USA Today Sees a Mobile Future, But Where Is the Money?
USA Today's plan to emphasize mobile devices, which it announced to its staff yesterday, is either visionary, or so ahead of its time it will cause what used to be the nation's largest newspaper to face a decidedly untimely demise.
The plan, according to an interview editor John Hilkirk did with the AP, is to "go where the audience is. If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we've got to be there with the content they want, when they want it."
That sounds great -- until you look at where the money is, and is not. It's true ad pages are way off -- dropping, per the AP, by about 50 percent from four years ago to 580 ad page
s in the last quarter. So is circulation, which is currently at 1.83 million, from a high of 2.3 million back in 2007. But just because those numbers are way down, and devices like smart phones and iPads are taking off, doesn't mean it's time to throw in the towel on print. For the time being, it's still where at least some money is.
True, according to the Mobile Marketing Association, ad spending in mobile will increase by 27 percent this year, to $2.16 billion, but that's across the entire spectrum of devices. To put this in some perspective, even in these dire times for the newspaper industry, it raked in $36.7 billion in advertising last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. For another bit of context, Google raked in $6.82 billion in the second quarter all by itself. Especially since advertisers are notoriously slow in adapting new platforms, it will be a long time before mobile has the traction to float an entire universe of apps looking for advertisers.
Speaking of which, I could only find one bit of mobile USA Today content that the company currently charges for: its crossword puzzle, which has a $4.99 iPhone app. The newspaper's app for the Android platform, iPhone and IPad are all free. If USA Today is truly serious about the mobile future, it had better learn to charge subscribers for its mobile content. Having popular apps, which the newspaper does, is a wonderful thing, but if the experience of the Web has taught us anything, it's that media companies can't thrive on advertising alone.
While part of me truly believes the newspaper is headed in the mobile direction, another part of me wonders if the announced "radical" shift to mobile is only so much window-dressing, conveniently trying to obscure the fact that as part of this new shift the newspaper -- already beset by layoffs -- will let go another nine percent of its staff, or about 130 people. The reason I wonder about that is that, so far, the numbers for a mobile transformation just don't add up.
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