By: Jennifer Saba Just over a year ago, the Associated Press decided to speed ahead of its contemporaries by launching the AP Mobile News Network. When the news cooperative revealed its plans for the network in April 2008, about 100 newspapers had signed up. Now, more than 1,000 newspapers from The Daily Home in Talladega, Ala., to the San Francisco Chronicle are contributing stories to the mobile initiative.
The AP built a news application ? first for the iPhone then the Blackberry, and soon for the PalmPre and one that works with Google's Android ? that organizes content depending on consumer preference. A smartphone user could get news according to ZIP code or even multiple ZIP codes, or through geo-synching, which tracks the user's location then sends out news relevant to that locale. (The AP also has a mobile WAP site a user can access via a browser on the smartphone at http://www.apnews.com.
Users can get top AP news, as well as local news provided by member papers that send stories to a database ? hosted by Verve Wireless ? where the stories are organized and transmitted.
"We're not a replacement for what a newspaper will do for its own mobile Web site," says Jane Seagrave, AP's senior vice president/global product development. "Newspapers want and need and should have their own mobile sites."
The iPhone app has some new features that take advantage of the new operating system introduced by Apple this summer. For one, the AP now has the ability to push out news alerts. If a user is reading something or if the phone is just idle, a box pops up on the screen with the news alert. The example pictured at left illustrates an alert sent when news first broke on the supposed death of Michael Jackson, before it was officially confirmed. The AP experienced a 350% increase in traffic to its servers on the news of the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
Seagrave says the AP mobile apps have proven popular, with more than 1.2 million downloads. About 75% of those apps are for the iPhone, but Seagrave points out that's because the iPhone app was the first one AP launched. Down-loads for the Blackberry version are "creeping up" since it was made available three months ago, she adds.
What some don't realize is that these apps are free. "Our view is we are better off getting an aggregated audience as big as we can," says Seagrave.
There is an advertising component to the mobile initiative, but Seagrave admits those ad dollars are hard to come by, at least for now. "We're focused on getting distribution up," she says. "[Advertising] is insignificant at the moment."
The AP will be ready and waiting, though, when advertisers finally come around. "Everyone still believes the next frontier for advertising [is mobile]," Seagrave notes. "There is a lot of interest, but the technology is still new ? coupled with the recession."
But advertisers are interested in the fact that the AP is a one-stop shop for national accounts. Says Mitch Paletz, the head of publisher and carrier partnerships at Nokia Interactive, "AP provides us the ability to create critical mass" at the DMA level. Nokia helps agencies and companies like Mercedes, H&M, and Dunkin' Donuts to place mobile ads. "They all want to reach audiences in a very particular DMA, but they need to know there is a critical mass," Paletz adds. "AP lends itself very nicely to that particular type of opportunity. They have great publications in the network and a lot of them are [market] leaders. There is still a very significant loyalty to the newspaper in most regions."
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