“Although Wired managed to achieve 24,000 downloads in the iPad app’s first day, and over 100,000 downloads in June, digital sales of the publication have since dropped substantially. The company averaged just 31,000 downloads each month between July and September, and October and November saw only 22,000 and 23,000 in sales, respectively,” Electronista reports. “Vanity Fair sold 8,700 downloads of its November issue, down from an August-October average of 10,500. Glamour is noted to have slipped about 20 percent a month in the distance from September to November.”
Electronista reports, “The magazine industry is currently hampered, however, by an absence of subscription support at the App Store, which forces people to buy issues individually unless downloads are tied to an outside paper subscription. Apple is believed to be working on native support…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: After sampling their wares, we’re waiting for a more seamless subscription model and more realistic pricing to appear before moving from our old-fashioned paper magazine subscriptions to iPad. How about you?
It’s the pricing. $2-$5 buys a lot of good apps on the iPad. Why should each issue of a weekly magazine with one to two hours of useful life cost the same? The value equation is not satisfied, yet.
The experience is good but the price is all wrong and they forget that they are competing with everything else on the ipad and Internet… as for buying the paper mag, why bother as the ipad delivers on everything I need to read and consume!
They are talking about magazine apps.
To be honest, I just can’t be bothered with having individual apps for individual magazines, just like I can’t be bothered having individual apps for individual ebooks. I also can’t be bothered downloading a 400MB magazine issue, just to get a couple of lame videos in a quasi-Flash format.
That said, I am a big fan of Zinio, where I can read an electronic copy of the paper version of a magazine, without all the crappy “bells and whistles”.
Not only pricing, but delivery. I have a few subscriptions ( People an Food & Wine for example) and it’s such a pain in the a$$ to download, as they won’t do it in the background, and u can’t read until it’s fully downloaded. zinio however has done it very right, interface background downloads, read while downloading, etc. I don’t understand why more mags don’t just let zinio look after their electronic delivery.
The Economist works really well, if you are a paid subscriber you get the weekly iPad magazine for free; also it’s all in one App, not one App per issue.
I also tried PROJECT but second issue is late and I’m annoyed that I paid and then they gave it away for free.
I think magazines either need to follow The Economist’s excellent lead or have a better in-app purchase option — and contained in one App, not one per issue.
No, the industry is hampered by the fact that the content sucks. The only thing subscription support would do is to rope in the suckers before they have a chance to realize what trash they’re buying. Heck, even I spent a couple of bucks to to see what Popular Science had to offer. Deleted the app after one day. I can’t imagine that Vanity Fair or, seriously, Wired? actually have anything to offer worth paying for. And the delivered content is already months old once the publishers have had their way with it. At this point it’s just a novelty, no where near compelling, and it’s the content that’s to blame, not Apple’s delivery mechanism.
Yeah I don’t blame iPad/apple.
They need to do something like the economist does. (like the guy said above, I’m not a subscriber)
And 300-400 per magazine? Holy crap…
I cannot understand why the Kindle has a better subscription model than Apple. The same is about to hold true for the Nook. Neither device come close to the iPad, and even their subscriptions aren’t that great. In the meantime we are given the option of buying magazine issues in the form of apps, which is pathetic (and costly), although the interactive functionality of those apps trump the competition.
Someone mentioned Zinio earlier. I happen to like their model, and subscribing to a digital magazine is reasonable. I would sure like to see something a la iBooks for magazines and newspapers.
After sampling the magazines’ wares, I’m waiting for a more seamless subscription model and more realistic pricing to appear before moving from our old-fashioned paper magazine subscriptions to iPad.
The magazines thought that the iPad would be the ‘trojan horse’ in which to put eyeballs in front of advertisers. The combination humongous downloads and price point sticker shock up front has basically killed the format in it’s tracks.
They can try to justify the price all they want, but subscribers are the lifeblood of magazines, not newsrack sales. If they demand to send dead trees to people to appease the Audit Bureau, then they ought to give free or cheap access to online.
Better yet, just give us a decent sub rate and watch the uptake! I am already conditioned to pay no more than $1 per issue for Wired or Esquire or the New Yorker through aggressive subscription pricing and blow-in cards. Why would I pay $5 an issue for the ‘pleasure’ of reading on my iPad?
Are you listening, dead tree industry?
Magazines either need to include a free digital subscription with the print subscription to get people used to the migration to digital, or substantially reduce the per issue digital cost.
No one in their right mind would pay the current digital copy cost. The huge file size of these custom issues is also way over the top. I’m currently subscribing to Scientific American Digital Online. I receive a monthly email alerting me to the new issue, and download the PDF to read in iBooks. This works fine for now, and the cost is comparable to the print subscription. SciAm Digital does a good job formatting the issues, with active links embedded in the document. I’m currently seriously considering dropping the print version when my print subscription expires.
I have subscriptions to half a dozen paper magazines. If each of them were to send me a notice inviting me to switch my subscription to “paperless” issues, I would do so at once. Instead, they offer electronic issues at an additional cost, and that cost is substantially higher than the paper subscription. If these legacy periodicals want to stay in business, they’d better think fast.
Easy solution for magazines STOP BEING SO DAMN GREEDY!!!
Only fair price for an online magazine of any type is $0 the same you pay for the content in the paper version. Magazines are paid for by advertising plain and simple. What you pay for a subscription doesn’t cover the cost of printing and shipping. Advertisers pay not the reader thats the way its always been and the only way it will work in the future.
Magazines? Does anyone read them anymore? Whether paper or iPad based, magazines are dying. Who wants to pay for content that is already free? Who wants to pay for whatbfeels like a glorified website?
I’ve been very impressed with the quality of some of the magazines on iPad, many are a thing of beauty and provide an excellent user experience.
But i don’t work that way anymore. When i want information, I seek it on the net. I don’t wait for a monthly magazine to hopefully provide something I wanted to know.
I tried many magazine and newspaper apps, but found myself drawn back to the web for the knowledge and information they provided.
The future of all print media is web delivery, not iPad app delivery.
Novelty
Anybody read NatGeo on Zinio? It’s brilliant, and actually formatter to read horizontally very well. And I subscribe to it, along with a few other publications. I’m wondering what the problem is here. If Zinio can do it why can’t anyone else?
…’formatted’…
sorry. Carry on.
iPad = simple, elegant, intuitive.
Magazine apps = complicated, overworked, navigation-hell.
You can take the designer out of Flash, but you cannot take the Flash out of the designer.
How about pricing the subscription to match the value of the content — gasp! — what a radical thought!
I’d part with a penny per issue for People, USAToday, etc. The Economist is worth the current cost and their app is better than Zinio which is mostly a PDF reader.
If priced right ($1 or $2 per), done exceptionally well and keeps improving all the time (Paris Match), they keep coming back for more (I own all the issues since the beginning).
The only issue I have with Paris Match is the space taken by each issue and no way to back it up on your local computer.
Gilles
It’s all about the price. I have no doubts that this format will be the future standard; but consumers right now are saying, no way until the price is more realistic.
I’ve been expecting the initial burst of iPad mags to soon crash and burn. I’ve tried a number of them out of idle curiosity, but haven’t been too impressed, and Vanity Fair‘s format in particular was unbelievably godawful and clueless. The cleverest one that I’ve seen so far is Martha Stewart Living but I’m not actually very interested in that content, and I don’t expect that the type of people who are will be likely to want to read it on an iPad.
I use zinio. Good selection. Pricing reasonable. Still could use more $1-$2 per issue pricing. Cancelled all of my paper subscriptions. Overall the best model I have seen.Works well.
Australian Macworld:
1. News stand price = $7.95
2. Subscription price = $7.32
3. Digital subscription – $6.32
Powered by Zinio but look at the price between the digital and non-digital version.
Before the new digital (download) paradigm is complete there’ll be a lot of blood on the streets before the publishing industry comes through this.
I publish a magazine in London for bodybuilders – the Beef – and we move a lot of copies through news-stands in UK. I love my magazine but also my new iPad! Sadly, my digital version is via Pressmart – and it looks great on the Mac – but not on the iPad of course, being based on Flash.
What’s a girl to do?