Businessaire

While traveling through Sweden in January I said to a friend that I thought the ‘newspaper’ was dead or at least dying a slow death to which he replied with some reasons why he thought it would stay alive.

Judging from the NYTimes, Washington Post and News Corporation stock prices over the last five years it doesn’t take a genius to see that the newspaper business model is broken, circulation and advertising dollars are down and people were asked to leave.

The current problem that plaques the traditional news outlets is that news has a time value that decays very quickly and their static papers get killed by the speed, cost and ease of the internet but the iPad can squash those gaps and make their business model and content (inventory) profitable once again.

The big advantage for newspaper companies moving forward is their household brand names and also their opinion and investigative journalism pieces which they can leverage to put a stranglehold in this space and save their future.

Now while I think the first iPad model has many flaws from a hardware perspective but like any Apple product it will be relaunched a ‘2.0′ fixing the glaring problems the main thing to take away is the functionality that the device poses.

Another barrier is price, although I think the current model is good value for money I think the transition to where a large majority of people would buy and carry one it would have to be around the magic $200- $300 price tag.

The iPad poses to bridge the gap for newspaper organizations because of a few reasons and we are seeing this happening right now!

The content can now be at real time-
It fixes that the static nature of the traditional paper so that breaking news can be posted straight away so likes of NYtimes can compete with the Twitter, and Facebook for speed which is a huge problem right now.

A problem with this is 100% connectivity and if you read the link below Time Warner now offers free city-wide WiFi which will enable the iPad to always be connected, hopefully this will set a precedent for other cosmopolitan cities.

Check Time Warner Cable enables city-wide WiFi for NYC subscribers- http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/25/time-warner-cable-enables-city-wide-wifi-for-nyc-subscribers/

Advertising-
- The size of ads can now be the size of current print ads unlike mobile devices
- Ability to tailor ad’s to the specific audience- using say Facebook data advertisers can tailor content to ages, sex, sports and hobbies
- Dynamic, one ad space could be two, or an ad can be a moving object like a gif or a small video like a trailer hosted on Youtube
- Call to action if you want users to actively participate in campaigns to Digg or Twitter content they can do that with one click connecting the ‘news’ and ‘social’ worlds but also being the primary source
- Geographical ad’s- You could make an ad for a restaurant that is close to the user or anything in a close proximity, this is something that has never been done before

This is happening now check out:
iPad apps attract big name advertisers- FedEx, Buick and credit card company have bought space on the apps from New York Times, Newsweek, WSJ and others
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/25/ipad-advertising

The NYT says the going rate is $75,000 to $300,000 “for a few months of exclusivity” on one of these apps.

Subscription model or application-
Newspaper organisations could charge a subscription model like WSJ is and I’m sure more niche news content providers will, or you will see them just get their applications out there as soon as possible so that most users have their applications because how many news app’s will one have? I think for most providers just having a an application for free to try to get that first mover advantage.

- WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month- http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/25/wsj-on-ipad-17-99-a-month-magazines-to-be-at-or-near-newsstand/

End of the day
What you eventually want is to be on the bus going home from work pull out the iPad one click on the NYTimes application see the latest news in an easy to read format, read without straining your eyes, move around swiftly through the pages and if anything breaking news happens it pop up on your screen, even the possibility of a streaming video of a situation, straight away so your never in the dark getting quality and quick news.

All the while all the ad’s are perfectly tailored to you and maybe you notice on the way home while reading the Sports section that one of your local pubs is having a cheap happy hour… Now wouldn’t that be nice.

Andrew