely by advertising revenues on existing digital assets.

The truth is that nobody really knows how to ‘crack’ the content app just yet and that it will be a (relatively) slow burn just as it was with online and mobile which has taken two decades to get where it is today.

For publishers the real game-changer isn’t developing that elusive killer app, it’s the realisation that end-users want our content and we continuously need to rise to the challenge of giving them access to it on whichever platform they prefer. I’m rather sure there’s an app for that!