telegraph media group (uk) – a year with the ipad
DESCRIPTION
Tim Rowell, Director of Mobile Product DevelopmentHow the Telegraph’s iPad product development has evolved over the last 12 months culminating in the recent launch of Telegraph for IPad v2.0. Tim flew over from London to give an insight into the decision-making process and the customer research that led to The Telegraph’s first paid for iPad product.TRANSCRIPT
A year with the iPad
Tim RowellDirector, Mobile Product DevelopmentTelegraph Media [email protected]+44 7775 410 645
Who we are
• Publishers of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and telegraph.co.uk
• Daily Telegraph - circulation 651,000 (Jan 2011)
• Sunday Telegraph - circulation 500,000 (Jan 2011)
• Telegraph.co.uk - 31 million U.U. (Jan 2011)
• Profitable newspaper group.
• Pre-tax profits £53.1m (2009)
• Largest quality daily newspaper in the UK
• 340,000 print subscribers
January 2010
The key questions
• Who would buy the iPad?
• Would they be Telegraph readers?
• How would people use the device?
• A live breaking news product or an edition?
• What should the difference be between telegraph.co.uk and the iPad app?
• How will we deliver content to the iPad?
We could only answer some of the questions
Telegraph for iPad v1 Sept 2010
160,000 downloads
70,000 individual users in April
Average user used the app 7-10
times a month
Weekends are more popular
than weekdays
Peaks at 7am and after 9pm
60,000 gave us their data
Who are the users?
Age
Research, research, research
• Surveyed 20,000 users (response rate of 32%)
• 8 focus groups
• Reviewed the competition constantly
• Feedback in the app
What the users wanted
• Finite, finishable
• Once a day edition (no updates)
• Familiar elements of the newspaper
• Crossword, Sudoku, Cartoons
• Archive
• Simple to use
• Unwilling to pay...
Launch
• May 2011
• Free to download
• Auto-renewable subscription and daily edition
• Free for our 340,000 print subscribers
Lessons learned
• iPad is not a direct substitute for print (yet...)
• Users wanted a curated product
• Content production is the headache, building the app is trivial
• More over 55s with iPads than there are under 35s
• Apple...
• Readers are willing to pay
Thank you