The Failure Of News Tailored To Each Person

A new Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad app called Zite will personalize news for each user based on their  reading habits. Zite describes the service as “Personalization that works automatically as you use read and view content—you don’t need to do anything for it to work.”

The product is similar to two others, one of which is long gone and the other which has had the most modest of successes. The first of these is PointCast, one of the most publicized products of Web 1.o. The PC-based news “push” product was introduced in 1996 just as broadband adoption began to hit a tipping point. PointCast was an early version of RSS but allowed complete customization based to some extent on reader habits.

PointCast failed to a large extent because of RSS. People want to be able to set their news feeds based on personal preference and not the results of complex algorithms. RSS brought personal news aggregation to broadband users.

The other product which is similar to Zite is Pandora, a company which offers technology which tracks people’s music listening habits and then pushes them similar music. Pandora is set up as a series of channels. Each is selected by the user and built out by the Pandora algorithm. Pandora’s limitation is that it competes with iTunes. Apple iPod and iPhone users can customize content to their exact preference through iTune downloads. Those preferences are based on human decisions and not technology. The proof of the success of iTunes and the failure of Pandora is the number of paid iTunes downloads which number about 12 billion. Users will pay for music if they can make their own selections. Pandora’s basic service is free. That has not helped it.

The lessons of Pandora and PointCast are that people can easily do their own customization. It only takes a brief tour of the Apple App Store to see how many news sources are available. App Store users can download most of them for free. They range from The New York Times to CBS Sports to gossip sites and number in the hundreds. Once downloaded onto an iPhone, subscribers can scroll through the sites and launch any one for reading in an instant. The App Store is set up to allow personalization of content driven by the user. The is the primary reason it has been such a success.

Zite will be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. This happens with most well-publicized apps. The moment it does not live up to user expectations, people will abandon it for the system of individual news site, the most widely used and successful model for content adoption on portable devices. The history of news aggregation make the Zite plan a longshot.

Douglas A. McIntyre