Jason Pontin for Technology Review:
So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of single-issue sales. Easy, I thought.
Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.
As I read it, Pontin’s major problems were in underestimating development costs and overestimating the demand for his product.
Pontin spells out in detail the mistakes he and other publishers have made when it comes to releasing content on iOS. He makes a mistake to assume that he can paint his own experience with the same broad brush as everyone else, but certainly some of the lessons he learned translate to others, as well.
The bottom line is that each individual company needs to take a hard look at their business model and prospective revenue stream to decide if selling content through apps is going to be right for them.
Looking forward to reading this. Thanks, Peter.
I haven’t seen the “Technology Review” iOS magazine, but my experience with other iOS magazines have been a total and complete disappointment. These guys don’t get it. I do not want a PDF wrapped in iOS app! Totally useless!
Who in the world would think that’s a good idea? That’s like when the motorcycle was invented, the producers of bikes would give you a bike with an engine on it that you can’t use. But hey it comes with pedals and they still work like always!I want a magazine app that exploits the hardware and software the app runs on. The typical slow, obnoxious, unreadable and poor search capability of magazine web sites are a slightly better than then the apps. But, it’s taken them a long time to get their web sites to that level.
I subscribe to nothing through Newsstand except Tap, which does a really nice job of making a unique iOS publication, and The Daily, which I hold out hope for actually being relevant and interesting some day.
For everything else, I’m very content to use Zinio. I have about six or seven subscriptions I’m currently juggling in Zinio, and they all work great.