Steve Outing again:

So, Pezzillo's simple observation about the success of phone apps points to an important truism about human consumer behavior: Most people seem to prefer to spend money on things they get to "keep." A phone app may not be a physical thing, but it's there on your phone every time you turn it on. It's "yours," even though it's just digital bits.

And that's way news organizations failed in selling content online.

Why did they fail? There are many reasons, of course, but I believe that perhaps the biggest reason is that when online news consumers were asked to pay for news, many felt that they weren't getting anything, because they received nothing tangible -- just information. And, as we've all been trained during the Web years, most information is free online.

Here's the full column.