I work for a publishing house and we're discussing different ways to sell our content over digital channels.
Besides the web, we're closely watching the development of content publishing on tablets (e.g. iPad) and smartphones (e.g. iPhone). Right now, it looks like there are four different approaches:
Conventional publishing houses release Apps like The Daily, Wired or Time Magazine. Personally I name them Print-Content-Meets-Offline-Website Magazines. Very nice to look at, but slow, very heavy regarding datasize and often inconsistent on the usability side. Besides that: These magazines don't co-exist well in a world where Facebook and Twitter is where users spend most of their time and share content.
Plain and stupid PDF. More or less lightweight, but as interactive and shareable as a granite block. A model mostly used by conventional publishers and apps like Zinio.
Websites with customized views for different devices (like Die Zeit's tablet-enhanced website). Lightweight, but (at least until now) not able to really exploit a hardware platform as a native app can.
Apps like Flipboard, Reeder or Zite go a different way: Relaying on Twitter-, Facebook- and/or syndication-feeds like RSS and Atom, they give the user a very personalized way to consume news and media. Besides that, the data behind it is as lightweight as possible, the architecture to distribute the data is fast and has proven for years to be reliable.
Personally, I think #4 is the way to go. Unluckily the mentioned Apps only distribute free content and as a publishing house we're also interested in distributing paid content.
I did some research googled around and came to the conclusion, that there is no standardized way to protect and sell individual articles in a syndication feed.
My question:
Do you have any hints or ideas how this could be implemented in a plattform-agnostic way? Or is there an existing solution I just haven't found yet?
Update:
This article explains exactly what we're looking for:
"What publishers and developers need is
a standard API that enables
distribution of content for authorized
purposes, monitors its use, offers
standard advertising units and
subscription requirements, and
provides a way to share revenues."
Just brainstorming, so take it for what it's worth:
Feedreaders can't do buying but most of them have at least let you authenticate to feeds, right? If your free feed was authenticated, you would be able to tie the retrieval of atom entries to a given user account. The retrieval could check the user account against purchased articles and make sure they were populated with fully paid content.
For unpurchased content, the feed gets populated with a link that takes you to a Buy The Article page. You adjust that user account and the next time the feed is updated, the feed gets shows the full content. You could even offer "article tracks" or something like that where someone can by everything written by a given author or everything matching some search criteria. You could adjust rates accordingly.
You also want to be able to allow people to refer articles to others via social media sites and blogs and so forth. To facilitate this, the article URLs (and the atom entry ids) would need to be the same whether they are purchased or not. Only the content of the feed changes depending on the status of the account accessing the feed.
The trick, it seems to me, is providing enough enticement to get people to create an account. Presumably, you'd need interesting things to read and probably some percentage of it free so that it leaves people wanting more.
Another problem is preventing redistribution of paid content to free channels. I don't know that there is a way to completely prevent this. You'd need to monitor the usage of your feeds by account to look for access anomalies, but it's a hard problem.
Solution we're currently following:
We'll use the same Atom feed for paid and free content. A paid content entry in the feed will have no content (besides title, summary, etc.). If a user chooses to buy that content, the missing content is fetched from a webservice and inserted into the feed.
Downside: The buying-process is not implemented in any existing feedreader.
Anyone got a better idea?
I was looking for something else, but I've came across with Flattr RSS plugin for WordPress.
I didn't have time to look it through, but maybe you can find some useful ideas in it.
Related
I’m making an application for iOS, I plan to release it in the App Store soon. The question arose - how to promote it correctly? Catch up with the audience? How to form the content initially, given that the application is something like a message board, respectively, if people download it, but it is empty, it does not fit. And is it better to launch it first in one city or in several? If anyone has such experience, I will be very grateful for the advice and answers.
The App Store
Apple’s App Store is a vast and complex ecosystem containing millions of apps across dozens of categories. But this vast selection is only valuable if users are able to find the apps they’re looking for. To that end, Apple has designed the App Store to promote discoverability.
How do people discover apps?
There are two main ways users discover apps in the App Store: by searching for keywords and by browsing featured and top charts. Surveys have shown that between 20 and 50% of users find apps by search, while another 14 to 20% discover them by browsing categories or looking at Apple’s featured selections.
App name and keywords
According to Apple, nearly ⅔ of app downloads result from searching. Therefore, it’s worth spending some time thinking about how to optimize your app for search. Your app’s search relevance is determined mostly by your app name and keywords, so let’s take a look at each of those in turn.
Apple once permitted app names to be more than 200 characters, leading to “names” that were chock full of SEO-gaming keywords, metadata, and the names of rival apps. Today, App Store guidelines limit developers to 50 characters and prohibit terms and descriptions that are not the name of the app.
When it comes to keywords, developers are limited to just 100 characters per app. With so few characters to work with, developers need a deliberate strategy. Ask yourself: What keywords are most important to you, and what are the keywords that will set you apart from your competitors? The best keywords are both relevant to your app and frequently searched, but the former outweighs the latter.
Remember: Users are much more likely to go with the top search results. Therefore, it’s generally better to be ranked #2 or #4 for a keyword that’s searched fifty-thousand times a month than to only be ranked #345 for a keyword that’s searched a million times a month.
Lastly, some brass tacks:
Separate keywords with commas.
Break down phrases into individual words (i.e., “photo, editor” not “photo editor”)
Save characters by not pluralizing your keywords (i.e., “calendar” not “calendars”)
Getting featured
Getting an app featured in the App Store is the dream of many developers. Not only does it confer special recognition on your app, it also gets you more prominent placement in the App Store. To add icing to the cake, getting featured also permits app developers to customize both their app and developer pages, further enabling them to stand out from the crowd.
A survey by Applause found that 40% of awareness of apps comes from browsing the App Store. In raw terms, that means getting featured on one of the dozens of lists, which are themselves created by a combination of popularity and editorial curation by Apple. Since users in general are more likely to trust (and therefore download) an app that they’re already aware of, having a recognized presence in the App Store is a major asset.
So how do you get your app into this elite group?
Obviously, there’s no substitute for quality. The best way to get an app featured is simply to build a great app. Apple’s curators are always looking for new apps that their users will be excited about. To that point, having a world class user experience goes a long way.
Beyond that, it helps to understand how the App Store works. A former App Store manager has revealed that the App Store isn’t a monolithic app supermarket, like Walmart or Target, it’s actually more like a bustling mall with dozens of small stores specializing in different areas. Each of these editorial teams is dedicated to a specific category or region, and each makes its decisions about what apps to feature internally. That said, developers can pitch their apps to Apple’s marketing team, who may then choose to advocate for an app within Apple. Going to events like WWDC and chatting up Apple representatives can also be a good way to raise awareness inside Apple about your work, especially if you’re a small or first-time developer.
Another thing that Apple’s editorial teams consider when choosing what apps to feature is whether an app takes advantage of Apple’s newest and most exciting tech. Remember, promoting an app in the App Store is also about promoting features that set iOS apart. Taking advantage of the newest APIs and functionalities can make your app more timely and relevant when Apple is choosing what apps to feature.
App Store search ads
A relatively new product from Apple allows developers to promote their app at the top of search results. Given that nearly ⅔ of app downloads come from searching, Search Ads can be an effective way to give an app the bump it needs to get found.
Search Ads are built around an automated auction process similar to Google AdWords. Developers set a maximum price they’re willing to spend per tap, which is then compared against the bid of the next most relevant competitor. Developers only pay when a user engages with one of their ads.
As with organic search results, relevance is the main determinant for whether an app is likely to appear on a given page of results, not how much a developer is willing to pay for placement. Relevance is determined by a combination of App Store metadata and user response.
That’s just a broad overview. Search Ads also includes some advanced features, like the ability to target specific groups based on demographic and location data. It also includes services to help you target your ad spend by recommending keywords based on your app’s metadata.
However you promote your app, it’s important to make sure you’re doing it in a cost-effective way. Marketing analysts and SEO experts may be able to help you optimize your marketing spend to ensure that your app gets in front of the right users based on your business objectives.
I'am creating a new feature for my iOS app. After I publish the app I wants to show the new feature only for 50% of the users, so I can do some testing which version makes more orders. I have no idea how to do it without using some third parties like Optimizely.
Also is it possible to do this using Google Tag Manager(GTM).
So can someone please help me to figure this out.
Thank you very much for your time.:)
It’s hard to do it on your own, though not impossible of course: Optimizelys of the world are just programs. You’ll need to solve these problems:
Targeting: Some algorithm that will assign user session to either control or (one of) treatment(s). This has to be random, of course, or you may as well stop there.
Routing: Send sessios to the targeted experience.
Logging: You’ll need to intelligently log events from sessions as they traverse their targeted experience. These may be many, so be careful not to add latency to your app path. Your statistical analysis will be based on these.
Experience stability: how do you ensure (if you do) that a returning user sees the same experience he’s already seen.
Note as well, that Optimizely will only help you if all your changes are on the device and not on the server. If you need to instrument server changes as well, you’ll have to look into Sitespect or Variant.
I finally figured out how to do the A/B testing with 'Google Tag Manager'(GTM).
In GTM you can create a variable called 'Google Analytics Content Experiment'. With this variable you can select how many percentage of users going to see each Variation(your experiments). You can create up to 10 variations for single experiment.
GTM is so cool and powerful. GTM contains so many features that could save lot of time and I totally recommend it for anyone who is going to do A/B testing.
I'm currently looking for a way to track basic user data for mobile iOS application:
how many times the app was launched
what was the average/by session time spent in total while using app
what was the average/by session time spent on particular screen
Additionally, I'd like the solution to:
display a heatmaps or click/tap/maps (clickstreams), to show how users tried to interact with the interface
generate visit graphs (user started from this screen, then went to this screen, etc.)
The most important requirement is that this is for internal application testing (nothing malicious), and we want to categorize data by user logged in (so that we can gather data per user, not some general average).
Can anyone recommend a suitable tool? Price or paid, doesn't matter. Is Google Analytics up for the job, or do we need something else?
Youve got several options to track the user behavior in the app. You can use frameworks like :
Flurry (http://www.flurry.com/)
Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com/)
Localytics (http://www.localytics.com/)
Google analytics
Im pretty sure there are more. Flurry is free (for now but you have some special paid features) and it´s broadly used. It´s the framework I use the most for my apps in these moments but it will depend of the client and the information you want to track. You can track events, events with information, see the stats of use, how the user has used the application, find dead holes in your app and broadly speaking, have a general idea about how your application has been used. The other frameworks are not free and you have to pay for the services but you can always use a trial version to see if this is what you want or not. Ive used localytics and its nice.
Ive tried all of them, and there are pros and cons, but to get a general idea about your application, everyone serves. Regarding heatmaps, Im not sure about that, I mean if some of the frameworks offer a solution like that, but you can always build your reports with the provided information (I know it´s not a straightforward thing or a 5 minutes thing).
Take a look, compare and decide which one can fit the best for you.
Well these days app analysis is very important and are of great help. There are large number of analytics tools available. Some of them are free some of them are paid.
below are some of them
Flurry
Google Analytics
Heatmaps
These are few which are used most. For most list visit this link
Hope this will help you. happy coding :)
I'm searching for a method to add DRM on ePub files programmatically. Anyone know how to do that? Maybe 3rd party software?
I added DRM with following things:
if ePub is coming from server, make zip file password protected and inside HTML pages you can encrypt via AES-128. For images also you can encrypt but you need to add more code on your reader part.
if you are encrypting images, then all images must be decrypted before you load HTML page in web or browser.
If you just want to protect your books from copying, then publish them through Amazon or Apple. As long as you don't select otherwise, those bookstores will wrap the books in DRM that allows them to be read only a limited number of devices belonging to the purchaser.
If you have some reason for wanting to worry about DRM yourself, then after carefully considering why on earth you'd want to, you'll need to find a vendor who can provide both the DRM technology and the reader (perhaps white-labeled for you) which knows how to read those DRM'd books. You see, DRM is useless unless there's a reader that can read the DRM'd books. And what's more, you need a back-end infrastructure to keep track of which devices belong to which person. There are vendors who provide such solutions. However, you'll end up paying them some of the money you were trying to save by avoiding Amazon or Apple.
The pricey Adobe solution mentioned by one commenter has the advantage that it is used by multiple bookstores/reading systems, including Kobo and Sony, so if you use it, then people buying your books can read them on any of these devices--albeit with an annoying step involving some software called ADE.
If for some strange reason you are thinking of building this entire infrastructure yourself, all I can say is, good luck.
More generally, even if you work through Amazon or Apple, it's well worth stepping back and thinking if you really want to do DRM or not. It's a natural human instinct to think, "By golly, I'm not going to let anyone steal MY book!!", but many of the people that might pirate a non-DRM'd book would not have paid money in the first place, so it's hard to say you're actually "losing" money. And someone who pirated the book might then Tweet or tell their friends about it and you'll end up selling more books than otherwise. Finally, someone who really wants the book without paying will crack the DRM anyway, as another commenter noted.
I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.