By JENNA WORTHAM
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is Susan Miller, a popular New York astrologer who has a cult following online. I read her horoscopes religiously and enjoy following her on Twitter for the fun mix of quirky updates and planetary advice she dispenses.
But in mid-November, I noticed a striking shift in the tone of her posts. Ms. Miller had recently refreshed her iPhone app and added a subscription priced from 99 cents a day to $50 for the year. Some of her readers were furious, and Ms. Miller was, by turns, apologetic and defensive.
“You got a great deal for a long time,” she told one person on Twitter. “All $50 does not go all to me. So sorry to see you go,” she tweeted at another.
When we met a few weeks later at her haunt of choice, the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she told me that she’d had no choice but to raise her price. Her old application, which was priced at a few dollars to download and gave users free access to all of her daily and monthly horoscopes, wasn’t bringing in enough money to sustain her business. The newly released version of her app is built around a freemium model, meaning it is free to download and offers abridged versions of her horoscopes. Users have to pay extra to read the full versions.
“Readers think I’m greedy and I want to address that,” she said. “It costs a lot to manage content.”
In addition to paying to upgrade her mobile applications — a process she said cost six figures — she said she also had to pay for researchers and editors to help churn out the 400,000-plus words she estimates that she publishes each year on the web and through her applications. Ms. Miller has been explaining, repeatedly, on Twitter for the last few weeks that Apple and a software development company, Phunware, each take a cut of the revenue her app pulls in. When I asked if she had considered charging for her web content or trying a different digital business model, one not so dependent on a third-party system like Apple’s, she demurred.
Mobile apps are “the most logical way to deliver content,” she said. Also, building an audience on mobile helps her establish a loyal audience that will buy calendars, custom books and tickets to her seminars.
Niche publishers like Ms. Miller — as well as nearly all major media outlets and publications — are banking on the popularity of mobile to bolster the future of their businesses. Phones and tablets are nearly ubiquitous and buying is as easy as a firm touch. In addition, people spend almost as much time, if not more, reading on devices as they do on the web.
But persuading people to pay for the apps hasn’t been easy, as Ms. Miller discovered.
“I like to say that I write in disappearing ink,” she said, tipping her head back to release a peal of laughter. “As soon as they read it, they gobble it up and want more.”
Ms. Miller joins the multitude of small publishers who are trying to figure out how to run a sustainable business on top of a mobile application. They include The Magazine, The Atavist, Epic, publishing houses like 29th Street Publishing, and a handful of smaller digital magazines, including Hello Mr.
And more are emerging each day. Recently, Jessica Lessin, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, introduced a subscription news service called The Information that will cost $399 annually for access to the tech and business stories it will publish. In a blog post, Mrs. Lessin explained her ambitious venture by writing, “Instead of chasing the highest number of eyeballs, we will chase and deliver the most valuable news.”
“To succeed,” she continued, “we need to write articles that deliver value worth paying for. That’s why we’re a subscription publication.”
The core appeal of these kinds of services, at least for me, is that they cut though the cascade of stories, tweets, links and other media that flow across our screens every day, and serve up something reliably good. Emily Books, for example, is a digital bookstore and subscription service that distributes an eclectic mix of handpicked titles. One of its founders, Emily Gould, said that she and Ruth Curry, the other founder, are exploring subscription models to deal with the problem of “an Internet where everything is click-based.”
Their service is small — they have a core group of 130 subscribers — but Ms. Gould says it would not require an extremely large number of regulars to make the economics work. “If we create this base of people where we know their tastes very well and then publish books specifically for them,” she said, “we can also pay the people who are writing the books. That is the long-term utopian endgame.”
In many ways, the emergence of these micropublishing models is the natural evolution of personal publishing, started in the early days of blogging, said David Jacobs, a founder of 29th Street Publishing, which developed the software for Emily Books and the digital arm of Harper’s Magazine, as well as for other small digital magazines.
“The traffic reminds me of the way blogging was a decade ago,” he said. “There were a lot of blogs and very little traffic and great growth. Those are the patterns we’re seeing.” The challenge, he said, was “that was a decade where we stopped paying for content.”
“The business model was dropped for a decade,” he said. “Publishers are going to have to get a grip on it.”
Of course, he acknowledged, mobile also has its challenges — among them is that, aside from those looking to buy games, the potential market can be much smaller.
But he still believes it can work in the long run. “We’ve bet the house on it, literally,” he said. “It’s not going to be Angry Birds, with 100 million downloads overnight that are selling for a dollar each, but if you’re clear with your audience about what they are getting, they feel good about supporting content this way.”
Ms. Gould echoed these sentiments, saying that 2,000 people had bought a book through her e-book store, convincing her that people are willing to pay for specialty content if it is good enough and packaged in a seamless, efficient way.
Ms. Miller said she had close to three million people on her original mobile applications. She claimed not to know how many people were paying for her new subscription-based service, and her app developer, Phunware, said it was not at liberty to disclose figures. Despite the complaints of what she termed a vocal minority, her application has hit the top-grossing spot for a lifestyle application on Apple’s iTunes at least a few times.
Above all, she chastised herself for not heeding her own warnings. All October — the month before the change in her business model became final — Ms. Miller warned readers that it was the wrong time to make any major changes or decisions in their lives, that they would be likely to end in disaster. “I told my developers Mercury was in retrograde!” she said. “And they didn’t listen. They thought it was just another day.” Lesson learned.
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