Posts tagged Publishing
There Is Opportunity In Diversifying Your Android Publishing Strategy
Jan 25th
Mobile marketing company Tapjoy has had a tumultuous ride in the last year. It has been bounced around by Apple and its App Store terms of service, has gone to the Web to skirt Apple’s policies, integrated mobile video ads and set up a fund for iOS developers to port their games to Android. It has been scattershot and frenetic but it appears that, finally, the company is starting to see some success.
Tapjoy launched a mobile Web-based application store late in 2011 with the intention of skirting Apple and bringing iOS, Android and HTML5-based Facebook games to one central location. Through its Android Fund, Tapjoy now has 130 applications that includes several million user editions. So much for the notion that 2012 would be the death of the third-party app store.
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For the record, I still believe that many third-party app stores will eventually get pushed out the ecosystem. It seems now that the market is still in its boom phase where many parties believe there is money to be made by living off the scraps from the Android Market and Apple App Store. And hey, why not? If Apple proved anything with its $700 million paid to iOS developers last quarter, it is that there is a healthy and vibrant demand for mobile applications and that there is money to be made by all.
Despite its bumpy ride, Tapjoy has been growing quickly. Its Android network reached 25 million monthly active users in December 2011. That is, of course, thanks to its focus on Android after iOS kicked the company and its virtual currency out of the App Store. Tapjoy then partnered with PapayaMobile to bring social discovery to mobile apps through its Web-based store.
“Our goal for the Tapjoy Android Fund was to help enhance the Android ecosystem by bringing great games from Facebook, iOS and other platforms to the Android Market,” said Rob Carroll, Tapjoy’s director of publishing, in a press release.
So, Tapjoy has been growing. So, it has had some success with Android apps. So what? Tapjoy in and of itself is only one player, and a smaller one, in the larger sea that is the Empire Of Android. Tapjoy’s recent success actually has a lot less to do with the company than the trend it represents.
What is the biggest problem facing Android developers? Making money. The Android Market has not been conducive helping publishers to that end. We expect Google to help change that in 2012 but right now there is an ecosystem building around Android that can help developers get their apps discovered and get paid. While there is basically zero grey market for iOS apps, the grey market for Android is a viable place for publishers to turn to. Whether it is the Tapjoy Android Fund and its repository of apps or the Amazon Android Appstore or GetJar (which just signed a deal with GameLoft) there are alternatives.
Android publishers have opportunities to make money. It is not as streamlined as iOS and some creativity will be needed. Diversifying your Android strategy can help you put apps on users’ smartphones and dollars in your pocket.
Developers: What is your Android strategy? Do you rely on the Android Market or ar you actively pursuing outside opportunities in third party application stores? Let us know in the comments.
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What Amazon’s Merry Christmas Means for Tablets and the Future of Publishing
Dec 29th
Not unsurprisingly, this holiday season was a big one for the world’s biggest e-commerce retailer. But it wasn’t just all those remote-controlled, inflatable flying sharks and Forever Lazy pajamas people ordered. Among the biggest winners this year was Amazon’s line of Kindle e-readers and, naturally, the e-books that go on them.
Kindles flew off Amazon’s digital shelves at a rate of over 1 million per week during the month of December and occupied the top three slots on the company’s site-wide bestseller list. The #1 position was held by the Kindle Fire, which was also the most gifted and wished-for item on the entire site, according to data released today by Amazon.
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What good would all those new e-reader devices be without books to go with them? Sure enough, after unwrapping their new gadgets on Christmas Day, people took to the Kindle Store to download books, making it the single best day for ebook downloads since Amazon starting offering them. Between Black Friday and Christmas, Kindle books sold 175% more than they did during that same time period last year.
Indie Authors on the Rise
Found amidst the company’s holiday sales stats are a few clues about what the future of publishing might entail. In addition to obvious choices like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, readers have been downloading books by independent authors at a growing pace.
In 2011, the first and fourth best-selling ebooks were by indie authors who published their work via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. No longer are readers limited to offerings from big publishing houses. Thanks to the explosion in e-books and the devices they’re best read on, unknown authors can become best-sellers like never before.
2012: Another Huge Year For Tablets
It was no mistake that Amazon released its media tablet just in time for the holiday season, and at less than half the cost of the iPad. The device is the fastest-growing tablet since the first generation iPad, and that growth shows no signs of stopping.
The early success of the Kindle Fire closes out another big year for tablets and precedes what is sure to be yet another one. Apple is expected to unveil the next generation of the iPad at some point in 2012, possibly in multiple sizes and almost certainly with a smaller price tag. Android is pushing its own platform forward with Ice Cream Sandwich and we’ll undoubtedly see a host of new ICS-friendly devices next year.
We’ll also see the launch of Windows 8 next year, a new generation of Microsoft’s operating system that will offer a seamless experience across dekstops, tablets and smartphones. How well it will catch on remains to be seen, but for Windows users, an affordable Windows 8-based tablet could be hard to resist.
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The Art Of The Follow-Up Post In News & Article Publishing
Nov 17th
Classic linkbait campaigns follow a “throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks” model. Which begs the question: what do you do when it does stick? Let’s say you’ve written a solid piece of linkbait, and you’re ranking on page one for a topical head or near-head…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
How HTML5 Tablet Apps Get a Boost From a New Breed of Publishing Tools
Nov 16th
Back when the iPad was nothing more than an Apple gadget rumor, publishers began imagining the possibilities the device would bring. Only 22 months into the so-called tablet revolution, the iPad hasn’t “saved” struggling print publishers, but early indicators look positive for publishers old and new. Last month, Apple went live with Newsstand, a new feature in iOS 5 geared toward bringing publications front and center.
Like it or not, the iPad is changing the way we read and Pew says that tablet owners are more engaged than PC users are. Naturally, publishers are looking to Amazon’s Kindle Fire next.
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This week, we saw the first official launch of a product built on Pressly, a tablet Web app-building platform and finalist at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt.
Much like OnSwipe, its closest competitor, Pressly takes existing websites and turns them into tablet-friendly, Flipboard-esque Web apps. It can grab content from RSS feeds, Twitter or a CMS and lay it out in a fashion that is far more appropriate for the tablet form factor than most desktop websites.
The platform is free to use, but Swipely takes a cut of the resulting ad revenue. The service isn’t yet open on a self-serve basis. Instead, publishers can >inquire with Pressly about getting on board.
The Advantages of HTML5 vs. Native Tablet Apps
This type of low-cost, cross-platform tool is just the kind of thing publishers big and small need to keep up with the rapid growth of tablet adoption. These days, when we say “publishers” we don’t just mean established media companies. Anyone with a personal or company blog can benefit from HTML5-friendly frameworks like these.
The advantage here comes both in the price tag as well as what goes on under-the-hood. Developing native applications for the iPad can get costly enough without factoring in expansion to Android and other emerging tablet operating systems. By building tablet apps that work in the browser, there’s no need to worry about rebuilding them in multiple programming languages and submitting them to various app stores. They just work.
It can also allow publishers and businesses to better profit from their digital offerings than they can in proprietary app stores. When Apple slapped a 30% revenue share requirement onto in-app purchases made within iOS applications, many publishers got queasy, and a few of them even jumped ship.
The Financial Times is one such publication. After they declined to comply with the new revenue share, Apple removed their app from the iTunes App Store. In its place, The Financial Times launched a tablet-friendly Web app coded in HTML5. Not only does it work across platforms, but the company reported getting more traffic to its Web app than it had seen on the iOS version.
Inclusion in the iTunes App Store isn’t without its advantages though. For many developers and companies, it offers enhanced exposure and distribution. That’s especially true for publishers in particular now that Newsstand is baked right into iOS.
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Buffer Adds Facebook To Publishing Repertoire
Nov 14th
Buffer, an app that stacks your tweets and publishes them at the best times for engagement, has just added Facebook to its repertoire. Now you can either schedule your Facebook posts using the default posting times (11am and 6pm) or just pick your own. What sets Buffer apart from the other tools is that with it, you can use the buffering pattern feature (paid only) to do post time-release posting instead of regular scheduling. This is not something you can do on other social media posting tools like HootSuite.
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Facebook still penalizes third-party apps, though it did recently improve the news feed so that it will detect good quality posting behavior. If you’re using a third-party app, your posts won’t collapse on themselves in the news feed.
Last week, Buffer launched its free Android app.
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Amazon Helps Cement HTML5′s Place in the Future of Publishing
Oct 21st
With its latest update to the Kindle e-book format, Amazon is pushing electronic books closer to the look and feel of Web pages. Kindle Format 8 is the file format that will be used by the Kindle Fire for displaying e-books when the tablet device ships next month.
The new format moves away from the previous Mobi standard in favor of one that supports many of the rich layout and formatting features of HTML5 and CSS3.
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Kindle Format 8 supports dozens of HTML tags and CSS attributes, most of which have an impact on things like layout, typography, borders and line spacing. On the HTML front, most standard mark-up for text, images, divs and tables are included. Notably absent is support for HTML5′s video and audio tags, but there’s no reason multimedia content couldn’t be included in the future.
The fact that Amazon is ditching its old format for a more Web-friendly one is a sign that it intends to make the e-reading experience one that’s more akin to Web pages in general. The use of CSS3 gives publishers a whole new toolkit for laying out and designing e-books, and one that utilizes the familiar and relatively simple syntax of stylesheets for the Web.
This move makes sense as Amazon gets ready to ship its first full-color e-reader and media tablet on November 15. Kindle Format 8 will land on the Kindle Fire first, and then make its way to the company’s newer e-ink devices and third party Kindle apps, such as those found on iOS and Android devices.
Amazon placed its first bet on HTML5 earlier this year when it launched the Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web app that lets customers read e-books in a rich, fluid UI that can be accessed from any modern Web browser.
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Blurb Launches $1.99 iPad eBook Publishing Service
Oct 18th
Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos – as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images.
Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.
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At launch the eBooks live in Apple’s iBook app, for easy offline reading, but the company says it aims to expand out onto other platforms soon. The Blurb Instagram app is also capable of publishing collections of Instagram photos to eBook format.
There’s no mention on the site of whether the books will be DRM-free or not, but I sure hope so. The company says it will be making a more detailed announcement about the new eBook program soon. All the example eBooks in the announcement are letterboxed on horizontal view, too. That doesn’t seem ideal to me.
You should post titles of your awesome Blurb eBooks in comments below and if you’re selling them for $2.00 I’ll go buy some of them. Heck, price them at $4 and I’ll buy a couple a month. Easy and cheap publishing for a widely used and attractive consumption platform sounds like a beautiful thing.
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“But What Should I Tweet About?” New Publishing Platform Aims to Make Social Media Marketing Easy
Jul 8th
James Gross and Noah Brier have talked to a lot of people at a lot of different companies around the world and they say the number one most-asked question by corporate execs about to jump into social media is almost always “but what should I Tweet about?”
The blank white box, as Gross and Brier refer to the interface presented by almost all other social media publishing tools, is a path to writer’s block or ineffective self-promotion for most corporate participants in online social media. These two experienced practitioners from the advertising and marketing world have now launched a much-anticipated new service called Percolate that aims to give people something to talk about. They’ve quickly built up a small customer base, have bootstrapped a team of 7 employees and this week they are opening the service to the world. The first 300 ReadWriteWeb readers to visit the site through this link can access Percolate right away.
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Percolate reminds me of a philosophy I’ve long advocated about blogging: inhale feeds and exhale blog posts. Alongside that philosophy is a belief that the best way to grow your brand is by adding value to conversations of general interest online. Your conversion rate with regard to your marketing goals may be lower than it would be if you were just talking about yourself all the time, but by emphasizing the value you add and your pass-along value, then the total number of people you’ll reach and hopefully your total number of conversions will be much higher.
Bare-knuckle RSS and blogging fans have been doing that for years, but much of the rest of the world could use some smart, attractive technology that lightens the load and makes content production even easier and more efficient.
Percolate presents something like a personalized Techmeme of topic content on the right hand side of the page (it cross-references news updates from millions of feeds with your personal network of trusted Twitter contacts and your demonstrated history of topic and source interest), and a stream of your contacts’ feedback on news on the left. You’re then encouraged to jump into either of those streams and offer feedback on any existing news item that’s as short as a one word tag or as long as a full blog post.
“What people are really doing on Twitter is not saying I’m having lunch with my cat,” says Gross.
“What they are doing is contextualizing links all day. We don’t think that filtering for the best links is a product, though, we think it’s a feature. The value is created when you can get users to trust your platform for both consumption and publishing. The real breakthrough over the last year was Tumblr and Twitter, the way they created the read/write interface where you created and consumed in the same environment, in that dashboard-like flow.”
Gross says the first few customers who are licensing Percolate’s technology as a back end and publishing to their own website front ends are aiming to have their team members post 20 to 30 short responses to links of interest each day – rather than struggling to write 1 to 3 medium to full-length blog posts each day from a cold start.
Future iterations of the publishing tool will be focused on grabbing media assets and pull-quotes from the pages that Percolate users are commenting on. That will make it all the faster and easier to create rich blog posts throughout each day.
How Well Does it Work?
I buy this idea, I really do. The service is available for free to consumers and charges for API access by brands. The interface has a couple of bugs at launch, but Gross (who worked at RWW ad network partner Federated Media previously) and co-founder Noah Brier, who has been a well-known online media consultant to leading brands around the world for many years, are very capable people and will likely iron out any kinks in the system soon.
I’m not sure how well the stories surfaced will prompt responses from users. That will be a big challenge to get right and it will require some training by users.
Users will likely find pleasing the inline publishing of responses to links as the core experience on the platform. Gross says his company watches Tumblr closely (who doesn’t in the publishing world?) and I can imagine people seeing Percolate as a Tumblr for brands or for responses to out-of-network content.
What do you think, would-be bloggers? Does this seem like something that could help you publish more and better content online?
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J.K. Rowling’s Next Chapter: A Transfiguration Spell on the Publishing Industry
Jun 23rd
Author J.K. Rowling unveiled the plans behind the mysterious Pottermore website this morning, and fans that were hoping for a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter series or for a wizarding MMORG may be disappointed. But for those who’ve been waiting to read the novels on their e-readers, good news: Pottermore will involve, in part, the release for the very first time of the Harry Potter series in a digital format.
In what’s an uncommon occurrence, Rowling retained all the rights to digital copies of her books. And until now, she had not struck any deals with publishers or distributors to make the series available digitally. All that will change when Pottermore officially launches this fall.
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That’s big news for e-books as the bestselling series will undoubtedly be wildly successful in its new e-format. (It’s as good an excuse as any to reread all the novels, right?) But the announcement is significant in a number of other key ways, not just because of Rowling’s decision to release the e-books now, but because of the way in which she has chosen to do it.
Self-Publishing’s Defining Moment
The books will be available exclusively through the Pottermore site, meaning that Rowling is self-e-publishing the novels. While self-publishing is, of course, nothing new, digital publishing and digital readership has helped self-publishing become more popular and, for authors, more lucrative. As we reported earlier this week, Amazon recently announced that self-published author John Locke had joined its “Kindle Million Club” after selling over one million copies of his e-books on the Kindle platform.
But Rowling’s decision here isn’t just another mark of legitimacy for self-publishing, nor is it simply yet another blow to the traditional publishing industry – although no doubt, both of those are true. Rowling’s announcement has several other ramifications here for the publishing industry.
DRM-Free Content
Digital rights management (DRM) technology is often placed on digital content, so the argument goes, to help prevent piracy. And indeed, the Harry Potter series may already be among the most pirated books in history, no doubt because of fans’ desire to read the books in a digital format. But rather than viewing that desire with suspicion about sharing, Rowling is trusting they’ll do the right thing. The Harry Potter e-books will reportedly be DRM-free, although they will be digitally watermarked with purchasers’ information.
Wired calls this the publishing industry’s “Radiohead moment” and likens this to the band’s release of its albums on its own site. “The crucial parallel between Radiohead and Rowling is the fact that they both put their faith in the fans rather than any intermediary. For Radiohead, this meant self-releasing their album In Rainbows after the end of their contract with EMI with an honesty-box pricing strategy.”
E-Book Standards
DRM-free content also means that consumers won’t be locked in to one particular format. As it currently stands, DRM is one mechanism that prevents users from sharing e-books; but it also means that Kindle owners can’t read Nook content, and Nook owners can’t load their iBooks onto their devices. But DRM is only part of the problem here; file formats are another. Rowling says that the books will be made available for all formats – to Kindle, iPad, Nook owners alike.
It’s not yet clear how that will be accomplished, but the most obvious way to do that would be via ePUB, the open e-book standard. However, Kindle does not currently support ePUB. But as paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen posits, “if any author could get Amazon to change its policy, it’s J. K. Rowling.”
There have been rumors recently that the Kindle will begin supporting ePUB, and that may come as part of Amazon’s new library lending program this summer.
(Another) Tipping Point for E-Books
The tipping point for e-books could have been when Amazon announced that Kindle versions were outselling print bestsellers two-to-one or when it said that e-books were outselling all print copies. The tipping point could have been when the company announced that a self-published author had managed to sell one million copies of his e-books.
But it seems likely that with the excitement and passion that Harry Potter fans have for anything associated with the series, that the release of the digital Pottermore will unleash yet another milestone in what is a quickly changing landscape for publishing.
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Real-Time Media Management Comes to Daylife’s Publishing Suite
Jun 8th
Publishers are attempting to evolve in the Internet era to stay ahead of not only competitors but also the curve of technological innovation. Social media, rich media, syndicated media, aggregated media, wire service media … there are a lot of different sources of content to keep track of and integrate into your website.
A new tool from Daylife – the Daylife Publishers Suite – aims to keep content creators a step ahead of the game. It is not a content management system but rather a dashboard of applications that can edit live websites in real-time. Want to drag and drop a photo gallery into a post without going into the back end of your CMS? The Daylife Publisher Suite has the ability to do that and more.
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The suite is similar to what social media content aggregator Storify does. With Storify, you build a story through social media channels, such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or other sources and then embed it within a CMS as a content frame. Now, think of the ability to do a Storify on a live website in real-time without the embedded-able content frame. That is essentially what the Daylife Publishers Suite does.
Daylife Publisher Suite – Intro from Daylife on Vimeo.
The way the publisher suite works is as simple as installing a piece of a line of Javascript on your website, similar to how you would drop in the code for something like Google Analytics at the header of your site. Daylife will then be able to open an editing mode within a live website that enables content creators to use the suite’s applications to modify the page’s contents.
Not Yet A CMS Substitute, But Soon
“It is very deliberately and aggressively not a content management system,” said Marc Hedlund, Chief Product Officer at Daylife. “The content management system is the problem … The Daylife Publisher’s Suite is intended to give the tools and capabilities to people who feel constrained by the tools they have.”
Right now, Daylife is constrained itself by content management systems. The suite works on pages that have already been published, hence a content creator needs to build media through a CMS before it can be edited by Daylife on a live website. Hedlund said that Daylife is planning a way around that by being able to build pages entirely in Javascript but in the initial rollout of the suite is as a post-publish editing tool.
Yet, Daylife has properties that can help publishers create excellent content. For instance, Daylife can create slideshows through syndication partners like Getty Images. It can then drop slideshows created automatically in a standard slideshow view, mosaic (like Google Image Search results), large format (think of Boston.com’s Big Picture) or via a touch gallery. The touch gallery would look like a standard slideshow from a PC but would be swipe-able on a tablet or smartphone.
The suite can also create pull quotes, drag in topic-releveant social media feeds, create polls and interactive timelines and teasers.
Other sites can help publishers with this type of content creation, but not quite in real-time on a live page. Newser helps machine-based aggregation with a human touch and OneSpot analyzes stories across the Web by studying link patterns.
Daylife was one of the ReadWriteWeb Top 50 Real-Time Start Ups in 2009.
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