AP to close down its ASAP service
Steve Safran July 29th, 2007
The Associated Press will shutter its ASAP service on October 31. ASAP was started in 2005 as a way for the AP to reach out to the younger, bloggier audience: ASAP offered multimedia, web-centric packages of materials. The AP says the division was simply not a financial success. It plans on using some of the ASAP multimedia elements in other AP offerings.
7 Comments Add your own
1. Jonathan | July 29th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Did anybody actually use ASAP? The site was ugly, and the font was tiny.
2. Anon | July 29th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I never knew it existed
3. fleetwood mack | July 29th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Jonathan and Anon hit the nail on why it failed. Badly executed and invisible.
And it was not “a way for AP to reach out to younger users,” it was a way for AP to provide its clients with something that might work for their web sites is what I think.
4. Eirc | July 29th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
You did not have to use it on the AP design. It was another product that you could license and roll into your own site or paper.
We looked at ASAP and concluded that the content was poor. While the topics of the stories catered to a younger crowd, they were written in a style that often seemed trite and pandering.
They did have younger staffers managing the content, but it still came across as parents trying to sound hip while talking to a teenager.
5. discreet_chaos | July 29th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I’ll say the same as Anon - I didn’t have a clue, it was there.
6. discreet_chaos | July 29th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
PS) Though I don’t usually, but I’ll say this may have been a case of something that might’ve benefited from context advertising. Several of the blogging tool sites use context ads and if ASAP had advertised where I’d have seen it, I may have known about their tool.
7. stefan | July 30th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I think Eirc also calls it, that was my conclusion as well. i evaluated it and wrote APa very long critique. The biggest shocker to me was AP trying to go after that demographic with absolutely no social networking or user customizing tools whatsoever. That showed such an fundamental lack of understanding of where information, technology, and usage are cross connecting.
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