Quote, unquote: Apple Newsstand failing to alert readers to new digital issues

“The challenge is engagement. Readers are subscribing, but then they forget to come back.”

-- Vidia Gopel, National Geographic's director of digital marketing and membership, commenting in a Digiday article about how publishers feel the Apple Newsstand is failing them.

Try before buy: Time Inc. to encourage digital-only subscribers with free previews

Time Inc. is allowing readers to preview several articles in Entertainment Weekly on their iPads before committing to purchase. And Time says that, by the end of this year, all 21 of its titles offered on the Apple Newsstand will allow such previews. The initiative is intended to grow the number of digital-only subscribers, says a posting on All Things Digital.

While Time Inc. has been trailing rival Hearst, which hit one million digital subscriptions earlier this year, Time says it has been adding 10,000 paid digital subscribes a week this  year. 

More than half of those subscribers are new customers, [said George Linardos, head of digital marketing and business development for Time Inc.] And he thinks he can boost that number by giving browsers more to see: “We know we have hundreds of thousands of people downloading the app, opening it, and walking away,” he said. “We want to give them a reason to stay.”

Apple promoting and rewarding magazines which conform to app-sub model

Apple's iTunes store is having a significant impact on sales of compliant U.S. magazine brands and appears to be rewarding titles which opt into the app subscription model that Apple prefers, according to a post on minonline. There is a rotating marquee of such titles as Glamour, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg Business Week, all of which offer app-based sub models from which Apple takes a commission.

We wondered whether this higher visibility on the App storefront is connected in any way with sales success. "Absolutely," says Chris Wilkes, Hearst's VP of digital editions. "Promotion by Apple can drive significant spikes in volume. Clearly Apple is putting muscle behind magazine brands and the in-app subscriptions they rolled out earlier this year. They'll go even further later this year when they roll out the Newsstand they announced at their WWDC earlier this month."

Minonline tallied some of the top grossing apps for U.S.magazine publishers as of June 22 as a "rough approximation" of performance:

11. New York Post ($1.99)
14. The Daily ($.99/week)
30. Marvel Comics (in-app comics purchases ~$1.99/issue)
33. Comixology (in-app comics purchases ~$1.99/issue)
35. The New Yorker ($59.99/year, $4.99/issue)
44. Wired ($19.99/year, $3.99/issue)
65. DC Comics (in-app comics purchases, ~$1.99/issue)
85. People ($3.99/issue)
90. Food Network ($3.99)
91. GQ ($19.99/year, $4.99/issue)
95. Cooking Light Recipes ($3.99)
104. Self ($19.99/year, $3.99/issue)
108. Vanity Fair ($19.99/year, $4.99/issue)
124. Popular Mechanics ($19.99/year, $3.99/issue)
136. Popular Science ($14.99/year, $2.99/issue)

We can live with the new Apple subscription model, says Transcon CEO

Apparently, a 30% subscription commission taken by iTunes, while steep, is something that the CEO of Transcontinental Inc., Francois Olivier says his company can live with, according to what he told the Montreal Gazette. Transcontinental Media publishes the largest number of consumer magazines in Canada. The new sub model will help newspapers and magazines  make money, Olivier says.

Apple this week announced a new subscription model that will allow the sale of daily, weekly or monthly subscriptions whereas the previous iteration made subscribers buy each issue of any publication separately.

“That was one of the things that was missing in the Apple model,” Olivier said. “It was used to selling songs on iTunes piece by piece, but in the newspaper and magazine industry, the bulk of our readers are subscribing to the publications.”

Olivier said he doesn’t mind the 30 per cent cut that Apple will take off the top of any subscriptions, which has been criticized by other industry leaders as too steep. “When we sell magazines through news stands, the stores often take more than that, so it doesn’t feel like a totally unreasonable number.”

According to Advertising Age writer Nat Ives, however, many U.S. magazines are still  staying away from Apple's new iPad subscription system to protest the fact that Apple won't tell them who's subscribing through the App Store unless subscribers specifically say they can.

"Without the demographics, which iTunes won't release, the print world is castrated," said Gary Armstrong, the former Wenner Media executive who is now consulting on branded content development for media brands.That means the iPad won't help the magazine business as much as many publishers fantasized, Mr. Armstrong said. "Is it a complete failure?" he said. "No, but it's obvious it will now never be the panacea they long hoped for, and they'll have to readjust their entire business model."

Waiting and seeing may be the wisest course for publishers, since already there is competitive pressure on price that can only increase over the next few months. Google's announcement this week of a competing tablet sub system with only a 10% fee is the first of what could be many. According to the Wall Street Journal

Google said it will charge publishers 10% of revenue from sales through its One Pass service. It will let publishers set prices and give them more control over customer data.

"The publisher is the merchant of record," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in Berlin on Wednesday. "We don't prevent you from knowing, if you're a publisher, who your customers are, like some other people" do, he said, a tacit reference to Apple.

 James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said in the story that some publishers might sign up for the Google service purely to show Apple they aren't happy and to encourage competition.