About Ben
Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a media company with over 10MM monthly unique users and major media partners including Fox, Showtime, HBO, Microsoft, and Turner. On his blog, Digital Quarters, he evangelizes “Publishing 2.0” and examines the changes needed for the media industry to thrive in the digital era. 
Ben’s Most Recent Tweets
- elowitz: Quoted in The Hwood Reporter: "The prof. critic has to compete against all kinds of independents to stay relevant." http://bit.ly/dwL47K
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- elowitz: Well said by jim breyer at #fortunetech: The big media companies have no incremental path to succeeding in digital media"
Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
by Ben Elowitz
It’s been a week of dancing for Apple and The New York Times as they played hokey pokey with an app that offers a new, fun way for consumers to experience media: First, Steve Jobs put the acclaimed Pulse News app into his Worldwide Developers Conference talk, then took it out of the app store, and then put it back in again, but only after the developers took The New York Times out of it.
But as fun as it is to watch them dance, I can’t help but notice that The New York Times missed the opportunity right in front of Sr. VP Martin Nisenholtz’s eyes: the Pulse team is exactly the kind of talent that the company should be acquiring, not shunting. The Pulse founders made an app with a great consumer experience for media, did it in just a few weeks, managed to get the attention of the premier technology tastemaker in the world, Steve Jobs, and even made some money.
Message to Martin: Instead of cutting them down and pushing them into someone else’s arms, make nice and go hire (or acquire) the Pulse team. Or, as my mother once said to my older brother when he was dating someone she actually liked, “There are better men out there than you: You better marry her before someone else does!”
- In: Apps| General| Newspapers
- Tags: app, Apple, martin nisenholtz, New York Times, pulse, pulse news, steve jobs
by Ben Elowitz
With the recent announcement of the iAd advertising platform for iPhone/iPa
d applications, Apple is filling one of the last major gaps in content monetization. They now have a full spectrum of monetization options for their platform: ad-sponsored free content; free trials; “bite sized” in-app billing for impulse buys, premium apps, and subscription billing. Publishers can choose the revenue model that best suits their content and audience.
For consumers, the Apple model is remarkably easy. Granted, the initial iTunes account set-up is somewhat of a hassle, but once completed, consumers can painlessly make purchases thereafter. Apple solved the micropayment problem years ago in creating the iTunes store for selling songs, and has carried forward that same keep-it-simple philosophy for premium content and applications on the iPhone.
Here is my take on the magic formula for getting consumers to pay for content:
Desire + Relationship + Ease = Spend
Desire is straightforward: how much do consumers want your content? Desire is a function of the degree to which your content and experience are unique and compelling.
Relationship is a measure of your brand and the extent to which you’ve consistently delighted a customer (or their friends) in the past.
Ease is achieved by making it effortless to pay for content.
Apple has nailed all three of these drivers, resulting in substantial and growing spend from consumers. On desire, they’ve made a product and a content experience coveted by loyalists and consumers en masse. On relationship, their platform has proven itself with a billion consumer delights. And in ease, Apple has set a new standard with the 5-second purchase process consisting of a just a password.
Many publishers and app developers complain about Apple’s closed system (indeed, Adobe has reason to do so), but that same closed system allows a controlled – hence predictable – experience for consumers. Apple is reducing the friction to purchase by leveraging their relationship and making the purchase easy.
This leaves me to wonder however: why is Apple the only company to innovate a complete platform for content monetization? The result for publishers is that they are better served by jumping on the Apple bandwagon than by striking out on their own. But as Apple continues to amass share of eyeballs, the media industry will resist the premium that Apple charges.
Can publishers directly offer consumers such high levels of desire, relationship, and ease and crack the code on getting consumers to pay? That is their challenge; and if they do, the money- and their independence – will follow.
- In: Consumer Payment
- Tags: Apple, bite-size payment, iad, micropayment
by Ben Elowitz
One of my favorite questions to ask recruiting candidates is: “What content sites have a unique and differentiated user experience?”
The usual answers are as tiresome as the state of web design: YouTube (yes, it is fun to keep clicking), Hulu (yes, they got the experience right for TV viewing), and lots of pauses and comments like “I don’t know, it’s kind of all the same.”
Let’s face it: publishers are formulaic herds. And the formulas are boring and tired for users. How bad the state of the art is when Huffington Post gets major props for going with a single full-screen hero shot on its home page – and that’s considered breakthrough!
So that’s why I’m incredibly impressed with what MSN’s Scott Moore and BermanBraun’s Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman have done with their newest creation, Glo. From logo to flow, the site’s design lets go of the old formulas, tries something new, and most importantly, takes risks. New layouts, new interactions, and new forms of content all create a feeling that this is not an ordinary website. Even more, they have defined their own style that is adventurously well-suited for their audience.
To start making money, publishers need to create consumer experiences that stand out. As MSN’s Scott Moore said in a post by Kara Swisher, “we see a lot of room to grow by offering something different and of higher quality.” These premium visceral experiences are exactly the path to profit in digital media: they will attract loyal audiences, premium advertising dollars, and over time create opportunities for upselling to consumers. And those premium experiences are, after all, the root reason why everyone is so excited about the iPad this week.
Apple doesn’t need to be the only one that can innovate. This kind of innovation is rare among publishers, and yet all too valuable.
For heaven’s sake, if MSN can do it, everyone can.
- In: Portals
- Tags: Apple, bermanbraun, creativity, glo, innovation, msn, scott moore
by Ben Elowitz
This article originally appeared as a guest post on Techcrunch
1) The multi-functional capability. Buy a Kindle and you get… a reader. Another dedicated device to carry. Buy an iPad, and you get a whole new companion that can do pretty much anything. Games, movies, browsing, documents, and more—all in one. And zillions of iPhone apps. It’s sooooo much more than a reader, it’s a whole-life device.
2) The screen. Full color, multi-touch screen, gestures, and more. It’s a pleasure to look at it – and we all can rely on Steve Jobs’ aesthetics to know that it’s a pleasure to hold as well.
3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub out of the box, overcoming publishers’ resistance to having to support a proprietary format such as Kindle’s; and creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. (Something tells me Amazon will be making an announcement about ePub support real soon…)
4) The iBooks store. Apple has captured the magic of shopping. Once again, whereas Amazon does great with the functional needs of buying a book, Apple goes beyond to create an experience.
5) The experience. The Kindle provides a good functional experience for readers—in a very Bezosian way, it meets all our needs. But Apple’s creation goes beyond, to make the experience fun and cool. You can swipe through pages on an iPad. On the Kindle, you have to dutifully click a button.
6) The economics. Publishers have been deeply concerned
about price erosion with Amazon’s $9.99 pricing—and have been up in arms over Amazon’s 70% revenue share take. Though Amazon has reversed the revenue share (to match Apple’s reported offer at 30%), it would require publishers to cut prices and offer deep discounts. Considering the threat the publishing industry is under, the last thing that publishers want in a time of transition is to have their revenues crammed down further by Jeff Bezos.
7) The apps. In a digital age, a book is (finally!) becoming more than just words on a page. But the Kindle has been slow to recognize this. With the iPad, out of the gate publishers can create whole experiences. Want to create something unique in the market to draw consumers? Publishers can go beyond e-books, and create an app using one of the world’s most popular SDK platforms.
8) The marketplace. Apple’s iBook and App Store marketplaces will instantly be a must-attend venue for publishers. The anticipated sales of the iPad will mean exposure to so many more consumers than Kindle; and Apple already has 125 million consumer store accounts with 12 billion products already downloaded. Amazon won’t even release the number of Kindles sold, because the number of consumers buying its device pales next to Apple’s reach.
9) The price. For $10 more than a Kindle DX, consumers get an incredible ebook reader, and so much more: a device that they can use for, well, pretty much anything. The options, consumer experience, and flexibility for that $10 are a no-brainer.
10) The Apple factor (a.k.a. “sexy”). Let’s face it, Apple is a brand people want to be affiliated with. It has a cool factor. Even those of us who are smart enough to know better still fall in love with Apple products, and carry them with pride. Amazon just doesn’t have that. As Jason Kottke says, “the iPad makes the Kindle look like it’s from the 1980’s”.
Apple has upped the game for Amazon. Jeff Bezos and his team better start a clean sheet of design if they want Kindle to catch up again and play as a leader with consumers.
It’s clear that Amazon is already scared: witness their recent moves in the last few days running up to Apple’s announcement. Just this month, they’ve announced an app frameworkand a new royalty structure to be more attractive to publishers – and both moves are clearly defensive catch-up plays to respond to the threat of the iPad. Amazon is even trying to win love by giving away free Kindles to their best customers.
But the best plan for Amazon isn’t to try to buy customers or try to match Apple’s approach. Rather, they’ll need to re-think their consumer experience from start to finish. They’ve done a great job so far of digitizing books, but now if they want to compete with Steve Jobs’ inventiveness, they’ll have to step up to be a must-have device in consumers’ digital lives. Of course, they can also just surrender and continue to sell books through their existing iPhone app, which should be compatible with the iPad like all the other apps in the App Store.