KnowledgeView

Speaking at the Newsroom Summit, London 8-9 September, Dr. Andreas Wiele, Head of BILD-Group and Magazines at Axel Springer, outlined the group’s online and mobile publishing strategy, illustrating significant progress in this regard. For example, income from digital content expanded from only 2% in 2004 to 25% in 2010, with a plan to make it 50%, equivalent to income from paper publishing, in the next few years. Axel Springer is Europe’s largest multimedia companies with half year income exceeding €1.3 billion according to their published data.

One reason for Axel Springer’s commercial success with digital publishing is their approach to content charging for online, mobile and iPad. Axel Springer has regarded the Web as the platform for developing news stories during the day, where money is generated mainly from advertising. However publishing on the iPhone and iPad follows closely the paper model, where users expect to read newspaper as ‘editions’, with e-readers and also to pay for them. This approach was confirmed by Bild gaining 50,000 iPhone and iPad subscriptions, with over 200,000 iPhone applications purchased from the iTune store. With the iPad edition, readers can order a single edition, or pay for 3-months, 6-months or an annual subscription. Advertising is also offered on the iPhone and iPad, much like the newspaper approach.

This agrees with KnowledgeView’s strategy in this respect, where it has produced for its clients advanced iPhone and iPad applications with e-readers capabilities and a subscription system based on the edition approach. Thus publishers can generate money from the subscription and advertising much like the paper model. With KnowledgeView’s Web-mobile solution, publishers can offer developing stories throughout the day from the Publish live mobile newsroom software.