Peter Svarre - Strategies for your digital business

The Ipad salsa with the Danish media business

It is fascinating to follow how the Danish media business is dancing with Apple these days. It basically goes like a Salsa – a couple of steps forwards and then a couple of steps backwards.

Last year, when Apple announced the iPad, the Danish media business was in ecstasy about the new business opportunities opening up with this new platform – or should we rather say old business opportunities… The majority of Danish newspapers (and other media) saw the closed off Apple platform and the Apple Store as a return to the good old newspaper business model, where you could actually charge real money for your news. The iPad was basically a platform, where you could shove your printed product into a digital platform and charge subscription fees the way you had always done such things.

But now – a year down the road we are hearing a different song. It turns out that people may not be that willing to pay for news on the iPad anyways and suddenly the media are starting to realize that Apple is actually charging 30% of the revenue just for providing the platform.

There is no doubt that the future of news reading is digital and a lot of that reading will be happening on tablet computers like the iPad. But Apple’s iPad is not a panacea for the media business, and the good old world is never going to come back. The media industry will have to accept that the digitization of their product has changed not only the shape of their product, but also the revenue models of their industry. News has become a commodity, where the value is approaching zero. People can get news everywhere and therefore they are not willing to pay for news. What people are willing to pay for are unique services where news is presented in different, more relevant and more personalized ways. And right now – on the iPad applications coming out – we are not seeing unique services but rather one-to-one copies of printed newspapers on a digital platform.