(Update: I turned this into a more comprehensive post about digital publishing trends on the RightSpot Media blog.)
I write this from my iPad (hence no formatting or links), on which I recently installed an amazing app called Zite. It’s kind of like Flipboard, or so I’ve heard; I never installed it because I tend to already fear the deluge of social spam that sites like Facebook now generate.
Zite is different. It’s a “personalized magazine” that brings me information I’m interested in, kind of like Pandora but for readable content. I tell it what articles I like (and assume it also picks up on cues, like what articles I share), and it brings me more of them. And it brings them from quality sources I might never otherwise discover, unlike RSS, which is fairly fixed once you set up your reader.
Working in a digital marketing and publishing business, I can say that this feels significant. Publishers are rushing to get apps out the door, perhaps delayed only by fears of Apple’s subscription cut. But I think it’s unlikely most users will subscribe to dozens or hundreds of apps on their iPad, taking up all that space, and cluttering their life. I think it’s far more likely that tablets will be dominated by the growing number of aggregation and curation apps.
What does that mean for publishers? It means a different model than the standard approach to advertising. I think it means more content sponsorship, where an advertiser pays to sponsor a subject area and has their brand associated with content on that subject (but doesn’t influence the content, at least not any more than existing forms of advertising). Mashable does this well, and is a model to follow.
I think it also means other forms of compensation, such as that offered by Readability (thanks to Pramesh for the correction), which is distributing subscription revenue to the creators of content that users save to that platform.
Will this “save” journalism as we know it? Hard to say. Who would have ever guessed that we could crowdsource an encyclopedia from latent talent and spare time? I do feel, however, that publishers are better off investing in low-cost sponsorship experiments than high-cost app-development experiments. More generally, I think this is a safe strategy to follow: create great content, find a related sponsor, embed their sponsorship in your content (in a way that respects editorial integrity), and distribute your content as widely as possible, to every app and website you can think of. Including Zite.
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