CMP SERIES CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE Thanks to downloading FlightTrack ($4.99; iPhone/
iPad, Android, Windows, or BlackBerry), Paul Paone, founder and director of Meetings Technology Expo, said he’ll “never circle the airport pickup area again.” The app, from the makers of FlightBoard, features information from more than 3,000 airports with real-time flight track- ing, baggage-claim information, the ability to sync with the user’s phone calendar, weather forecasts for arrival and departure cities, and many more features. Paone uses the app specifically for “knowing precisely when my VIP attendees, friends, or relatives are about to arrive at the airport.” FlightTrack also offers a free version, but online reviewers seem to agree that the paid version is the way to go for road warriors.
CURATE INFORMATION By the end of 2010, more Americans got their news from the Internet than from newspapers, according to Mashable. And while a majority of people surveyed in a Gallup poll released in July said that television was their main source for news, 21 percent said it was the Internet. Although it’s easy to get lost in the Internet’s information vortex, clicking through
successive links, many planners find they don’t have time to consume all the news or content that they’d like. For keeping up with industry-specific content and news,
Spellos recommends Zite (Free; iPhone/iPad, Android, Win- dows, or Web), which he describes as the place “where news meets Pandora.” Users input their interests and Zite goes to work, pulling in items from around the web that it “thinks” might be appealing. “It learns what I like,” Spellos said, “and continues to give me more of the type of story that is of interest to me.” A similar news and content aggregator, Flipboard (Free; iPhone/iPad, Android, or Web), allows users to create their own “magazines” full of content from around the web. “Their strength,” Spellos said, “comes from a change a few months ago to allow users to create their own magazines and have their members, clients, or constituents actually subscribe to their Flipboard publication.” A number of tech organizations are using the app this way, and Spellos said he sees great potential from a hotel’s or city’s perspective. “There’s a lot of opportunity to effectively curate without spending a lot of money doing so.” Think of how many times while searching for something online, or scrolling through your Facebook timeline, you
‘Why Most Apps Are Free’ A good number of apps, including several featured in this article, are available for down- load only at a cost — and some with free basic versions, like Evernote and Dropbox, require a paid subscription to access “pro” versions or the app’s full offering of features. But most users expect that apps will be available for free download, even though the only way for most app developers to do that is with ads.
“While consumers may not like in-app adver- tising,” Mary Ellen Gordon, Ph.D., writes in a blog post on Flurry, a company specializing in mobile advertising and analytics, “their behavior makes it clear that they are willing to accept it in exchange for free content, just as we have in radio, TV, and online for decades.”
Here’s an excerpt from Gordon’s post, “The History of App Pricing, and Why Most Apps Are Free”:
Many consumer surveys point to an obvious conclusion: most people hate seeing ads on smartphones and tablets. But the truth is, con- trary to the desire for an ad-free experience, when faced with the choice between free
58 PCMA CONVENE OCTOBER 2013
apps with ads, or paying even $0.99 for apps without ads, consumers overwhelmingly choose the free apps and tolerate the ads.…
Some might argue that this supports the idea that “content wants to be free.” We don’t see it quite that way. Instead, we simply see this as the outcome of consumer choice: people want free content more than they want to avoid ads or to have the absolute highest quality content possible. This is a collective choice that could have played out differently and could still in particular contexts (e.g., enterprise apps or highly spe- cialized apps such as those tracking medical or financial information).…
On the surface, the rise of free apps could be seen as herding behavior: maybe app developers saw how much free competition there was and decided to make their apps free too. It’s certainly possible that may have happened in some instances, but by digging deeper into app pricing patterns over time, we were able to see that many developers took a much more thoughtful approach to pricing.
We looked at historical iOS app data (again because iOS apps have a longer history) to identify apps that have been the subjects of pricing experiments. That typically took the form of A/B testing, where an app was one price for a period of time, then the price was raised or lowered for a period of time, then raised or lowered again. This lets developers assess users’ willingness to pay (i.e., price elasticity of demand) based on the number of downloads at different price points.
…[I]t’s most interesting to look at the trend among apps that were subject to pricing ex- periments.… [T]here was an upward trend in the proportion of price-tested apps that went from paid to free. This implies that many of the developers who ran pricing experiments concluded that charging even $0.99 signifi- cantly reduced demand for their apps.”
To read Gordon’s full post, which includes charts illustrating Flurry’s research on app pricing, visit
convn.org/why-free.
PCMA.ORG
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