psmith, journalist

From Stacini (http://www.flickr.com/photos/staci/) on Flickr

So now The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Viz and countless others sell – or give away – not just content but software: the great hope of 2010 is that iPhone, Android and mobile reading generally will foster a much-needed shot in the arm for advertising and direct revenue. With readers not that keen on coughing up for reading sites on their desktop PCs, maybe that will happen.

So now that we’re all software developers as well as news publishers, shouldn’t we start acting like them? What works and what will people pay for?

In a word, updates. Online games and next-gen games consoles have the unassailable advantage of regular functionality and content upgrades: just look at how detailed and frequent World of Warcraft “patches” are.

It’s staggering, and it gets better: the last time WoW broke the games sales records was when Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 million copies in one day in Novmber 2008 – but Activision-Blizzard wasn’t selling a new “game” at all, just a new vivid and vast virtual world for its 12 million paying players to interact, “raid” and quest in. By contrast, The Telegraph recently added some very nice changes to its app but it remains free – it’s seen as a gateway to content.

Is there a way to charge news users for that regular functionality and content upgrading of news software? With newspapers searching for a paidcontent solution, this could be part of it. New blogs, new crowd-sourcing techniques, real-times news feeds, audio/video content, geo-specific news centred on readers’ locations, augmented reality…. none of this stuff is easy or free to do. Forget “news” for a second: if the service is good enough – and you promise it will get continually better – then why not charge for it?

And if you can mix that with the addictive, compulsive, rewarding behaviour patterns of video games (as I’ve previously argued) then you could be really onto something.

I can’t put it better than Paul Lomax did on Twitter in a conversation this week: “Functionality is the the new content…”