Micropayments and the power of free

WriteRoom is an iPhone app for taking notes that has a few nice features. I know about the developer, Jesse Grosjean, from some of his Mac work, and when I saw last night that the app was on sale for 99 cents, I bought a copy.

But that sale was actually part of an experiment Jesse’s been running with WriteRoom’s price, and he’s now publishing the data he’s collected. And it raises some interesting perspectives on the ongoing debates around micropayments.

WriteRoom used to cost $4.99. And last Thursday, at that price, it sold nine copies.

Then Jesse decided to make WriteRoom free for three days. In that long weekend, his application was downloaded a whopping 16,347 times.

Then, starting Monday, he brought back a price — this time, only 99 cents. In the first two days at that price, he averaged 72 sales a day.

Now, selling iPhone apps isn’t precisely analogous to selling individual news stories, for a variety of reasons. And any number of external factors could have influenced Jesse’s numbers. But it’s also another bit of evidence of how enormously price-sensitive people are in a digital environment. As Chris Anderson will tell you, free is an entirely different animal from any price — even one as insignificant as 99 cents. If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford 99 cents for an app. But even for this relatively upmarket crowd, that tiny sum was a huge barrier. Journalists who think their audiences will happily start paying a nickel/quarter/dollar for every story they click on should take note.

(This is also why I always counter arguments for micropayments with a push for macropayments. There are in fact people willing to pay for news content. But they’re a smaller share of your audience than you might think, and they’re also willing to pay more than a nickel or a quarter. If you’re going to try a paid-content model, to me it makes a lot more sense to make sure you’re getting all the revenue you can out of those bigger fish than to waste energy chasing after the folks who will never pay anything.)

For the Boston Globe’s Kennedy series, video is dominant

It wasn’t quite the Red Sox winning the World Series, but The Boston Globe saw huge traffic yesterday as it covered the death of Ted Kennedy — a sign that local news sites can still dominate national stories on their turf.

The Globe, which had spent years preparing for Kennedy’s death, had more than 8 million page views as of 5 p.m. yesterday, when I spoke to Bennie DiNardo, deputy managing editor for multimedia. Part of the Globe’s coverage included a seven-part biographical series — with lengthy articles, videos, and other material — that first ran in February and was later published as a book. Recent disagreement over the appeal of long-form journalism on the web made me wonder: How were people consuming the Globe’s Kennedy series?

David Beard, editor of Boston.com, said the package received more than 2.5 million page views in February and likely led to a bump in time spent on the site that month. There was some “lingering traffic” after the series ran, in part because it ranks on the first page of a Google search for Ted Kennedy. Though he didn’t have numbers to share, DiNardo said, “What we saw online the first time it went through was that people were heavily consuming the video.” (Much of the text was removed from the package for several months as part of an agreement with the book publisher, Simon & Schuster, which didn’t want free competition. All of the content is back up now, even as another press run of the book is prepared.) Boston.com has been promoting the series on its front page since news of Kennedy’s death broke early yesterday morning.

There’s not enough evidence to make a sweeping conclusion, but some of the data suggests that video is the better entry point for long-form content. Certainly, the Globe designed its Kennedy package to give the videos more prominence than the articles. “This was the first time we tried to really produce documentary-quality video,” DiNardo told me. He said finding and making arrangements to use archival footage was particularly difficult: “It was just a whole world that us newspaper folks aren’t used to.”

Yesterday the Globe uploaded those and other videos to its YouTube channel, hoping to gain audience as people searched for Kennedy clips. That’s certainly the first thing I did yesterday after waking up to the sad news. Most of the Globe’s videos have just a few hundred views, but their investigation of Chappaquiddick, naturally, has already garnered more than 13,000. Searches for Chappaquiddick dominated Google yesterday.

A for-profit argument for a nonprofit model

There’s a great new post at Free Press’s Save The News project. It’s from Cindy House, formerly of the now-deceased Rocky Mountain News and now of the Rocky Mountain Independent. In it, she talks about the Independent’s business model and why the founders chose the for-profit path.

House’s post is worth reading because the three-pronged model she describes is truly innovative. The first two elements we know a lot about: advertising and memberships. The third is something not normally associated with newsrooms: The Independent plans to develop a consulting business that will offer “Web design, search engine optimization and editing/writing services to other businesses.”

Although House doesn’t use the word “subsidize” in connection with journalism, that’s exactly what she’s talking about. As she says, the owners hope the consulting business will “bring in much-needed capital.” She adds: “We keep our expenses low so that whatever revenues come in go right back into content development.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely the argument for the nonprofit model. Keep reading »