This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose...
LEGITIMATE DEBATE
There are a few points of inarguable agreement and a few points of legitimate debate which it's important to dispense with if we can have a useful conversation about the future of reading tools online. Here are the premises from which I'd start:
- Most content sites on the web are unpleasant to read, and conventional advertising is a big part of the reason why.
- The behavior of sending content from the web or apps into other services and synchronizing between those apps is only going to become more common, and hopefully will become mainstream.
- People like the creators of Readability, Instapaper, and the other early tools in this space are real web people, who are both able to, and interested in, hacking on the web because they care about it. This hasn't yet attracted the folks who just have dollar signs in their eyes but don't care about it.
- Sites which publish original content can't survive indefinitely if a substantial percentage of their readers either block ads or read their content in apps which don't display those ads, unless there is some other way for them to generate revenue.
- Advertisers will not be so dumb as to continue buying ads on sites at current rates when a significant, or particularly valuable, segment of the audience starts viewing the content through reading apps.
- Nobody's solved this problem yet, and it's still very early days.
I'm hoping those baseline assertions can be agreed upon; If anything there is really objectionable to you, I can't help you, because you're crazy. So, where are the things we can disagree about? Right here!
- Most reading apps have a way for users to pay for the app itself, either as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Many publishers find this objectionable, as the publishers get no revenue from these applications and readers who use them do not consume ads except (usually) when adding the content to their reading app.
- Apps like Instapaper make the argument that publishers will be able to get the same CPM advertising rates for people who save articles into their apps because the regular web page is displayed before being reformatted into a cleaner format. Some publishers object to this model on the ground that advertisers are becoming aware of this trend and will start paying lower rates as a result.
- Apps like Readability offer a system where a subscription payment holds the majority of its revenues (in their case, 70%) for publishers, but requires the publisher to register with the app in order to receive their payment. Some people consider this objectionable because it's opt-out instead of opt-in for the publishers, and because it's not clear enough what happens to unclaimed payments.
- A few people object to reading apps because they want a site's publishers and designers to have final authority over how their content is displayed to users. Most of us consider this untenable because it's in tension with the design of the web.
People may quibble with the wording or emphasis I've placed on various points above, but I think these capture the major discussions going around, and I think reasonable people can fall on various sides of these issues, or may fall on both sides of these issues at various times. Here's the thing that I think is most clear:
Reading apps give people a better experience on the web, but do so in a way that's in tension with current publishing business models, and it will take painful, disruptive changes to resolve this tension.
Now, with the reasonable overview out of the way, we can talk about how we people who love the web continually fuck ourselves up...
