Q. Why is now the right time to sell Instapaper?

A. “The biggest reason I did it is because I just haven’t been able to keep up. It’s not that I’m having trouble keeping up with competitors or Apple or anything like that. The service has gotten so big now that I’m having trouble just keeping it functioning, fresh and up to date. I knew probably six months ago that I should be starting down this road and it took me awhile to admit to myself… The product has seen incredible growth and has a very loyal dedicated customer base, and I couldn’t address their needs fast enough. It needs a staff, no question.”

Q. What types of features do you hope that Betaworks will add?

A. “I have a lot of half-done major features that Betaworks is going to take to completion. I want to have a fresh new design on the app, new sidebars…so many things I got partially through or didn’t have the time to start. The service has always been about doing the basics really well, not about having a million different features. That’s what I’m looking forward to, going forward — a staff that can keep up with a lot of that stuff.”

Q. What’s next for you? How is The Magazine [the iOS/web magazine that Arment founded in 2012] doing?

A. “I’ve been working on Instapaper for five years so far. I would love the chance to try new stuff out. This has been the only major app I’ve done in the entire iOS App Store…Now I will have time to explore more things beyond just that.

The Magazine is still kind of finding its way. We do experiment a lot with it, and it has a healthy number of subscribers. [But] that’s really not much of a technical project. The app is effectively done. That’s an editorial challenge, so most of the work on that is actually not on me.

[As for my next project], I have nothing to share at this time. I’m going to try a few things, but haven’t quite finalized which of those things will become a product.”

Q. A lot of read-it-later services have popped up in the years since you launched Instapaper. What do you think about the future of the space?

A. ”There’s a new one every few months. The fact is, it really isn’t that hard to make the basics of something that saves links and serves links back to you. It took me one night to be the first person who did that. The challenge with these tools is in all the other features that go along with that — the level of detail and the level of quality that goes with that.

Pocket is one. Readability was on the way, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been very busy recently. Evernote is making a big entry in this market with almost every feature it adds these days.

Having competition is nothing new, really. What I see hapening in this market is that there are going to be three or four players that make it big, and the rest are just going to be little, lesser-used tools. I don’t really care. Instapaper’s customers choose to use Instapaper because they like it better. The potential for this market is so big, almost everybody who reads on the web can use these tools. You don’t really need to capture a majority of [the market], or even a plurality of it, to succeed.”

A previous version of this article stated that The Magazine is an iPad-only magazine. It is available on iOS and the web.

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Unlike Digg at the time it was acquired, however, Instapaper has a business model: It’s a paid product. The iPhone and iPad apps are $3.99, and the Android app is $2.99. Users can also install a bookmarklet to save articles.

On his blog, Arment wrote of the acquisition, “We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.” He said he has been looking for an opportunity to “try other apps and creative projects.”

Betaworks’ acquisition of Instapaper fits with the firm’s strategy of investing in both short and long-form content. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick said at the paidContent conference last week that companies shouldn’t favor one over the other: They need to invest in both. Digg is planning to launch a Google Reader replacement, and Instapaper’s technology could possibly be put to work on that project.

Here’s a video of Borthwick talking to Om Malik at paidContent Live:

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In this business, you can’t count on anything having longevity. To avoid new services that are likely to get shut down within a few years, you’d have to avoid every new tech product. Products and services lasting more than a few years are the exception, not the rule.

Fair enough! Except I didn’t say that.

This is what I said: It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.

I am far more likely to believe in and use products that are the main focus of the company behind them. Online storage? Dropbox. Time-shifting web content? Pocket or Instapaper. Short form communication? Twitter. Baby pictures and wedding photos to make single people miserable (or happy for being single)? Facebook.

The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around. And if in seven years (or seven months) they fail — hell, at least they went down trying.

Our company pays thousands of dollars for Google Apps and the reason we do is because it is a business for Google and it makes good business sense. I have no problem paying for Instapaper or Pocket or Dropbox or Skype or anything that helps me do my job. And if anything that starts out free (Dropbox did) and then wants me to pay for it (like Evernote), I don’t hesitate upgrading. Why? Because I want these guys to be around.

As the Google Reader example shows (and as Chris Wetherell told me in an interview), Google didn’t even try with Reader. It never gave us an option to pay, even though Google is willing to offer some paid services when it makes sense, like multiseat licenses for Google Apps.

As Marco said, in the end it’s always business. It’s just not Google’s business, so perhaps that is why we should shift our energies and attention to services whose business is the apps they want us to use.

That said, I don’t think Marco is that far off from my way of thinking. He wrote, “Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

Isn’t that what I am saying? Albeit, with a lot more emotion?

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And yet, he was in good sprits, focusing instead on good things that were happening in his life — his new startup, Avocado (an intimacy application much like Pair and Couple) finally has a new office and is growing like a weed on the Android platform. He has ample money from investors such as General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners. So perhaps that is why he doesn’t want to dwell on the past.

Wetherell, who spent four years on the product left Google and later joined Twitter, co-started Thing Labs and worked on Brizzly before arriving at his new idea.

When I asked the Beaverton, Oregon, native about his emotional state, he quietly pointed out that he has had years to prepare for today.

As we dug into steaming plates of vegetarian (and super spicy) Chinese food at Henry’s Hunan, a block away from his and my office, Wetherell joked that he had lost his innocence about the business world a long time ago and had developed a thick skin. “I have seen a lot worse decisions than this,” he quipped, in between sips of piping hot soup.

A slow lingering death

“When they replaced sharing with +1 on Google Reader, it was clear that this day was going to come,” he said. Wetherell, 43, is amazed that Reader has lasted this long. Even before the project saw the light of the day, Google executives were unsure about the service and it was through sheer perseverance that it squeaked out into the market. At one point, the management team threatened to cancel the project even before it saw the light of the day, if there was a delay.

“We had a sign that said, ‘days since cancellation‘ and it was there from the very beginning,” added a very sanguine Wetherell. My translation: Google never really believed in the project. Google Reader started in 2005 at what was really the golden age of RSS, blogging systems and a new content ecosystem. The big kahuna at that time was Bloglines (acquired by Ask.com) and Google Reader was an upstart.

And it entered the market with big ideas, a clear, clean slate and captured the imagination of early adopters despite some glitches. The Google Reader team, which included Chris (who was the Senior Software Engineer), worked hard to keep pushing the product forward. Among the folks who worked on the project included backend guru Ben Darnell, Mihai Parparita and Jason Shellen.

Missed opportunities

I wonder, did the company (Google) and the ecosystem at large misread the tea leaves? Did the world at large see an RSS/reader market when in reality the actual market opportunity was in data and sentiment analysis? Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”

“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears. Costolo, of course is working hard to mine those affinity-and-context connections for Twitter, and is succeeding. What Costolo understood, Google and its mandarins totally missed, as noted in this November 2011 blog post by Chris who wrote:

Reader exhibits the best unpaid representation I’ve yet seen of a consumer’s relationship to a content producer. You pay for HBO? That’s a strong signal. Consuming free stuff? Reader’s model was a dream. Even better than Netflix. You get affinity (which has clear monetary value) for free, and a tracked pattern of behavior for the act of iterating over differently sourced items – and a mechanism for distributing that quickly to an ostensible audience which didn’t include social guilt or gameification – along with an extensible, scalable platform available via commonly used web technologies – all of which would be an amazing opportunity for the right product visionary. Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).

If there were things that went wrong, then there is a lot of positive things that came from Google Reader, Wetherell said. He believed that one of the main reasons why Google Reader could exist was because companies and entities with completely conflicting agendas came together to support RSS and other standards. Google, MoveableType, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr and several other web apps believed in creating RSS feeds for easy consumption. “In the end it helped the average users,” said Wetherell.

But all that is behind us and we might not see similar altruism again, Wetherell theorized. I agree with him. If in the early 2000s, Web 2.0 companies were building platforms that wanted to work with each other, today we have platforms that are closed.

We live in the world of silos now. Twitter and Instagram have broken up. Facebook is the Soviet Union of the modern web. The new systems don’t offer RSS or feeds. “There is no common language of sharing,” he bemoaned. And rightfully so! And unless we have web giants speaking the same language of sharing, there seems to be no future of aggregation.

Built at Google Scale

Marco Arment said it is good that Google Reader is shutting down, because “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” It won’t be easy or trivial. As we finished up our dinner, Wetherell said that it took a lot to make Google Reader work.

For instance, it was Google Crawler that gave the system ability to make lightning-fast connections and bring up recommendations. It is one of the main reasons it cannot be open sourced. The systems are too intertwined with Google’s search and other infrastructure to be sold as well.

In addition, Google had a separate recommendations team fine-tuning Google Reader, and those people don’t come in cheap. And let’s not forget that it was Google’s infrastructure that allowed millions of accounts to be hosted and many billions of items — photos, videos, text objects — to be saved for people to consume them at their leisure.

It wasn’t — and it still isn’t — a cheap exercise, said Wetherell, rationalizing why he somewhat understands Google’s predicament. ”This is and will always be a Google-level problem, especially if you are building a service for more than a few people,” he said.

End of the Reader Era

So if a company like Google, which has the infrastructure and a monetization machine in place to profit from the reader market, is throwing in the towel, what hope do others have? Most importantly, what if readers are not even necessary? Dave Winer wrote:

I didn’t think the mailbox approach to news was right. Who cares how many unread items there are. I like the river of news approach and I have a very fine set of rivers that keep me well supplied with news and podcasts.

After a roller coaster of emotions — shock, disappointment and anger — had run their gut wrenching course, I asked myself the question: has the world changed so much that we don’t really need something like Google Reader? Is it time to think about something else, something brand new? Something that is more in sync with a world where information flows through the social webs and is consumed on devices in our pockets?

Something like Prismatic, perhaps? Something that automagically surfaces what we want or what we should want to read? I know it is a painful thought to think at this moment, but technology brings change — and change we must. Chris puts it well when he wrote:

Reader will be an interesting footnote in tech history.

That’s neat and that’s enough for me; wasn’t it fun that we were able to test if it worked?

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As Arment explains in his blog post about the change, the need to open up his magazine’s content more for sharing was brought home by the response to a recent piece he published by Jamelle Bouie on the topic of race and technology writing. As with most of the essays in The Magazine, the writer was free to publish on his own blog as well, which he did — and while The Magazine’s version got plenty of readers, the response to Bouie’s piece after it appeared on his own site was substantially larger:

“We allow authors to republish their articles on their own sites (or anywhere else) just 30 days after we publish them. Bouie did exactly that, as many of our authors have. Only then did his article explode into the huge discussion I suspected may result from it — and The Magazine wasn’t a part of it.”

The magazine was cut off from the social web

The Magazine wasn’t part of this broader web and social-media discussion because Arment initially showed only a short excerpt at the website — as well as a download link for the iOS app — when readers shared a story. As the publisher points out, since his magazine doesn’t rely on advertising at all but gets its revenue entirely from subscriptions, a web presence with full content seemed like a fairly low priority, if not an outright negative. Arment calls this “the biggest mistake I’ve made with The Magazine to date.”

“You’d share a link, and everyone would just see the truncated teaser. Some of them would subscribe and see the rest, but most would get turned off by the truncation and just abandon the effort, as we web readers tend to do. Most people with big followings would quickly realize this and, understandably, avoid linking to our articles.”

This is similar to the problem (one of many) that News Corp.’s iPad-only magazine The Daily ran into when it launched: it didn’t even have a website, per se, so initially users who followed a shared link from a subscriber would get a static page. In the early days of the app, in fact, readers were actually sent to an image of the page from the app — something that was impossible to click on or otherwise interact with. The sharing experience was so broken that many likely never bothered.

Where should the freemium line be drawn?

Arment’s problem is a microcosm of the tension that publishers everywhere are experiencing, from the New York Times to the smallest local paper. While some media companies — including News Corp. with some its British papers — have chosen to go with what are called “hard” paywalls, where virtually no content is provided to readers for free, almost everyone else is trying to find a happy medium between that and no subscription barrier or paywall at all.

The NYT started by providing 20 free articles, and giving anyone who came in via a link on social media a free view, a so-called “porous” paywall approach many other newspapers have adopted. But the paper recently cut the number of free articles in half. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile — who recently launched a standalone blog funded solely by subscriptions — has made virtually of his content free via RSS, but imposed a click-through wall for readers on the site.

The issue for everyone from Sullivan (who will be appearing at our paidContent Live conference in New York in April) and Arment to the New York Times is how much they need to be part of the social web vs. how much they plan to rely on reader subscriptions. A hard paywall essentially means a publication will be supported solely by existing readers, plus a few new sign-ups here and there — but newer or smaller publishers need the word-of-mouth that sharing brings in order to build awareness (and older brands might as well).

As traditional advertising continues to decline in value — something that has taken both the New York Times and the Financial Times to the point where subscription revenue now exceeds advertising revenue for the first time — more and more publishers are going to have to confront this tension between paying and sharing. And in all likelihood, there is no single right answer.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni and Shutterstock / Daniilantiq

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Since the “democratization of content” that was created by both blogs and social media is fairly well established now, both Svbtle and Medium seem to be focused on the process of curation and design rather than simply giving writers a new place to publish their content. How they are going to monetize this new form of curated blogging remains a mystery, however.

Svbtle was born last March, when designer and developer Dustin Curtis decided to create what he thought was a more elegant and simple way of posting content (interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the same motivation that David Karp has said was behind his creation of the Tumblr network in 2007). And while Svbtle seemed at first like a personal project involving Curtis and some of his writer and designer friends, it has grown fairly substantially, with more than 200 bloggers generating what Svbtle says in its blog post are “millions upon millions of pageviews” a month.

Svbtle admits it doesn’t know how it will make money

Curtis told TechCrunch that he raised the unspecified amount of funding from a group that includes SV Angel, the CrunchFund and New York-based incubator Betaworks (the startup also got some earlier funding through the Y Combinator program) because he wanted to hire developers, but also because he needed a “cushion for experimentation.” Among other things, the Svbtle founder admitted he doesn’t really have any idea how the company is going to monetize the content it is curating on the network.

As Curtis put it in the TechCrunch interview: “Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet.” But he provided some clues in a response on Twitter on Tuesday:

You can't make money in publishing by monetizing the content. You have to monetize the delivery system.

—
dustin curtis (@dcurtis) November 21, 2012

Medium is also focusing on curation and design

In many ways, Svbtle seems to be aimed at the same kind of market niche as Medium, the startup that Evan Williams founded last fall after leaving active duty at Twitter — where he was a co-founder and CEO — along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both of whom were co-founders and/or early staffers at Twitter and Blogger. Reinventing blogging seems like a particularly fitting task for Williams, since Blogger (which was acquired by Google in 2003) was one of the early success stories in what was then a brand-new way of publishing and distributing content online.

And like the Svbtle network, Medium seems to be focusing on the curation process as a way of adding value to the blog market: it is invitation-only, although the company has said it plans to open up to more contributors in the future. And Medium recently hired a content editor, former literary agent Kate Lee, whose job appears to be finding new writers and encouraging them to blog on Medium — as well as perhaps finding ways of distributing that content in other forms such as ebooks. But much like Svbtle, the company hasn’t given many hints about how it plans to monetize its network.

Blog networks like Pajamas Media and others were a staple of the early days of blogging too, but most failed to achieve any kind of actual business success — although some managed to earn advertising revenue through ad networks like The Deck and Federated Media, which was an early backer of blogs like TechCrunch and Laughing Squid. The Huffington Post arguably started in the same way, with a core of unpaid bloggers that eventually became a business, and so did Talking Points Memo.

Can Svbtle or Medium find an alternate route to success, possibly by imitating the “artisanal” approach taken by entities like Marco Arment’s The Magazine, which is iOS-only? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: just when you thought blogging was dead, someone comes along to reinvent it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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Here is an overview of how publishers are re-evaluating their approach to apps, followed by three examples of the new app economy in action.

Getting past the love/hate view of apps

To begin, it’s helpful to recall why apps became so contentious in the first place: they were supposed to be a way for publishers to replicate the glory days of print but with a digital twist. The idea was to deliver pretty layouts plus interactive razzle-dazzle to a captive audience who would read the content (and ads!) just like a magazine or newspaper. This promise, though, fell far short as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Tech Review described with anguished honesty in May.

Pontin explained how his publication expended innumerable staff hours plus $124,000 on outside costs to build apps that yielded a grand total of 353 iPad subscriptions. In doing so, he discovered that app building was not a one-off process but a never-ending struggle to stretch and shape the app across different devices, operating systems and updates. Pontin also came to question the basic premise of a publishers’ app. Specifically, why would readers want to read inside a box that cut them off from the “linky-ness” of the rest of the web?

Pontin, who has since made good on his vow to yank his apps from the Apple store, makes a strong case. So what’s changed since then? A couple of things.

The first is cost. Today, there are a growing number of companies offering off-the-shelf app solutions that let publishers enjoy pretty, serviceable apps on the cheap. These apps are not as “linky” as a web page but do come with the sharing features that are essential in the age of social media. These publishing options mean app-making is no longer the high stress, budget-busting process it was before.

The second, and more profound change, comes in how publishers have come to think about apps in the first place. Today, most publishers accept they need an app. As an Economist executive noted at Business Insider’s Ignition conference this month, his magazine’s strategy is simply to be where the reader is — which includes inside app stores and on the display of a smartphone or tablet. But the choice of what type of app to put there will vary widely depending on the publication.

For news-intense digital publishers that offer lots of links and reader interaction, an app can simply be a proxy for their mobile website. More pensive publications, on the other hand, may decide to invest a little more on a boutique app from a speciality shop. Meanwhile, legacy publishers can turn to app makers to help them slap social or shopping features onto their traditional layouts.

The point is that publishers no longer face the hard choice between betting the farm on expensive apps or risking being left out of the digital future. Instead, apps have become just one more tool of distribution available in an ever-growing number of shapes, sizes and prices.

Example 1: A pretty container for The Awl

The Awl is a literary, cultural and news site whose motto is “be less stupid.” It caters to a young, technophilic audience but is still a shoestring operation with little cash for expensive bells and whistles. But that didn’t stop it from developing a personalized app.

Turning to a New York start-up, 29th Street Publishing, The Awl made an app called the Weekend Companion that delivers five new articles to readers’ iPhone or iPad each week. The app’s appeal is that it curates a small set of articles and presents them in a pretty, immersive layout. The articles download quickly and are ready for reading on a train ride or a rainy morning in bed. While the Awl app has discreet tools to share stories by email or text, the overall idea is not interaction but a reflexive, book-like experience.

“We put content front and center not the app,” said 29th Street Publishing CEO, David Jacobs in a phone interview. The company is working with a dozen or so publishers, including Gothamist, and its pricing models include both fees (one report cites $20,000) and revenue sharing.

Jacobs said apps can provide a better media experience than the web but that he doesn’t perceive conflict between the two platforms; rather, he thinks publishers should be on both. He added that so-called “sub-compact” publishing models like 29th Street and Marco Arment’s The Magazine are best suited for light-weigh text-focused publications.

“You can’t really have a sub-compact fashion magazine,” he noted.

Example 2: Off-the-shelf content shovels for magazines

Sub-compact publishing is a hot topic but it’s not a realistic option for publishers that want an app to mimic the look and feel of a glossy magazine. In the past, these publishers had to build individualized apps at great expense but now they can turn to off-the-shelf solutions.

One popular option is MAZ, a company that provides apps and mobile service for titles like Inc and Bust for $299 a month plus 20 cents per download. According to founder Paul Canetti, MAZ lets editors and reporters take control of the mobile publishing process without having to learn finicky coding techniques. It’s a logical division of labor, in other words.

“I’ve never met a print publisher who made their own layout software or built a printing press — why expect it with apps?” Canetti said in an interview. He added that his clients’ apps were ready the moment Apple introduced its new retina display iPad while the venerable New Yorker struggled to update its house-built app.

MAZ apps also let publishers customize stories with shopping and social buttons. This means readers can buy things they see in an issue or cut out pictures and share them on Pinterest.

The MAZ apps rely on publishers uploading PDF’s so they are best suited to publications that want to reproduce their distinctive print layouts online. Meanwhile, publishers that want a more comprehensive white-label solution may look to companies like Polar Mobile which help sling mobile content across different forums, including apps.

In the long run, the off-the-shelf products may present lock-in risks but, as Canetti notes, the same risk applies to choosing a content manage system. “Publishers trust us not to take advantage of them,” he said.

The bottom line here is that, as external app solutions become more numerous and versatile, the pressure on publishers to create elaborate apps for themselves will diminish.

Example 3: Apps are just a box for the web

For some types of publishers, the rapid evolution of mobile websites has nearly obviated the need for apps altogether. The most prominent example is the Financial Times which grew fed up with Apple’s pricing practices and pulled out of the app store altogether this summer. The strategy appears to be working.

FT.com’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told a Business Insider conference this month that traffic on iOS devices was up 70 percent since the FT left the app store, and suggested company is not looking back.

Should everyone else follow suit? Once it again, it depends on the publication. For publications like GigaOM that embody the hyper-connectedness of the web, a mobile site is the best way to deliver that experience. It is perhaps also telling that popular tech aggregator Techmeme doesn’t have an app at all.

But even for publishers that are betting on the mobile web over apps, it doesn’t hurt to have an app all the same for readers who like the idea of a publication’s icon appearing on their devices. That’s why publishers like the FT and GigaOM offer apps that largely mirror their mobile sites but that require little in the way of development costs.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

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The massive growth of a site like Tumblr, which is now bigger than Wikipedia with more than 20 billion pageviews a month (something I have argued should make Facebook more than a little nervous) is even more spectacular when you consider the fact that David Karp — who designed a prototype of the service when he was just 19 — didn’t have any intention of creating a gigantic web company that would one day be valued at close to $1 billion and have over 160 million users.

Create something you want or need

As the Tumblr founder said in our interview, all he really wanted was a tool that he could use to post images and thoughts online. There were image-hosting services like Flickr and micro-blogging networks like Twitter and full-fledged blog platforms like WordPress, but nothing that fit what Karp was looking for or was as easy to use as he wanted. So he built it. A number of other founders at RoadMap echoed that sentiment: build something to fill a need that you have, and if you are lucky then lots of other people will have a similar need, and you will have a useful service.

So what is the takeaway for media companies? It’s fine to say that an entrepreneur should focus on filling a need that they have themselves, but where does that leave a traditional media player? You can’t just redesign a newspaper or a newspaper company from scratch (although people like John Paton of Digital First Media and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are certainly trying hard to do so anyway).

What I think you can do, however, is to think about who your user is and what they want, both when it comes to your traditional product (i.e. a newspaper or magazine) and your digital services or products. This isn’t something most media companies are particularly adept at, just as thinking like a startup and focusing on innovation is a struggle for many — in the past, media companies just pumped out content and more or less relied on captive audiences to subscribe to or consume that content, without thinking a lot about what they wanted from it or how they wanted to consume it.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in me-too digital apps that repackage print content with a few digital bells-and-whistles, rather than really trying to understand what users want when it comes to news or other forms of content on a mobile device. And one of my criticisms of the rush to paywalls is that they don’t allow newspapers to really get to know their readers likes and dislikes.

Who are your users and what do they want?

For an example of the opposite, all you have to do is look at what Marco Arment — a designer who used to work at Tumblr and also runs a service called Instapaper — has done with The Magazine, a digital-only and mobile-only editorial product that he launched recently. There are virtually none of the trappings of a digital magazine that has been ported over from the print world, for the simple reason that Arment created it to be digital-native. And it is almost an artisanal approach to editorial content, since he picks the writers and edits it himself, to fill a need that he felt existed in the market.

Another good example of thinking outside the usual boxes is Circa, which Matt Galligan and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh (who was trained as a journalist before he got into the web-humor business) started as a way to provide news in a different format that works better on mobile — as a series of edited summaries of stories rather than the usual repurposed print or web content. Whether users respond to this idea or not remains to be seen, but at least it is trying to reimagine how we interact with content in a mobile age, and it is looking carefully at what users actually do with it.

Most traditional media companies are happy doing surveys of readers so they can target them better for advertising, but how often do they actually think about — or ask — what those readers really want when it comes to their product? Have they thought as hard about the features as David Karp did when he decided to replace comments with the reblog button? Or are they just pumping out the same kind of content and putting it in slightly different packages and hoping that it works?

Getting to know their readers (or users) better, and understanding exactly what they want and don’t want, isn’t just something that would be helpful for media companies to figure out — it could be the only thing that is standing between them and extinction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Zert Sonstige

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Launching today in iTunes, Arment’s “The Magazine” will showcase top technology writers and ideas, offering four articles every two weeks. The first edition will cover topics like tech writer John Gruber ‘sblog format, geeks and sports and people’s relationship with technology, according to screenshots in iTunes.

To view the Magazine’s Table of Contents requires users to download a 7-day free trial which then turns into an auto-renewal at $1.99. The app is only available to iOS6 subscribers which means those of of us waiting out Maps-Gate will have to hold off. Fortunately, my colleague Erica Ogg was able to procure a screenshot:

In the forward, Arment explores how a legacy concept of a “magazine” should apply in the world of digital publishing and notes that many iPad magazines are carrying unnecessary and expensive baggage from their print days. He invokes comedian Louis C.K. as an inspiration for breaking from conventional distribution models: “Usually, things are done the way they’re done for good reasons. But sometimes, they’re only done that way because nobody has questioned it recently.”

Arment also offers a refreshingly frank summary of his business plan: “My biggest fixed cost is the up-front design and development of the app, and my biggest recurring cost is paying writers. If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months — just four issues — I’ll shut it down.”

The launch also coincides with a newfound interest in long form journalism by web publications, like BuzzFeed and SB Nation, which typically rely on short, snappy formats.

From a strategic point of view, Arment’s new magazine ambitions would seem to be a good complement to Instapaper — his service that lets readers clip long articles they find on the web and collect to read later in a different place or platform.

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“Sandboxing, although said to be a good protection from the malware, brings too many troubles to the applications themselves. I have made 6 builds trying to make MPlayerX pass Apple’s review and I have explained why some privileges are so important for MPlayerX to achieve this and that features, But the answer is NO, NO, NO, NO, NO and NO.”

The sandboxed app store version of MPlayerX wouldn’t be able to automatically load subtitle files, according to its developer.

Some of the MplayerX features affected by Apple’s sandboxing rules include the ability to automatically load subtitles and automatically play the next episode of a TV show, he explained.

QU said that version 1.0.16, which was released a few days ago, won’t come to the app store anymore. He will still try to make version 1.0.15 via the Mac App Store, but said that it will be a “limited-function version.”

This isn’t the first app to disappear from the Mac App Store over Apple’s sandboxing rules. Apple originally wanted to introduce mandatory sandboxing last November, but then twice delayed the deadline. Sandboxing eventually became mandatory on June 1. The move resulted in Postbox and other apps leaving the App Store, and prompted Instapaper developer Marco Arment to ask:

“How many good apps will be pulled from the App Store before Apple cares?”

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