Things you learn when you start building a news reader

This article is for everyone that wants to make another news reader and aggregator (and we all know from experience, that its bound to happen again and again). And for everybody else, that want to learn about the things you need to think when you are developing a product.

One of the strange things that I’ve learned is that News Reader applications are cliche. Everybody has one. Everybody uses one. Yet people just keep making them — it only gets worse with “ToDo” apps.

Plenty of apps readers have been developed — just try going to Google Play Store and entering “news reader”. There you will find hundreds of apps that are made for news reading.

Also, lots of news reading applications failed:

• Circa
• Discors
• Brief.me
• Prismatic

and many more.

So what’s so hard about making a news reader?

Making money is hard

Companies fail because they fail to get enough revenue to fund their operations. And that’s pretty tough with a news reader.

That’s because nobody (I’ll backtrack on this later) is willing to pay for the news. There are plenty of competitors who are ready to offer a mediocre solution but for free which has some crappy ads.

Which is rather funny, because people can’t make any money with the ads too (even Medium realised this) except for the biggest players. For most businesses, the ad revenues are going down and that’s caused by two things:

• The law of shitty clickthroughs
• Pageviews

I’ll elaborate a bit on the pageviews: to get more revenue from ads, you need to get more impressions, to get more impressions you need to get more pageviews, to get more pageviews you need more content (pages), and to create more content you have to lower your quality standards. When the quality drops, fewer users start paying attention to your pages, and the whole spiral starts again — you need to get more revenue from ads to compensate yours loses.

This situation is not unique to news readers (or publisher businesses in general) but it is a bit tougher than for others. In the sections below, I’ll delve into the reasons, why is it so hard to make money with news.

People just want to kill some time

Part of the reason why is it so hard to earn a living from the news is that people are just apathetic to them. Nobody is going to get upset if they do not get a daily dose of their news. It’s a vitamin, not a painkiller.

But let’s step back for a moment and let us ask ourselves a question, why do people follow news and all sorts of blogs?

It’s because people want to learn about things that they don’t know that they don’t know. It is the fear of missing out (FOMO). Otherwise, people would just google it.

However, not everybody is the same. We have identified a few types of readers:

• News junkies — these people just can’t go without news. Constant updates every hour is a must for them.
• Casual readers — people that just want to kill some time when they have a spare minute. Maybe they will take a look at the news in the evening.
• Content hoarders — people that are constantly on the lookout for good stories and good content which gets saved and never read again.
• Non-readers — these guys just hate news, they do not read them as it is a waste of time (today’s news are going to be irrelevant tomorrow), but sometimes they find an article or two that they will carefully digest.

Probably we could add more types, like professional readers that follow a specific industry or a company with some kind of keyword monitoring solution, but let’s keep it simple for now.

As you can see, all of these people have very different interests. Some of them could utilise news for learning (especially long-form articles) while for others it would just be entertainment.

Competition

It’s no secret that the industry is extremely competitive. You will have to compete with:

• an enormous amount of no-name apps,
• big and well-known products (like Flipboard)
• publishers themselves
• social networks (one of the most popular ways to get news)

Since the competition is so fierce, it is really hard to differentiate yourself to be able to attract users. Basically, what can you do better than your competitors?

And doing better is not enough — it should be x10 better.

Connecting the dots

In the end, to be successful your product has to provide some substantial value to your target customer.

There is no chance that your product can be useful to everybody. When the target customer is found, you better hope that the value you can provide to THEM is big enough to pay YOUR bills.

If you are just a news aggregator, how are you going to convince that your product is worth paying? News Junkies are not going to pay — they will just find another source. The same is with Content Hoarders — they are happy with the products they use at the moment.

What usually happens is that the improvement is incremental (a vitamin) and the product gets ignored.

In the end, you have fierce competition and user base that’s hard to monetise.

Feedpresso

It wouldn’t be fair to forget Feedpresso in this piece. At Feedpresso, I had the special honour of being super naive and I’ve learned all of the things above the hard way.

Surely, there are many more things that I have yet to learn but I am going to share how we fight all of the above at Feedpresso.

Focus on a specific user

For Feedpresso, it is a person working in a Technology Business that has a managerial position.

Why? We could have focused on many different segments, but this one is the most familiar to us (we are a technology business company) and those people care about recent developments in the field.

By having a clear persona in mind, we can further tailor content for that specific group and have constructive interviews. The whole communication just gets a lot easier and starts making sense for us and our users. Marketing gets a lot easier.

It makes it possible to make users love the product. That’s our unique proposition. Newsreader for technology business executives.

Subscriptions

A while ago we decided to introduce subscriptions to Feedpresso.

The ultimate validation of the product is the one, when a user agrees to pay for it. It means that they care about your product and you should care what they think in return.

Also, subscriptions provide the right incentives to work with — you care about the quality of the experience and not the opportunities to show more ads (remember the bit about ads from above?).

Deep Personalization

Content personalisation — it’s another cliche but it’s amazing that nobody has solved this problem yet. There is an endless amount of information out there and it is not possible to browse through everything.

Heck, it can take another full-time job just to follow everything that could be interesting for you. That’s why deep personalisation is one of the core propositions at Feedpresso. You get more informed by spending less time.

I can’t claim that we have solved the personalization problem but we have made some impressive progress that makes the experience much more pleasant.

Conclusion

I am pretty sure that lots of this apply to many different types of products and I hope that by reading this, you got a chance to think about the problems that your product might face.