NB: This is a guest post by Peter Buckley, digital publisher for Rough Guides and DK Eyewitness Travel.
Having worked in the publishing industry for over a decade as a designer, author and editor, I have witnessed some pretty swift transitions from old-style publishing to new.
We have all had to learn an awful lot very quickly. For the last year I have been working for both Rough Guides and DK Eyewitness Travel, and the learning curve got a whole lot steeper.
Coming from the world of books to the world of apps, the shift is not only focused on the different ways we use content and build products, we are also facing a very different kind of sales channel to the one we are all used to.
As customers, we all know that price is the most significant factor when we make decisions about a purchase.
Yes, desire, need, fashion and other forces play a part, but price, and our ability to instantly balance that price against value, is king. In the world of apps there sometimes seem to be little logic or justice in the way that prices are set and these judgements are made.
People will seemingly pay $0.99 for an app that blows raspberries (a sound that we can all make ourselves for free), but then turn their noses up when presented with a $3 content-rich offering where the physical book equivalent might sell for four times that price.
It’s a fascinating and challenging arena.
So, why should we have to pay more for certain kinds of apps? Well, taking the example of travel apps, creating a good app is no less expensive than creating a good guidebook.
And there is a whole lot more to it than just “chunking” up the book’s content and dumping it into an app.
By far the more interesting aspect of digital travel products, from a publisher’s perspective, is the freedom they offer to really play with formats and do all the things we have never been able to do with books.
Imagine how different digital ideas meetings are to an equivalent gathering discussing books. There are no physical constraints to the conversation. No talk of numbers of pages, or the cost of shipping books around the globe.
Instead, user experiences are discussed; breadcrumb trails are layered across content and exciting interactive elements are chewed over … it’s a whole lot of fun.
But it’s also expensive to do and takes enormous amounts of time and effort to get right … time and effort that people need to be paid for.
Good apps take quality and trusted content and add an element of depth, by surfacing the content and creating an interactive experience, allowing us to experience it in exciting new ways.
There is also the brand element to be considered when looking at price. When individuals weigh up the relative merits of, say, an anonymous Guide to Paris and the Paris: DK Eyewitness iPad app [launched last month], they are perhaps influenced in their choice by brand loyalty and the knowledge that the content is coming from an established team of experienced and trusted writers, editors and designers.
There might also be a brand voice that the user identifies with and wants to experience in this format too. All these things have value, and warrant a price, but that is not to say that publishers and brands have a God-given right to that loyalty.
The digital world is an incredibly transparent and empowering one, and if an unknown voice steps forward with a killer product they are just as likely to succeed with it than a massive brand would.
As I have already hinted, one thing that is hard to do for free is generate unique content that cannot be found elsewhere – there are plenty of cheap-as-chips travel apps out there that do little more than draw on Wikipedia for their guide content and dish it up alongside a photo-feed from flickr.
It’s easy to put together from a developer’s perspective, but not the greatest experience for the punter. As a trusted publisher, one might also go down the root of calling upon the “crowd” for content, but even the aggregation and policing of such a system needs to be paid for.
But that is not to say that all our apps will be paid for, there are also a myriad of reasons why we might choose to produce free apps: to enhance brand awareness, or as a marketing strategy, for example.
We took this approach with the Rough Guides World Lens app. It’s a free travel photography app that really sums up the values of the brand and drives traffic to the website. With over 30,000 downloads in the first few weeks alone, it has been a real success for us.
We have witnessed a real snowball effect with this product as it also has built-in features that enable people to share individual images via either email, Twitter or Facebook.
These kinds of activities work really hard for Rough Guides as a brand and are an essential part of our online activities.
It both promotes digital products and the sales of our physical book products and, of course, with all this extra traffic firing our weblinks around the globe, our online ad partners are happy too.
Free apps also mean more opportunities for third party sponsorship of our products.
It’s a model that is becoming increasingly popular and might either take the form of ad banners served directly to our apps from a third-party ad agency, or a direct relationship with a single ad sponsor. The latter, in particular, can be a really strong lever for both brands involved.
Unsurprisingly, early research shows that people are far more happy to see third party ads in a free app but less so in a paid app.
This kind of free model also creates the opportunity to seed paid-for apps, either by including links back to the App Store or via in-app purchases, where customers buy additional chunks of content to populate their free app.
To date, the real success stories here have been with games and entertainment apps, where developers have been able to make more money giving away an app and then offering additional levels of plugins, than they could if they had charged for the app at the outset.
The bottom line is that this is a very new space for publishers, and we have to experiment to see what works for the kinds of products that we create.
Trying out different pricing models and evaluating results is key to discovering what works. Mixing and matching paid and free apps is part of this process.
The creative industries have changed beyond recognition in the last decade, and creating any kind of print product is no longer the, fairly, exact science that it once was.
NB: This is a guest post by Peter Buckley, digital publisher for Rough Guides and DK Travel.