Buying into plotlines
Your brand is your user experience
Merry Amex-mas (Augmented Fun From Down Un)
Where do you stand on SOPA and PIPA?
iPhone apps created for brands: What’s out there? What’s working? What’s not? And who’s thinking differently? Just some of the questions I’ll be asking, and hopefully answering, in an ongoing series for this here blog.
$1.99 is a rip-off!
I was initially going to be reviewing the CTV Olympic app, but as I started reading its reviews, I became intrigued by something else: the incredible animosity towards it.
The CTV Olympic app promises to be “everything you will need on the Games from Canada’s official broadcaster”, and when you first open it, that seems an accurate description. The extensive navigation menu has News, Live Blog, Photos, Medal Count, among other things.
But as soon as you start going through the app—looking for who won the China vs. Denmark women’s curling match, let’s say—you come up against a screen telling you to upgrade to the premium service for $1.99. And this upgrade notification comes up repeatedly. Want to check out one of their blogs or get real time results? Sorry Bub, gotta upgrade.
The upgrade is making a lot of people angry. Of the app’s 1,170 ratings, a resounding 692 are the lowly one star.
Based on the comments, most of the animosity is the result of what some describe as the bait-and-switch tactic of listing the app as free but then tacking on a two buck upgrade when people want to access any content of substance.
I do think it’s ridiculous for CTV to charge $1.99 for content that’s also available for free on their own website (among hundreds of other sites covering the games), but what I find more fascinating is the larger issue of the value of things in the app economy.
$1.99. Not a lot of money, really. It’s a coffee, a couple of songs, an hour of parking. How many times a day do you drop two dollars? But within the world of branded apps, $1.99 better buy you a kidney—or else. The culture of free has become so entrenched in the App Store that you become painfully reluctant to cough up a lousy two bucks for anything.
Certainly, people are paying for some apps, but of all the top paid apps on iTunes, most are games and the only branded app on the list is for Martha Stewart recipes. (It’s $0.99.)
The belief that branded apps should be free seems to follow this logic: Branded apps are created by big rich corporations, so why nickel-and-dime me on price. And even if a branded app is helpful or entertaining, it’s still a form of marketing. You should be paying me, dood!
It’s hard to argue with that logic. Yes, Charmin’s Sit or Squat gives you the incredible utility of consumer reviews of public toilets, but it’s still just an excuse to hock toilet paper.
For CTV, the promotion of their status as official broadcaster and providing thousands of people with a handy little Olympic app wasn’t enough. And the public have responded. Not surprisingly, the Vancouver 2010 Guide—run by Bell—has much better reviews. But it may just be because of its price…free.
Hayley
February 23, 2010 @ 11:50 am
I had the applications, and all I really wanted it for was to check the metal standings. They didn’t charge any extra for that, excellent.
However, when I updated the application with the available iTunes update for it, it wouldn’t open again. Black screen, then crash. I uninstalled and reinstalled, and nothing. Glad I didn’t pay the $1.99, I suppose.
I don’t see an issue with charging people for the app upfront. Sure they may get a little less of a response, but at least they wouldn’t have frustrated the customers that did download.
Some of which I’m sure will remember this ‘incident’ when it comes to choosing between CTV and its competition in the future.
heung
February 23, 2010 @ 12:58 pm
From what I’ve read about the CTV Olympics app, the main issue wasn’t so much the price of $1.99. In fact a lot of the reviews I read said that they gladly paid it. It was the following plague of black screens and crashes that soured their experience. Apparently the app had a tendency to crash/black screen after the users purchased the upgraded version. For an app based around an event of limited time length, to have it not working for any amount of time depreciates its value significantly.
Dayton Pereira
February 23, 2010 @ 11:13 pm
Hey it’s Dayton from Indusblue makers of the CTVOlympics app. Just wanted to jump in and dispel some myths about the app.
The black screen issue only affected some users, it had to do with Push Notifications being turned off in preferences, support was offered to those who posted comments and who got in touch with us over email and twitter and their issue was resolved. It only affected a small population of the total users, with the majority having no issues with the app.
We made a final release with a permanent fix to the black screen and some more detailed Curling results available for download today.
The fact is that people did have a problem with paying for the application, as was clearly voiced, and that was and remains the big controversy.
So if you want to charge for your branded app… well there are a few things to consider. Free app with in app purchase, paid app, lite app, free app and paid app, the list goes on and on. Then you get into how much each of the features should cost, what is worth more, what should be free what should be charged. We went through a whole exercise and ended up with what we have now.
Did we expect the backlash? Definitely. Could it be done differently? Definitely. What will we do next time? Lots.
With all the features we packed into a single app, we only just scratched the surface of what can be done. At the end of the day we learned lots on this one, in a space where there is only speculation about what should and shouldn’t be done.