In an effort to tap the mobile platform for revenue, Australian media group Fairfax has unveiled iPhone apps based on the subscription model for its newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Today and WAToday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday.

While most newspaper publishers have opted for a one-off fee payment system, the Fairfax group is the first publisher to have launched an iPhone app based on the subscription model, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Readers can download the apps from the Apple iTunes store at a monthly charge of $2.49 and those who opt for subscriptions over a six-month period are entitled to a 15 percent discount, and therefore will pay only $12.99.

Image: AdNews Australia

"It's the first move by Fairfax Media to charge for its online news content on a mobile phone," Brian McCarthy, chief executive at the Fairfax group, was quoted by The Australian as saying. "The development of the apps is a milestone in our ongoing strategy around the delivery of content through digital platforms."

Purchasers of mobile telephones can look, but not buy, their mobile devices soon. According to mocoNews.net, Google has recently launched a new Android store for "window-shopping only."

The store will be a "database that tracks all of the Android handsets in the market place allowing customers to conduct comparisons across handset makers and carriers," according to the online article. Google also launched the Google Phone Gallery, which will be like a phone showcase without actually selling anything. Google learned its lesson when it underestimated "how hard it would be to sell unlocked devices at full price directly to consumers," states Moco News.

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U.S. publishers Gannett Company Inc., The New York Times Co. and The Washington Post Co. have invested US$12 million in a start-up company called Ongo, which is developing a news aggregation website that will draw content from major publishers, The Wall Street Journal revealed today.

"We are building Ongo to reflect the many ways consumers prefer to read, organize and share digital news," Ongo's founder and chief executive officer Alex Kazim stated in a press release. The service is expected to go online by the end of the year.

In a statement, The Washington Post explained that its investment was lead by the company's interest "in experimenting with different ways to experience digital news and information." The three media groups have been discussing the joint project with Kazin, a former eBay executive who was president of Skype before it was sold, for more than a year, a spokesperson of The New York Times said to The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook drives 13 times more traffic to French news sites than Twitter, which only accounts for one click per 100 visits, according to a study conducted by AT Internet Institute, paidContent reported today.

Among the top 12 leading news sites in the country, Facebook is responsible for 1.3 percent of visits and Twitter for 0.1 percent. By way of comparison, researchers also looked at the traffic driven by Google and found that the search engine' share is 40.6 percent or 30 times greater than Facebook, AT Internet explained in a press release.

Graphic source: AT Internet Institute

"This figure remains high, but we should not forget that the main function of a search engine, such as Google, is to suggest links to Internet users. This is not the case for Facebook," the company reminded.

The low impact of Twitter is becoming a trend in some countries. According to paidContent, a study released in March showed that the 140-character site only drives 0.14 percent of the traffic to U.S. news sites.

UK daily The Times has lost an additional 120,000 online readers following the installment of a paywall, the latest comScore data shows, Media Tel reported Monday. According to Thinq, the News International-owned daily also saw a 1.67 drop in print readership, reaching 494,205 - the first time since April 1994 that the figure has been under 500,000.

The title had 1.459 million unique visitors in August, a 7.6 drop from 1.579 million in July, when the paywall was launched, according to WallBlog.co.uk. The total minutes users spent on the site dropped by 16 percent from six million in July to five million in August, Beehive reported. Further, total page views dropped by 22 percent, from nine million to seven million, month-to-month.

Kicking off an online revolution in traditional display advertising at Advertising Week in New York, AOL unveiled its display advertising initiative called Project Devil, which aims to transform online advertising by improvising on aesthetics, impact and interactivity of ads, NewsandTech.com reported yesterday.

Through this initiative, the company is aiming for a "fundamental redesign of the Web," which is incredibly "bold and ambitious," Jeff Levick, AOL's president of global advertising and strategy told MediaWeek.com. The company's two ad platforms namely- the company's mega ad network, Advertising.com and its popular ad-serving platform, AdTech will support growth of the Project Devil initiative.

Image Source: RealTimeAdvertisingWeek.com

Having re-launched 16 of its news websites after overhaul operations recently, The Sun-Times Media group plans to deliver the United States' largest sports monthly magazine, called Athlon Sports, for its readers beginning October 21, Editor & Publisher reported yesterday. Seven million copies of the monthly magazine will be circulated nationwide by the media group's 47 newspapers.

The magazine will appear each month in the Thursday editions of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Southtown Star, the Post-Tribune, the Courier News of Elgin, the Beacon-News of Aurora and the Herald-News of Joliet, the Naperville Sun, the Lake County News-Sun, the Pioneer Press and The Doings Newspapers, NewsandTech.com reported yesterday.

Taiwan News, an English-language newspaper that has been published in Taiwan since 1949, will be available online-only starting Friday, the Central News Agency reported yesterday.

"The unthinkable is finally upon us," said Taiwan News' President Jack Wong during a press conference explaining the daily had taken the lead in the country by being the first digital-only newspaper.

Photo source: Central News Agency
Wong said the new site will be launched today under the name Taiwan News Multimedia Newspaper and it will include "previously impossible integration of text, color images, and sound in a digital multimedia format."

The company will also publish the Taiwan News International Financial and a Cultural Monthly online magazine. According to Central News Agency, these publications will be available in eight languages while the Taiwan News will continue to be published in English and Mandarin.

The company said the multimedia edition of the newspaper as well as the magazine would soon be delivered through e-mail at no cost to those who register online.

Rupert Murdoch's UK-based publishing group News International embarked on a multi-million pound advertising campaign beginning yesterday for its national Sunday tabloid paper News of The World (NOTW), MediaGuardian reported. The initiative, which touts the title's reputation for exclusive content, is being launched across outdoor and television platforms before a digital paywall is raised next month.

The TV ad, made by WCRS agency, includes the slogan "The Big Stories Start Here" and will strive to convince users that NOTW produces quality material. According to Brand Republic, the three-week long campaign will include some of the tabloid's biggest scoops, such as football team Chelsea's player John Terry's affair and Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson paying for access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew.

The paywall will incorporate a £1.99 (US$3.15) charge for a four-week subscription to online content, according to MediaGuardian. Users will have to pay £1 ($1.58) for a day's access while the iPad edition will cost £1.19 ($1.89) per week.

World-wide media and marketing company Mindshare was in charge of media handling and buying for the campaign, Brand Republic added.

UK supermarket chain Asda and News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have announced a new deal that features the return of NI-owned The Sunday Times to 260 Asda stores, following a week-long disappearance, MediaWeek reported today.

NI recently increased the cover price of the weekend title by £0.20 to £2.20. Last week, the publisher decided that it would have £0.183 of the price increase while retailers just a little over 1 pence or £ 0.017, which constitutes 23.5 percent. Asda responded by claiming that it should have £0.5, or 25 percent of the cover price, as it previously did.

Asda pointed out that NI made an "acceptable proposal." However an NI official said that the publisher "sold to all retailers at the same price," MediaWeek informed. If thedeal did in fact go through, Asda's competitors such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons might be suffering defeat, Media Week suggested.

NI owns The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and News of The World. According to the Guardian, the collective circulation of the titles amounts to 37 percent of the country's newspaper circulation. In 2009, The Times and The Sunday Times saw losses of nearly £87.7 million.

As consumer reading preferences increasingly shift to mobile devices such as the iPad and smartphones, The Associated Press is looking for a means to harness the mobile medium's potentials by bringing circulars and coupon inserts to newspaper apps, AdAge.com reported today.

Tentatively called "iCircular," the app is currently being developed in collaboration with Verve Wireless and will work in conjunction with the AP's white-label app platform. Jane Seagrave, senior vice president and chief revenue officer at the AP confirmed its development, but declined to provide any further information saying, "the development process wasn't far enough along," according to AdAge. Member publishers can also publish apps under their own brand with the help of this application.

"Ad circulars ... are extremely important to almost every newspaper," James Moroney, CEO and publisher at the Dallas Morning News was quoted as saying by AdAge. "With the decline of classified print advertising, as far as printed newspaper ad-revenue categories go, it is, if not the largest for a lot of papers, always going to be one of the two or three largest categories."