Magazines have taken a hit over the years on sales in the marketplace. But we’re talking about physical magazines, the ones where you leaf through actual pages.

Companies have moved toward digital magazines as a way to get consumers back, and even find new ones. According to research by Adobe, which produces the software that most professional print and digital magazines are created with, the outlook is positive.

“The momentum we’re seeing in digital publishing is that publishers are actually able to make money off these magazines,” Lynly Schambers-Lenox, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for digital publishing, told TabTimes. “They are coming to realize that these [editions] have business value.”

Consider the data Tab Times released from Adobe: In May 2011, Adobe published 170,000 digital issues a week. At the end of February 2013, the total reached 1.8 million.

More striking are the results from a survey Adobe released. When it comes to consumer willingness to pay for digital content, 65 percent of potential consumers said they would pay for content in February 2012. One year later, that percentage jumped to 80 percent. In addition, subscriptions have seen a growth over single-issue sales, according to TabTimes.

To read the entire TabTimes article, which contains more data, click here.

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AdobeAll this seems to come as good news to publishers and advertisers. It isn’t that readers don’t want to consume news and information, but rather that they’re looking for different ways to capture it.

When it comes to publishers, perhaps more of them will look to use Adobe’s DPS, especially given that the company is committed to this service now that it has seen such an increase in nearly every important category.

But the big question is going to come down to advertising.

Magazines make some money on single-copy sales and subscriptions, but most of the big money is the result of ad sales. Still, subscriptions are important because they allow publishers to project readership numbers well into the future. And at least in part, the price of ads are calculated by using those numbers.

So, are the ads working?

“TV ads have the best pull, but tablet ads only represent two percent of all ads, so this is early days,” Schambers-Lenox told the TabTimes. “We’ll see the percentages shift around. Interactive ads are great, but there are not a lot of them out there at the moment.”

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