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Key insight: "do I buy a separate radio to listen to different stations?" Actually, I do use two news apps on my iPhone (aside from Safari and an RSS reader).
by cstross 14y ago
Key insight: "do I buy a separate radio to listen to different stations?"
Actually, I do use two news apps on my iPhone (aside from Safari and an RSS reader). They're the BBC, and The Guardian. The BBC app is free, and ad-free, at least in the UK, because it's provided by a public service organization with a non-advertising-based revenue model. (You pay your TV license fee, you get your ad-free app.) The Guardian charges for their iPhone app -- a modest annual fee (or rather more every month if you want the full-fat newspaper on your iPad) but thereafter takes a light touch with the advertising on the iPhone app; it's a headline sampler, and in that respect it's arguably a marketing tool for the newspaper itself.
The common denominator of both these apps is that they don't do the advertising fandango. I think we can see where this is going, can't we? Yes, it's the separate-radio-per-channel model: it's not so much about providing a better service as it is about obtaining a monopoly lock-in on the user's eyeballs while you feed them ads.
- muyuu 14y agoThat's your choice. You should also be allowed not to put up with their apps. I simply opted for not reading the news on my phone as it's painfully inconvenient to me. My 512MB phone struggles with 5 odd apps in the background and I'm not going to install yet another app taking over my phone as it didn't run anything else. Yes I do kill processes etc but this kind of shite should not be the standard.
- cstross 14y agoBeen there, done that (I leapfrog iPhone generations, so for some months before each upgrade things are running painfully slowly). I will note that disabling Javascript on most news sites seems to disable the "why don't you download our app?" nonsense and a lot of the irritating fripperies that slow down the basic news experience. My main issue is that this exposes some of the drawbacks of a business model that relies on advertising: it delivers false incentives that cause the business to pursue ad clicks rather than customer satisfaction (i.e. short term profit over long-term customer base).
- stcredzero 14y ago> Actually, I do use two news apps on my iPhone (aside from Safari and an RSS reader). They're the BBC, and The Guardian. I'll also use the NPR app from time to time. Its design isn't bad, and I like being able to switch from print to streamed audio sometimes. > it's not so much about providing a better service as it is about obtaining a monopoly lock-in on the user's eyeballs while you feed them ads. Apps and mobile sites that make you wait five freaking seconds so they can load ads and all of the metrics for their sponsors -- who are they fooling? Have they even tried to use their own app?