

Would you pay $1.99/month for newswire app on iPhone? - bingbingbing

I'm working on creating a mobile newswire app for the tech vertical. The following are the features that the app would have:<p>1. Headlines limited to 140 characters or less for quick consumption 
2. Social sharing news via Twitter, Facebook, SMS and Email 
3. Sentiment analysis - green for positive stories; red for negative stories; yellow for neutral stories; blue 
for sponsors; orange for announcements 
4. Four tabs - recent stories, trending stories, badges and options pages 
5. Recent stories will show all stories in a chronological order 
6. Trending stories will show top 10 most voted stories 
7. 18 badges will give incentives for users to launch/use the app regularly and increase engagement 
8. Options page will have users resubscribe to the app, manage push alerts and a host of other options 
9. Push notifications for instant breaking news alerts 
10. Shake device for positive-only, negative-only, neutral-only and regular story listings 
11. Advertise “TrendOY!” on social sharing services with page branding 
12. Integrated advertising/sponsorships to increase revenue 
13. In-app browser to make reading full stories easy and efficient 
14. Offline viewing for older stories 
15. Search archives going as far back as 5 days 
16. Keyword alerts to customize story alerts - user can select specific keywords to receive stories they are 
interested in<p>The idea is that people with mobile devices don't have a lot of time to sit there, pull up an article on the NYTimes or WSJ app and read it in its entirety. They want their information quick in bits and pieces so they can stay in the loop and move on to the next piece of information. We promise to deliver that information in tweet-like headlines and help you on move.<p>Would you pay $1.99/month for an app as a subscription? What features could we add to make it worth the $1.99/month price?
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aspir
For me, it would ultimately have to come down to the quality and caliber of
the news within the app. I'd kill for high quality, diverse, informative, and
mildly entertaining news. All the extra features are just thing that are built
around the sweet spot of great news. At best, they're icing on the cake; in an
absolute worst case senario then may distract- but its how they're developed,
so it may not be an issue.

I use Fluent News and Time apps many times daily, and it's not about the bells
and whistles. I just want plain old good news agglomerated from many sources.
If you can do that better (more stores, higher quality stories), $1.99 is a
steal. If it's just the same service with better packaging, it's probably not
worth the money.

But, I do log onto my free news apps many times daily. That's ad exposure that
someone would pay greatly for.

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bingbingbing
so the kind of news that we're hoping to deliver is breaking news. because
we'll be push notifying you of breaking news, the goal would be to ONLY
deliver good, quality news (in our opinion) and not everything that we can
possibly find. we don't want to kill your device with 100 tweets a day. that's
just way too much.

what will be missing would be blogger opinions etc. that generally go
everywhere - unless that opinion happens to become a story of its own.

we're drop dead focused on simplicity and keeping the interface clean. i'll be
sure to let you know when.

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smoody
My personal opinion is that badges won't matter to people consuming newswire
content. I suspect that within a year, badges have little-to-no value in apps
as a whole (with the exception of gaming apps -- and I consider Four Square to
be a game).

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bingbingbing
you're right about the badges. that's just to get the engagement going in the
beginning, but you will eventually see them evolve into something much more
useful and perhaps you would be able to unlock real-life prizes like gift
cards, sponsor supported gadgets etc.

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sportsTAKES
I like the idea and my initial impression is that if you can truly deliver all
these features, with excellent news content, $1.99 might be too low.

I would almost consider scaling some of the features back and focusing on
simplicity and content.

Do you have anything you can show us yet?

Sounds promising.

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bingbingbing
unfortunately, i dont have anything to show you yet. we're in week 4 of
development. one more week and we'll submit the app to the app store. trust
me, all these features will be laid out extremely simply with a great user
interface and design (in my biased opinion).

for subscription, we plan on charging $1.99/month, $4.99/quarterly and
$19.99/annually.

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lotharbot
Any reason the quarterly subscription is 3 cents cheaper per year than the
annual?

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bingbingbing
ALERT: PLEASE realize that this is $1.99/month subscription service.

