USA Today Failed to Tap Revenue from its iPhone App
June 15th, 2009 | by Jhananthi Janakiraman |USA Today’s publisher David Hunke said that he regrets the decision to make USA Today’s iPhone news application free. He also said that readers will be more than willing to pay for such an offering which the publisher failed to leverage to create a revenue stream.
USA Today is now looking to the mobile platform and ereading devices for augmenting the daily newspaper’s revenue.
The iPhone app was launched in December last year with all the features present in the print edition. If you were an iPhone user then you can access News, Money, Sports, Life, Tech and Travel headlines, interactive polls, GPS-enabled weather updates and photos.
You can also share content email, text messages or Twitter. The USA Today app was designed and developed in cooperation with Mercury Intermedia. It also supports rich media advertising formats like click-to-call, click-to-maps etc making use of the user’s GPS location and video. With such features users would have surely paid for it, feels Hunke now.
Source: AP
