Summly and absolute paywalls: the future of quality news content is in danger
Yahoo has made a millionaire out of 17 year-old app developer Nick D’Aloisio with the purchase of his news summary app, Summly – and although Raymond Snoddy says it’s great that news is being made more accessible via mobile devices – it’s a little less good that quality, journalistic content is being turned into convenient bullet points.
Until this week Summly was a little-known word and Nick D’Aloisio? Maybe a nephew of Nancy? At long last we can boast about a home-grown Internet entrepreneur.
One just hopes that the 17-year-old – now worth an estimated £20 million – has made the right decision in becoming a Yahoo employee. After all, none of the existing Yahoo employees managed to come up with an idea like Summly, which summarises news stories from media websites.
There is a danger that D’Aloisio will find it difficult to come up with any other brilliant ideas within a corporate structure.
But even if he fails to have a single further idea, multi-millionaire Nick has already made a remarkable impact. He has proved that anyone can come up with a winning app. Well, almost anyone.
More importantly, Nick has drawn attention to the limitless potential of mobile – a sector that has so far flattered to deceive, at least in terms of fulfilling its potential.
Everyone knows the big numbers and outrageous jokes; seven billion mobiles out there and close to 2 billion of them smart phones. Go to any developing country – even in rural areas of India or Mongolia – and the mobile seems to be ubiquitous. More people have access to mobiles than toothbrushes – through how anyone has an accurate fix on the global reach of toothbrushes remains a mystery.
Nick is not alone. A lot of work is already under way in the UK to try to fulfil the potential of mobile and new uses pop up all the time.
A British company, Proxama, which is expanding in the US, has produced mobile electronic wallets and is developing close and personal relationships with posters; walk past an outdoor display and instantly get special offers and discounts.
At the same time, O2 Health is forging relationships with health professionals – everything from using mobiles to check vital signs of life such as blood pressure or heart rate, to keeping a watch on the movements of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
But so far as Nick is concerned his subject matter is a little worrying. It’s great that news is being made more accessible and presumably more people will absorb more information as a result.
It’s a little less good that larger web pages are being turned into convenient bullet points. Web pages are not exactly enormous in the first place.
Next app up? Something that condenses bullet points into four-word summaries?
The real worry of course about Nick and his new best friends Yahoo are that they will be another entity trading, presumably legally and without plagiarism or breach of copyright, on the back of information originated and checked by newspapers.
And as the app, already downloaded more than 1 million times, is still free then we are probably talking about a further small step in the direction of the commoditisation of news wherever you are.
I hope somewhere in newspaper offices there is someone asking themselves why they didn’t discoverer Nick and Summly and get to him more quickly than Yahoo and turn the app into something that might have served their interests better.
At least this week we are seeing in the UK a greater clarification of the great paywall debate with the Daily Telegraph and the Sun heading in different directions.
There is no one answer to the conundrum and different papers will take different approaches based on how they perceive their market.
In the US the metered paywall route adopted by the New York Times is gaining in popularity and that is the way the Telegraph is heading.
The Telegraph will offer up to 20 articles a month for free before paywall subscriptions kick in.
News International executives have also made it clear that the Sun will go behind paywalls by the second half of this year – a development that will coincide with the arrival of Premier League goal clips.
The implication is that it will be an absolute paywall like The Times. If so, that is likely to be a mistake. With the exception of the goals, The Times tends to have more must-have information for its readers than the Sun where a metered approach would surely be more sensible with the goal clips behind the meter.
The trouble with absolute paywalls, as is already well known, is that papers and their journalists lose enormous visibility when online.
The gap is very clear when you look at the latest numbers from NRS PADD, which combine print and online regular readership.
The Daily Mail weighs in at a massive 20 million with the Sun not so far behind on 17.4 million.
The Telegraph is well above 12 million, whereas the Times scrapes through the 5 million mark.
Mike Darcey, N.I ‘s chief executive may be right that it is untenable to continue giving everything away for free but is it equally correct for the Sun to take the massive hit in visibility that will result from going behind a blanket paywall?
The scariest number of all is that the £20 million realised by Nick D ‘Aloisio is not all that far behind the annual online advertising revenue of the Daily Mail from its 100 million online users worldwide.
Perhaps when Nick tires of being a Yahoo employee one of the large newspaper groups will make him an offer to direct their mobile strategy even though Summly has already got away.