Cover story: Digital Newsstands
DIGITAL NEWSSTANDS are gaining ground, roughly in-line with the global market’s growth in new devices and their adoption by different demographics. Already many of the names seem familiar – Zinio, Pocketmags, Magzster, Nook, Next Issue – but there are others springing up with various propositions for consumers and publishers, who are shopping around, ensuring they don’t keep all their apples in one basket. The big Apple itself is like a huge warehouse, getting bigger by the second. When it launched in October 2011, it stocked 200 magazines. Now there are 8,000 and counting, and although it’s getting increasingly hard to get your magazine noticed on the crowded iOS newsstand. But, essentially, it is still early days for publishers and the newsstands. Business models vary from single sales to monthly ‘all you can eat’ deals, whereby publishers get paid on a points system. No one appears to have found the best solution yet and it may be a while before one emerges and the market sees consolidation. In the meantime, publishers and their newsstands give us a store guide.
the laws of attraction
ROLL UP: NEWSSTANDS SET OUT THEIR STALLS (SWEDEN)
LAUNCHED IN SWEDEN in March 2013 (and set for a US roll-out shortly), Readly is a new contender offering an all you can eat deal for its customers. CEO Per Hellberg explains: “We want to have all magazines available on the site – meaning all the ones that people pay for in stores or by subscription. We don’t do free magazines.”
Readly subscribers pay US$9.99 a month per household and up to five people can access the titles on different units. The service stems from the all you can eat business model, originating in the music and film industries via companies like Spotify and Netflix. “Our mission is quite simple,” says Hellberg. “We want to increase reading because we can see that circulation is decreasing in a lot of countries. If households pay a reasonable fee, they will start to read more. When we compare our customer base with publishers, we have 98 per cent new readers on our applications – including people who have never been subscribers.” Hellberg points out that the largest selling
fashion magazine in Sweden only reaches about 2.5 per cent of Swedish households. “So, I have to assume that there are a lot of households interested in buying the magazine and reading it, but not the way it is packaged today. What we do is put this magazine in households on a mobile phone, tablet, PC and, yes, publishers get less per copy, but, on the other hand, they get the brand out to a lot more households. Paper is actually restricting
fipp.com Per Helleberg, CEO, Readly, Sweden, said the company’s ‘all you can eat’ model aims to increase reading
distribution today. Digital enhances it. “Nowadays people want to read when they
want to read. A lot of people won’t pay for a year’s subscription any more. And what you see in the end is very interesting. You see what type of magazines customers view when they first sign up and what they progress to. They get to know a lot of new magazines and get hooked. “As well as having the latest copies, there are all the back issues, too. Maybe we have 130 magazines ,but we have 1,500 issues. If you want to go back to a cooking magazine from last year, you can do that. As a publisher, you can actually gain money from archiving.”
Hellberg admits that many publishers don’t quite know what direction to go in. “There are a lot of question marks. Our company is made up of people who have been in the publishing and digital industries for their entire working lives. They asked themselves how they would react if someone like us offered them a service. If you want to be successful at this you need to go to the publishers and offer them the service with no extra workload.
Because a lot of the extra platforms that have come up so far create extra head-count. So our software takes the file created for the print house, converts it and publishes onto our platform. For most publishers, we do this automatically, and then they decide when they want it to become visible.” Readly has a points system for publishers’
fees, calculating how many points each read page has created. There are different measures – new content has more points than old content, content read a lot has more than content hardly read at all. Publishers get to see exactly what content
is generating the most interest. “This is the key thing,” says Hellberg, “We have spent around 60 per cent of our programming on things you will never see – it’s an analytical system. In real time you can get every page of a magazine up and see who’s reading it, the demographics, where they live, why this article is getting 80 per cent of readers, what time of day they’re reading, what ads they like. It’s like a dream for publishers – compared to the tools they had before.”
issue 81_2014 | Magazine World |11
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