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Learning to fly
Joe Wikert, who works at O’Reilly Media, also authors a blog, Publishing 2020, which is recommended reading.
On Publishing 2020, Wikert recently asked “Where are all the iOS magazine subscription apps?” He wondered out loud if Apple’s 30% “cut” is discouraging publishers from pursuing the subscription route.
I don’t see Apple’s cost as the deciding factor. Our analysis shows that a cross-section of publishers spends (on average) 59% of their circulation revenue to promote and fulfill print subscription copies.
The same group of publishers typically spends a comparable share of newsstand revenue (55%) on single-copy expenses. Looking to take 30% of gross revenue, Apple starts to look like a bargain.
The more likely culprit: publisher inexperience building apps.
Subscriptions are a contract: you give me money, and I deliver an agreed-upon number of issues. Before committing to a subscription model, publishers need to know what’s involved in making that happen, not once, but every issue.
That doesn’t mean that publishers should take forever, but Apple has not been particularly proactive in providing specifications or direction for its app store. This ball started rolling only in April.
Edited August 3 to add: Apparently it’s more complicated underneath the hood.
Posted by bowerbird
brian said:
> Before committing to a subscription model,
> publishers need to know what’s involved in
> making that happen, not once, but every issue.
oh boy, does this take me back a long way! :+)
it’s _easy_ to make an electronic-magazine issue…
if you do it the right way.
i can’t remember the exact year, but i was working
on a mac running system 7, and it was “pre-web”,
so i’d guess it was sometime around 1994 or so…
i talked to the people at macworld, and suggested
that i could make an electronic version of their rag.
they were interested, and said i should send a demo.
i basically stripped all their _text_ out of one issue
—the cover article, their feature articles, all of their
software and hardware reviews, all of their content—
and put it all into my standalone e-book program…
the funny thing was that it was under 1.2megs, total,
which i remember because the thing fit on a diskette.
when i sent them the demo, they totally freaked out;
said what i’d done was a violation of copyright and
how they’d sue if i continued, etc. i was perplexed,
because they had _asked_ me to send them a demo!
it occurred to me that they went nuts because i had
made it totally clear to them (and thus to everyone)
just how little _content_ they were providing in the
mass of advertising they were wrapping around it…
i don’t think they wanted to face the fact that their
product was as thin on the ground as it actually is.
i was reminded of this recently, when wired choose
to convert all of their text into jpgs for their e-mag,
thereby bloating one issue up to 500megs.
-bowerbird
p.s. i continued to use the macworld content in my
demos, but swapped out the vowels randomly, and
thus turned it into an e-magazine called “mocwurld”.
Posted by bowerbird
why
don’t
you
widen
the
width
of
your
comment
section
to
a
reasonable
amount?
-bowerbird
Posted by Brian O'Leary
The comment space is pretty tight. We’ve been working with the current set-up for probably a year and a half; time for a fresh look, or at least a refreshed one.
You got mentioned in today’s post, by the way. Thanks again for your comment on Monday.