I was pleased to hear the circulating rumor that Apple will announce a powerful affiliate platform on its January 27th press conference. Perhaps this platform will be not just for marketing, but also for selling items directly. And since these sales will likely lead to paid content downloads in a seamless real-time experience, it has the makings of yet another Cupertino game-changer.
Sure, there is already an iTunes affiliate marketing program, just like there’s already a popular affiliate marketing program for Amazon’s web-based store.
But these affiliate marketing models have more or less remained the same for the last 10 years. I think it’s about time for a change.
A new market is going to soon pop out of thin air, just like it did in 2008 with the iPhone. And just like in 2008, there’ll be a market vacuum. One of the new questions many people will be asking themselves is “how can I get good stuff for my tablet?”
This new question is a big opportunity for developers such as myself (and presumably, as the analytics suggest, my readers.) Of course, there will be an official store, just as there is now. And certainly the iPhone App Store and iTunes are both a pleasure to visit. As is Amazon.com. And owning the store itself is the simplest, most obvious way for Apple and Amazon to both control the user experience and generate revenue from a cloud-based content platform.
And yet, these stores must always be one-size-fits-all, and that’s not enough for me. “Pants on the Ground” would not have happened if Apple had some devious way of controlling all the internet memes through its own official gateway. And neither would Ushahidi. Yes, “the wisdom of the crowds” may be so very 2006, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
iTunes has done a phenomenal job getting high-quality educational podcasts into the iTunes store. But YouTube EDU also has fantastic content, and so does does Academic Earth. And I don’t doubt for a second that publications like the New York Times would fit very well into the iTunes model, and perhaps even farther down the long tail. It works great for music, after all. Why not for news?
Because news, in our age, proliferates in mysterious ways. If you look at the process of selling news as a funnel, it is complex and individualized. I suspect that people will never again all go to one place to find (and buy) their news, and that there’ll never be another Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Medill and NYU and Berkman and CUNY and Columbia and heaps of others have all drastically overhauled their curriculum to confront this sea change. In a new post titled “Information Finds a Way, but Does Revenue?”, David Cohn does a great job of encapsulating t
In this age of experimentation, which we all agree is happening, there are certain assumptions we make that steer the direction of our thought.
One of those assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information. That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to “sell” the news.
I don’t claim to have all the answers about how to solve this problem. But I do have a couple potential answers I’d like to try out. And if there was a simple, extensible affiliate platform that could be woven into the fabric of the web, 10,000 other developers and myself could all experiment and iterate and compete and come up with some great vertical, highly-contextualized ways to sell different kinds of news in different circumstances to different kinds of customers.
I’ll end this post by calling out one of the few people who really may be in the position to influence the course of events, fellow Berkeley resident Dave Winer. Dave recently announced that he’s going to teach at NYU and he’s involved in a secretive NYC-based journalism project:
NYU and Manhattan are going to be very interesting places in the coming months and years, in exactly the areas I’m interested in. There are projects getting underway that I can’t talk about yet, but when you hear about them you’ll probably understand why I had to go.
I don’t know anything about the project he speaks of, but if it involves a platform - and if it’s Dave it almost definitely does - I doubt that it has anything to do with the part of actually selling content and subscriptions. The platform is probably related to distributed microblogging of some kind, and it’ll probably be wonderful for what it does.
[ Update: Judging by the Rebooting the News essay Dave posted this morning, it seems like the project relates to user-generated-advertising. I can see why he’s so excited about it, as it really is a fantastic idea. ]
But will this project help local news organizations find a sustainable business model? Given the conversations I frequently have with colleagues working in world-class newsrooms, and especially given the desperate, grasping-at-straws vibe Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seems to give off , I don’t have an excess of confidence.
But this new Apple affiliate platform launch rumor is vindicating. I eagerly await the chance to try it out.