“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?
Once the realistic subscriptions come into play there will a big surge in sales
Publishers fail to understand the iPad, especially iPad users. The new magazine “Project,” for example, is a dog on the iPad. I quickly removed it. Other magazines and newspapers are asking way too much. I delete those apps that require a weekly or monthly subscription at high rates; I delete those apps that require individual purchases at news stand prices. It’s better to sell a million at $0.99 than 8,700 at $4.95. It’s about competition, and iPad users want fantastic products at low prices because it can be done; and it is done by those apps, such as “Flipboard,” that provide excellent content and screen navigation at low prices.
@Alex McKenna – make beef stroganoff?
I have print subscriptions to New Yorker and National Geographic. The iPad versions of both magazines come free. I never had to sign up for them. The publishers just seemed to know that I have an iPad.
There is one magazine model that works
free magazine – paid adverts
these ipads magazines are pretty much free for the publishers
a bit of text a few photos, they must have been dreaming of all the dollars they could make with out even making a physical product
wake up publishers
Does this data include Zinio subscriptions? I have moved all five of my current magazine subscriptions to Zinio. I love the convenience. And the pricing for all five were competitive with the hardcopy subscriptions they replaced.
Do you want 1000 purchases at $5 per week or 50,000 purchases at $1 per week.
Quick, give us an answer.
I thought the iPad would have been the perfect platform for nice full color magazines and a real good non-paper solution for newspapers, but the idiots who create these digital products never realized that people won’t pay twice as more for a much cheaper to produce digital version than the good old fashion paper version.
Hmmm… Five bucks for one digital magazine or a full year of paper mags for 9 or 10 bucks.
Should I get a full year of the wall st journal paper edition delivered to my house by 5:00 am for $100 bucks or pay $5 a week for the digital version?
It’s a real no-brained that the current model failed, it never stood a chance of succeeding.
I hope someone gets half a brain and fixes this problem. That’s one of the main reasons I bought my iPad, to read on the go.
@Big Als MBP
i dont have the time for all those. How many for 10 cents?
Yep, not very surprised about this one.
Publishers save a lot more than paper and ink with digital distribution. Newsstand, postage, or home delivery accounts for the biggest chunk of the price of a publication.
Apparently publishers aren’t looking at that but rather at reinforcing the notion their content is worth the same as with physical distribution. However that is not the what the iPad proposition should be, and the readers know it. Charge significantly less than the dead tree version and readers will flock; profits will rise.
I’ve got Zinio for Sporting News Today,Macworld,3 photo mags,Mother Jones,Rolling Stone,Utne Reader,National
Geographic,Sound & Vision,Home Theater,Science,iPhone
Life.
Got Press Reader for Washington Post and The Guardian.
Economist app. for The Economist.
All reasonably priced. No problems. I’m happy.
For other apps and mags, the pricing structure has to be
worked out. No way $4 a pop for Wired ($48/yr) or Popular
Science ($36/yr) when I get 365 issues of Sporting News
Today for $36,26 issues of Rolling Stones for $20,12 issues
of Macworld for $20 via Zinio. Incidentally, Popular Science
is $20 a year on Zinio.
FAR too expensive, fussy apps, flashy and shallow production.
How about 50 cents an issue?
How about a more simple product – I really dont need the movies, the shimmering twitchy Jeff Bridges thing, etc. etc.
Fast and simple, cut the crap, concentrate on the content not the wrapper.
Yeah, I know. I am dreaming.
These style-obsessed fools cant put a straightforward magazine together.
It’s the price stupid! A magazine I subscribe to and which will remain nameless costs me $14 in paper, but $36 a year digitally. I thought digital books were bad in costing more than their paperback counterparts, but digital magazines take the cake.
My wife loves her Kindle. However, I have no interest in reading books or magazines online. it would have to be ridiculously cheap and easy. Then again, I find that when I download my Zinio free subscriptions, I may browse through them and never read.
Blaming the contents of magazines is completely off the wall! I love books and subscribe to way too many (print) magazines I can’t do without.
Plus, you can’t duplicate the experience of seeing and smelling thousands of fresh books at the book store on an iPad (or any computer).
zinio
I gave up on magazines about 5years ago. I now have 5 subscriptions, all about 12 bucks a year, and I would agree the price point should be 50 cents an issue, but some of the perks like being able to click on an ad to go to the web site help.
Price sucks for what you get. Something great will come out eventually once someone figures it out.
If you deduct the cost of printing, distributing and warehousing all those printed magazines, digital mags should be much cheaper than their over-priced paper cousins. But magazine publishers, greedy beggars that they are, want to charge the same price! As Mammy said in Gone with the Wind: “Askin’ ain’t gettin’.”
Zinio- Works for me. Some others have tried too much of the whiz-bang in my opinion. I also like to get the same ads as print mags, which Zinio gives me. Ads are a huge source of information in specialty mags and are part of my reason for buying them.
Apps like Pulse give me a mag experience, updated daily. Traditional news and broad based monthlies will struggle competing with that. On the other hand, small specialty mags could flourish if there were a well done “News Stand/Subscription” app.
Use Zinio to get a couple of mags as a test. Pros-Can be read on my iMac or iPad, content. Looks great, like the hot links for more info/ads
Cons- pricing and selection
Mags are too expensive and no way of backing it up or saving it unless it is on the magazines’ site, my info.
Also why pick on the mags?
I find kindle e books not cheap!!!
The other cool thing about The Economist is that the issues contain only the content (text articles, graphics, illustration, etc.) all formatted as per the magazine … but no advertising.
Hence the files are small, and it’s great to flip through on the iPad.
It’s all about price. A paper subscription costs less than a digital subscription. What’s wrong with that picture?
@MDN
what happened to the triumphant proclamations that iPad was going to revolutionize and resurrect the printed media industries? You’ve changed your tune…
I can pay to download and read an iPad mag app or just read the web. I’d rather just read the web for free and I expect others would rather do the same too. Magazines are dead and why would you want to replicate them on the iPad?