Hearst CTO on the publisher’s plans for the future

How would you rate Hearst’s products now?
I would give us a good mark to date. We’ve updated our products so they’re mobile-friendly. We just did a redesign of our newspaper products that drove a significant increase in engagement. But we have many more to do. So we need more scale.

Hearst just launched CosmoBody, an online subscription video service, at a relatively high cost of $9.95 a month. Is that the model you’ll be looking to replicate?
That’s one element of the strategy. We’ll be looking at free businesses, but we want to develop products people are willing to pay for. We know we have to go deeper in our thinking of our service to consumers if we want them to pay for it.

You formed this group with the acquisition of the professional networking startup BranchOut. Its own app didn’t really work out, though, and the company pivoted. What did Hearst see in them?
There were several elements. They had a messaging company that we thought was well received. They also had expertise in utilizing the social graph. That combination of mobile and social attracted us. They’re a very strong technical team. [Their app] was an explosive hit. Facebook changed the rules so they couldn’t operate as they were, and that limited their growth.

Lots of apps get downloaded, only to be quickly forgotten. How are you approaching these?
Our view is that an app needs to be an experience that’s a daily habit. If you’re not accomplishing that, you don’t necessarily need to have an app. In some of our properties, the majority of engagement is still on mobile Web. In news, the consumers in those markets interact with us everyday. The application drives the deepest level of engagement. This is a different relationship than a headline or “have you seen the latest person do someone silly on Facebook.” It’s not that we haven’t been guilty of doing apps that people downloaded once. But we have a clearer view of where a native application fits into our digital ecosystem.

How will you make money from all this?
We’re experimenting with many different approaches. Subscription is always going to be part of our strategy. We’ll also experiment with a la carte offerings, as we just did with The Falling Man and Esquire, with really strong results.