CNN Expects You to Pay to Work for Them - September 29th, 2009

Today, CNN’s new app hit the App Store, and the world rejoiced. Mashable reported on it, and told masses of impressionable readers that it was impressive. I’m not going to disagree with Ben on this, but I am going to chime in a bit where he left off.

What wasn’t talked about all that much in Mashable’s post was the fact that CNN is charging $1.99 per download for this app. First of all, why on earth would CNN be charging for this? They don’t charge for any of their other content, why start now? Secondly, the price is saying something; $0.99 is the normal price for an app, $2.99 is officially expensive. $1.99 is known as the pretentious price for an app. It’s the price a company charges for an app that should obviously be only $0.99, except they know they can get away with charging more.

The Real Issue

CNN suddenly becoming capitalistic isn’t what I take issue with. They can charge whatever they want, it doesn’t bother me, what does bother me is this: Note the inclusion of extensive iReport functionality. It all becomes extremely transparent once you realize what they’ve done here.

CNN wants to charge you $1.99 to work for them. It’s not crazy, it’s common sense. Nothing about this app is actually special, except for the streaming video addition, which can be had at their website free of charge. Those streaming videos are paid for by ads, and that same business model could have been applied just as easily on a mobile platform.

Most people don’t utilize CNN’s iReport simply because they have to go out of their way to do so, but if they’re already using a news app on their iPhone, a piece of equipment which probably spends more time in their hand than not, then it makes perfect sense to build streamlined iReport functionality directly into the extant application. The glossy video features will sell the app, but people will use iReport.

Download the App.

CNN met great success when they embraced Twitter in their daily reporting, and their iReport has been continuously lauded since its inception. Put simply, CNN has succeeded in passively crowdsourcing to bolster their real-time capabilities. Now they’re going to make money doing it.