MagBlog

The good news for print magazines in Targetcast tcm's latest survey can be summed up in this short extract:

60% of consumers say newspapers need to change the most to stay relevant, compared to 30% for magazines and nearly 20% for radio.

Then there's this mixed news:

A solid 57% say they prefer the experience of reading a printed magazine over reading a magazine on the Internet. An even stronger 71% would not be willing to pay for an online magazine subscription to replace their printed magazine subscription. Also, only 15% of respondents overall agree that they'd rather read magazines online. Additionally, printed magazines score well in terms of ad attentiveness and purchase influence.

Which goes to prove magblog's insistence that haptics is a very important consideration for print magazines.

Find a proper summary, with tables and everything at mediapost.com

Labels: digital magazines, digital revenue, political economy, print magazines, subscriptions

A little snippet from a bigger piece by Steve Outing on the American Editor & Publisher site. He's discussing ways to get people to pay for digital content:

Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away. USA Today, for instance, offers a free downloadable news app for the iPhone, which offers a superior reading interface than USA Today's mobile Web site, and access to content is free using the app. Meanwhile, People Magazine has its own iPhone app called "People Celebrity News Tracker," but charges $1.99 for you to download it. Content is updated regularly with "instant" celebrity news and alerts from People.com, including lots of photos. There's no monthly fee for the content on the People app, which is supported by advertising, but the one-time extra $1.99 purchase price can create another nice revenue stream, especially for a publisher with a large audience.

As you can tell from the first three words, he looks at various scenarios, including using Amazon and Paypal. Worth reading.

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, electronic magazines, iTunes iPhone, subscriptions

If screen size is the key to creating a satisfactory "magazine" experience on a handheld digital device (hdd), something the size of a Kindle should be better than an iPhone – and something more like a sheet of A4 better again. This is what Hearst, the American publisher of magazines and newspapers, seems to be hoping, according to various reports (well summarised on this post from CNet).

Implementing a tied-in device could also give Hearst the opportunity to try an iTunes like subscription service, and such a service could be extended to include other publishers, thus creating the Amazon-style service proposed in previous posts.

Fortune magazine's first report of the Hearst hdd
The Wall Street Journal on Hearst's plans to charge for content

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, electronic magazines, haptics, Hearst, iTunes, magazines, print magazines, subscriptions

Check out W H Smith's version of the e-subscription system mentioned in the previous post on the WHS site.

Not only is the cost of the digital sub more or less the same as a print sub but:
* Subscribers will only have access to duplicate copies for three months
* All issues have DRM

This is not good value. Take the costs of paper, print and repro out of a magazine and you effect big savings. If publishers, distributors and retailers are serious about digital mags they need to address the pricing.

Why do people take out subs?
* Because they want a guaranteed supply
* Because they want a discount per issue
* Because they want to hoard every copy until the attic rafters are bowed

Read what Zinio, suppliers of e-magazine software to 750+ titles, have to say in E-Commerce Times.

Labels: digital magazines, DRM, electronic magazines, subscriptions, W H Smith, Zinio

John Menzies, the newsagent chain, has come up with a wonderful new idea – a computerised station where customers can download digital magazines, according to a report in NMA.

To quote from the story:

"The Magazines on Demand website works in conjunction with free-to-install software and enables users to download
the latest issues of magazines at any time as well as viewing, storing and searching digital magazines bought from the site ... the key feature of the system is the ability to save magazines to a USB stick."

But can't people with their own computers and an internet connection download all these magazines anyway? And if they don't have a computer, how can they read the magazine?

Wonderful though it is to see such an old-established business marching bravely into the future, I can't help but feel that they have somehow got hold of the wrong end of the (usb) stick.

UPDATE: Next post

Labels: digital magazines, DRM, electronic magazines, Menzies, subscriptions, W H Smith, Zinio