APPAPPO
Why should a reader marry a publication to read one story?
2018 · Product manager at Vikatan Group, with Vikatan's engineering team
Made for
People tired of full-pack subscriptions, and the publishing ecosystem.
What happened
For readers who want to pay for one story instead of buying an annual subscription and forgetting to cancel it. It won an award and then it died; the reasons are in the micropayments essay.
Subscriptions ask a reader to marry the publication. APPAPPO let them buy a single story instead, for one, three or five rupees from an in-app wallet, with no ads and no subscription. It launched at the end of 2018 as India's only pay-per-article product, drawing on Vikatan's archive back to 1926.
I owned the product vision and the roadmap. I built and ran a four-person content team that curated more than 11,000 articles in a year and a half, and worked with data scientists on an item-to-item recommendation modelled on Spotify's Discover Weekly; with it, paid readers went through the library more than 50% faster.
APPAPPO won Bronze for Best Paid Content Strategy at WAN-IFRA's South Asian Digital Media Awards 2019 and reached about 1.8 lakh readers. It closed after that; the micropayments essay is about why.
The award
WAN-IFRA's South Asian Digital Media Awards 2019 gave Bronze for Best Paid Content Strategy to Vikatan's Appappo; the award was presented at Digital Media India 2020.
