Here’s a phrase you don’t hear from many publishers these days: “We found Apple were very helpful.”
Ever since Apple set down new rules for taking a 30 per cent cut of all App Store subscriptions in February, media groups and their trade bodies have often been found bad-mouthing the iPad maker.
But as the Telegraph Media Group launches its new paid iPad app, its digital editor, Edward Roussel, says Apple has been “co-operative and helpful” during its development.
That was particularly true in making the app easy for existing print subscribers to access for free and Apple was even flexible in allowing the Telegraph to access customer data. Data has been another big sticking point for publishers concerned that Apple would not hand over information about their customers.
The Telegraph iPad app will cost £9.99 a month, but Mr Roussel is happy to give £3 of that to Apple because the App Store is such a “user-friendly” way to pay – and in any case relatively similar to the costs of distributing a print product.
“The bottom line is we don’t have a gripe with Apple on the subscription model that they have,” Mr Roussel says. “We found they were prepared to enter into a dialogue with us.”
Coming just a day after Hearst’s announcement that it would make some magazines available for subscription on the iPad, there could be signs of thaw in publishers’ relationship with Apple.
“The big picture is that Apple itself is evolving and changing and I think that Apple understands it is in its interests to carry the content of large publishers,” Mr Roussel says. “It’s also making efforts to understand what the key issues are for each publisher.”
To get around Apple’s stranglehold on consumer data, the Telegraph asked readers if they were happy to give it information about their habits. Just under half of the 133,000 people who downloaded its previous free app agreed to do so, Mr Roussel says.
“With our trial [free] product, we had a discussion with Apple about that [data sharing] and what they told us was that they didn’t want mandatory fields as a condition of downloading the app, but that it could be voluntary. I don’t think they have changed their position on that,” he says.
“People talk in a rather blanket way about data. When you are very specific, they do listen and do respond.”
That customer data from its free or “beta” app has helped the Telegraph to shape its paid strategy. At an average age of 50, iPad readers tend to be younger than the Telegraph’s print readership (averaging 55) but older than its website (typically around 40).
Spikes in daily activity occur in mornings and late evenings, so the new app features a “night reading” mode, with white text on a black background to reduce screen glare.
In many ways, the Telegraph app is much more similar to its newspaper than its website – and deliberately so. Each day’s content is made available at 5am and is not updated during the day except for particularly big breaking news stories.
“The big decision we made was that fundamentally we want the iPad app to be a digital newspaper, as distinct from something that’s updated every five minutes,” Mr Roussel says. “It’s a very different product to a live 24-7 website.”
