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By Chris Meadows

nytimes In the New York Times’s “Bits” blog, Saul Hansell ponders why it is that iPhone (and iPod Touch) users are willing to pay for content for their devices. For example, the iPhone app version of David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual (which I reviewed here) was the best-selling edition of that book.

Hansell looks at the app store and marvels that applications are being sold that contain information—such as public domain e-books—that could be found for free on the web. He finds it interesting that “iPhone users are willing to spend money in ways that Web users are not.”

Why has this happened? Apple has created an environment that makes buying digital goods easy and common. With an infrastructure that supports one-click purchases of songs and videos, it was easy to add applications in the same paradigm. Paying for software, especially games, is not new to Apple customers. So when you see the iPhone manual or the Frommer’s Paris guidebook, it feels natural to click. (And of course, your credit card is already on file with Apple.)

However, Hansell does point out that when O’Reilly tried raising the price of the Missing Manual app from $4.99 to $9.99 sales fell off by 75%. “So even if all content doesn’t have to be free, it may well have to be cheap.”

A recent trend in the app store seems to agree. According to Dan Frommer in the Silicon Alley Insider, the average price of the top 100 paid apps in the app store has fallen from $3.15 to $2.55 over the last two months.

Certainly, whether and how and how much to charge for web content has been a hot topic in recent weeks (as seen in all the stories we’ve carried about it). Newspapers in particular need to find a sustainable model. The fact that app store users are willing to pay for otherwise free content is interesting (and perhaps in line with the advice offered here about how to charge for content) but it is hard to say how relevant it may be to the newspapers’ plight.

 
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