The New York Times has a piece summing up the unhappiness magazine publishers feel with Apple’s current limitations on e-magazine apps. Though it does not mention the “thou shalt not” that Apple issued to European publishers who wanted to give free iPad subscriptions to print subscribers, it mentions a number of the other points that have been raised over the last few months: high price, no reasonable subscription capability, and Apple’s refusal to share purchaser demographic data with the publishers.
The article also mentions the planned News Corp daily iPad newspaper The Daily, whose debut has been held up until Apple has the software capability to support that type of subscription. The price for this paper is expected to be about $1 per week, which does not seem unduly high for iPad content (though it remains to be seen just how much content there actually will be per issue).
But an article in Ad Age suggests that even that low price might be too high. The article cites a study by on-line research company Knowledge Networks in which 86% of iPad owners have said they would be willing to watch or read ads to have access to free iPad video or magazine content, but only 13% would be willing to pay fees to view content that they can currently access for free. (Though 78% of iPad owners say that advertising “takes away from their enjoyment of their iPad,” which seems at odds with the high number willing to view them.)
With regard to magazines, which in many ways have flocked to the iPad more heartily than other media, the survey found that about 14% of users would be willing to pay to get a special iPad edition of a magazine they already receive in print. Condé Nast has taken this idea a step further, experimenting with iPad-only content, such as its Condé Nast Traveler "Best of Italy" app, which is in fact a collection of articles about travel in Italy from its extensive archives. About 12% said they would be willing to pay a small additional fee for a magazine they already get, while only 1% said they would pay the same as the cover price of a magazine they already have for the iPad version.
Of course, advertising is not necessarily lucrative enough to support an e-magazine without subscriptions, which is the main reason so many paywalls have been going up. What this survey means for the future of those who want to publish iPad-compatible magazines remains to be seen.
I still think that magazine publishers could do well by not limiting their thinking to apps. RSS feeds won’t allow the full range of fancy formatting that appgazines might, but they won’t be subject to the bottleneck of Apple’s app store restrictions either.
