AP Mobile Celebrates 1st Anniversary

AP Mobile: News with a Bullet

After launching May 2008–a launch covered by MobilizedTV here–AP Mobile is now celebrating its first anniversary of providing a mobile news service from the respected Associated Press brand by debuting Version 2.0, a “significant ap-mobile-iphone-front-page-0527092 update” to its Apple iPhone/iPod Touch app. At the one-year anniversary, AP Mobile reported that 55 million local stories have been read on the site since its launch. The mobile news service’s member organizations have also skyrocketed, from 107 a year ago to 1,000 local sources today.

“It’s been a fantastic year and a year of lot of change,” said Jeff Litvack, AP’s mobile and emerging products general manager. “The growth has been more than we’ve expected across the board. In May [2008], it was exciting to talk about web apps and a Safari-based environment which was beginning to change our people were interacting with their mobile devices. When we launched AP Mobile within the iPhone app store on July 11, it was an instantaneous change in user behavior. We watched page consumption go from low teens to upwards of 80 to 85 pages for a unique user, per month. They’re reading 10 to 12 articles per visit.”

AP Mobile did a soft launch of Version 2.0 the end of May and then, last week, came out with Version 2.01. “Applications are very difficult to build,” said Litvack. “That was a reflection of the challenges of getting the code right.” “We’ve developed an incredibly superior experience of the user interface,” he continued. “In one touch, the user can get the content he or she wants. If you want U.S. tennis content, for example, you used to have to go to the home page, then to sports and then to a tennis tab. Now with the customized front page, you can do it in one click. It’s gone from mass media to a personalized experience.”

The glitch after launching Version 2.0 appeared because the app developer tested the download of the new app but wasn’t able to test for the iPhone upgrade experience that the user who had Version 1.0 would have. A simple table problem caused major crashing. But this was no big surprise. One thing that AP Mobile learned from its initial launch was that tweaks would be necessary.

What has Litvack learned in the last year? “We’ve continued to learn that this isn’t the year of mobile advertising,” he said. “This is still a long-term investment and we’ve always said that We’re seeing more and more advertisers come on board and there’s more interest, but the audience is building faster than the advertisers are coming board.”

“We’ve also learned that mobile isn’t the third or fourth screen - it’s the first screen,” he said. “It’s the first screen that people are turning to for their news and information. We’ve always believed it would be an important part of how people got news and information, but the frequency of use is higher than we anticipated, both on a monthly basis and a daily basis. It’s so easy to check it in a meeting, in the elevator. Everyone thought we were a couple of years away from that, but we’re not. It’s here. The advertisers go where the masses go, and the masses are going to mobile.”

Litvack believes the impact from TV broadcasters going mobile by end of 2009 will be minimal. He reports that AP Mobile just signed its first broadcaster–WTMJ-AM, a radio station in Milwaukee (type in zipcode 53201 into the iPhone). “There are different tactics in terms of what’s happening,” he said. “Broadcasters are looking to make their live broadcasts available via mobile devices. We’re still bringing the best of the photos, videos and text together. We’re not looking to do live updates. We’re looking to do on-demand stories and breaking stories and photos. Some users will want mobile for scheduled viewing and others will want updates as they occur. We encourage newspapers and broadcasters to have an active mobile strategy. AP Mobile is only part of that.”

AP Mobile’s main aim, said Litvack is to “be the news button and the national footprint for local news.” “You’ll be able to find it in one spot and hopefully get a new kind of experience,” he said. “So if you’re living in Boston and watching the Red Sox play the Giants, we want you to be able to read the articles in advance from newspapers in Boston and San Francisco and get an understanding from the different perspectives of what the two cities are reporting, as well as the play-to-play reporting of the games.”

AP Mobile also recently released apps for BlackBerry and Palm Pre. “We’re seeing the BlackBerry usage climb every day since the opening of the app store and we’re seeing really nice traction,” said Litvack. “The monthly downloads of Apple and BlackBerry are trending similarly. The challenge for BlackBerry is more technical than demand. Unlike the iPhone which, when released had the app store in it, the BlackBerry needs to roll-out the app store with the carrier and that’s taking some time. And some handsets are better than others from a multimedia and screen-size and design perspective to deliver what effectively is great content on the mobile device.”

Although AP Mobile originally launched as a U.S.-centric application, that’s changed. It is preloaded onto the Nokia N97 and became the #1 app on the Ovi store the day it launched. “We continue to push to go global, which wasn’t part of our initial plan,” said Litvack. “One of the failings of the original iPhone version we did was that we put the AP Mobile app into the stores around the globe, and we found a lot of users were interested in getting the content but didn’t want US news. Expats were excited about it, but others wanted local news from their areas.” AP Mobile recently announced its first foreign partner, with French and English language versions of The Canadian Press Mobile, with 30 local papers, and Noticias de AP a Spanish language app available on BlackBerry App World.

In the last year, AP also inked relationships with Nokia, RIM and Windows Mobile as well as wireless carriers such as AT&T and Virgin Mobile USA. “We’re also very excited about Palm Pre where we’re one of about 20 apps,” said Litvack. “It’s a great environment to work in.” The future holds even more possibilities, said Litvack. “There’s a shift going on,” he said. “The Web operating system environment is more similar to developing a website…but it’s still an application. In the next 2 or 3 years, as we look at technology and how phones handle 3G to 4G and beyond, we’ll see how the role of the application and the role of the mobile web will converge. Being able to develop across the broad set of handsets is also something we look forward to.”

The AP Mobile app is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/. Service updates can also be found on the AP Mobile blog.

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