Like so many of its peers, The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) is trying to find the right notes to play in just the right order when it comes to getting paid for digital content. Unfortunately, John Philip Sousa isn’t around to write the march. Instead, the Post is mixing it up: launching a paid iPhone app that hit iTunes Wednesday but keeping an open, ad-supported WAP site; not charging for access at washingtonpost.com but considering options for premium offers; charging $1.99 for the first year of that iPhone app—and $240 for a year of a digital edition delivered by Kindle or other e-readers. Goli Sheikholeslami, the Post‘s vice president and general manager of digital operations, spoke with paidContent about the paper’s strategy when it comes to mobile business models, developing for the iPad and tablets, e-readers and more. She was GM of washingtonpost.com before the online and print operations merged on Jan. 1. (The interview took place before WaPo tech columnist Rob Pegorano panned the app on his blog, suggesting users save the $1.99 for now. I’ll let you know whether I think it’s worth the money. Meanwhile, some screen grabs.) Some highlights:
—Online vs. Mobile: “We do treat them as separate platforms, I think that the users’ expectations are different on the two platforms and we want to make sure we build for the mobile platform. We’re focused on the fact that it’s a different screen size, people are usually sort of in transit, on the go, also, on the iPhone in the app store, the expectation from customers to pay for digital content is there as well. It also gives us a place where we can experiment. We do think that readers and users will pay for content that’s unique and customized, valuable experiences.” That doesn’t mean WaPo CEO Don Graham was off key when he said the paper wouldn’t charge for washingtonpost.com—but the discussion is far from over. “We don’t have plans now to charge for the website because we think that the opportunity from a business perspective is greater if we keep it as an open experience for users. But our thinking will evolve and learn as we try out these new things.”
Later, when I asked how Graham’s comments fit with Publisher Katharine Weymouth’s saying on various occasions that the decision hadn’t been made yet, Sheikholeslami replied: “We have no immediate plans to put a metered system or a pure pay wall in front of our website but that doesn’t mean that we’re not working on how to create new premium products that may or may not be subscription products.”
—The iQuestion : Is WaPo developing an iPad app? “I’m not ready to announce exactly what it is and what we’re going to do but we are very much in that exploration phase and would like to aggressively have products available for that platform.” Does aggressively mean when it launches? “The challenge is that from the time they announced it at the end of January to the release of the first product end of March is eight weeks.” To meet that deadline, the first effort may be an iPad-enhanced version of the new iPhone app. (Video is on the roadmap but not part of the launch version.)
But Sheikholeslami expects to go beyond that. “What areas can we go deeper in? … What new products can the Washington Post introduce on these platforms?” The approach is similar to the one they tried with iPhone; the first effort was the Going Out Guide, a free local entertainment app. She wouldn’t provide download stats but said they’re please by the adoption rate.
At the same time, she’s trying to gauge how people will use the iPad, recalling how Steve Jobs described it as a “sitting-back” experience and that reading experience and even asking me if I think the iPad will be an “enjoyment reading device” for people to curl up with on their couch. She added, “I think that makes a difference for the way we approach it as a creator of content.”
—The E-Question: For all that some developers talk about how controlling Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) can be, Sheikholeslami sounds intrigued by the potential of breaking free from the more rigid requirements of Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) for Kindle. “With Amazon, the editorial specs are very well defined. Everything’s very standardized. It’s hard for us to try to create a unique experience. But on the iPad and the iPhone, the tool kit is available to us to manipulate and be as creative as we want to be.” Then again, the Kindle version is an e-edition delivered daily, not the non-linear experience of a constantly updated news app. “We have to create an experience on all of these devices. They have to be well tailored to that platform and that device. We can’t take the newspaper and slap it online and we can’t take our web site and slap it on the mobile phone and we can’t take our iPhone app and slap it on the iPad. We really have to reimagine and recreate.”
—The $238 Question: When I raised the almost mind-blowing disconnect of the $238 difference between the iPhone app and the annual cost of a $11.99 monthly e-reader subscription, Sheikholeslami quickly replied, “That’s why we really do think of this initial year as a year of experimentation because at some point we have to have a consistent approach when it comes to pricing and bundling. Right now we have the benefit of being able to use the iTunes backend for that frictionless payment system—which is beautiful—but if we are serious about this we have to really start thinking about how to bring that into our internal back-end system so we can be much more sophisticated about the way we manage.” Sheikholeslami brought up bundling, which she sees as an opportunity, but the paper isn’t close to including paid digital access with its print subscriptions.
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