It’s very sad. Glenn is a great guy and friend, but I understand the issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand—it’s not fun. Apple should just admit that they don’t give a shit about digital magazines and be done with it.
The Magazine shuts down
Blaming Apple because people don’t care about a magazine? I suppose that’s easier than being introspective and possibly admitting personal faults.
When fotopedia couldn’t survive then what chance Magazine had.
fotopedia was on of the most used apps.
There is no economics of apps either unless you throw ads at your user.
This what happens when little fish think there is enough space on the pond but giant keeps growing.
Besides Newstand was asked by Publishers to save their industry.
Unless there is some champion in Apple that drives it. Most of these kinds venture at Apple die off very quickly after initial euphoria.
Newsstand sucks – Agreed.
The Magazine is shutting down solely because of NewsStand / Apple – Disagree.
I had a paid subscription for The Magazine for a few months. Then I just stopped reading it. Canceled subscription.
The Magazine is shutting down most probably because of capitalism – not enough readers interested in it. Sucky NewsStand probably exacerbated it.
Actually this whole thing is entirely Apples fault. If it wasn’t for all these damn computers on our desks and in our pockets connecting to that lousy internet, then magazines would still be alive and well. Rat bastards.
Thanks, Jim, and I’ll elaborate on this. It’s not that the Newsstand changes caused me to fail. What they did is not help me thrive. iOS 6 was good for Newsstand publications; iOS 7 was not, partly by giving developers most Newsstand tools w/o requiring its use.
If those tools were available in iOS 6, Newsstand would never have been populated. Once in Newsstand, you could move your app out (in iOS 7) with some rework, but then lose 100% of your subscriptions (IAP) and have to rebuild.
Loyal subscribers told me they forgot to read b/c the icons were gone. They unsubscribed. I understand about people who weren’t interested and my own inability to market it to a broad-enough audience. But Newsstand’s changes dropped the bottom out of some of the reasons the Magazine was launched in the first place.
What Jim is referring to is how Apple has mismanaged the Newsstand app experience since I … retired. They could fix it by making it possible for newsstand subscriptions to have their own app icon on screen, and allowing the app to feature the latest “cover” app icon, so you know when it’s updated with a new edition.
I have a subscription to The Magazine. Have had it for years.
Rarely read it though. Random topics, beautifully written.
I’ll tell you from my experience, I originally subscribed because I’m a fan of what Marco did. When you took over, I continued to subscribe just because I wanted to support the endeavor because I felt it was a breath of fresh air regardless of who owned it, even though I had not been reading it as much anymore. It got to the point where I just stopped reading, but kept my subscription going for months and months longer. Eventually I just couldn’t justify seeing iTunes keep charging me.
My problem is, my time for leisurely reading is limited to the things I really want to read, and I just have to choose the things I want to read the most. Unfortunately I simply lost interest. I love to read John Gruber and all the others in the Apple community, and I don’t forget to visit their sites just because I don’t see an icon on my homescreen. I make a conscious decision to open Safari and visit their sites. Newsstand gives push notifications when new issues are downloaded, so I think a loyal reader forgetting to read because the folder icon changed is a little strange. I understand publishers being annoyed with some of the changes, but the fact is that they benefitted the broader iOS users (most of whom had no interest in Newsstand), which is more often than not going to be a bigger priority for Apple.
And a push notification when a new issue gets downloaded doesn’t serve the same purpose? Highly doubtful that Apple will populate the homescreen with magazine icons, would just look terrible and out of place. You have the standard iOS icons designed with the icon grid, and then magazines right next to them with a completely different shape and visual layout?
They should simply find a way for Newsstand apps to be able to convert to a standard iOS app with the standard iOS icon shape, without losing all their subscribers. Once an app enters Newsstand, they lose the subscribers if they want to get out of Newsstand and just be a standard app (as Glenn mentioned below).
Newsstand is a product that Apple treats as an afterthought. Many pubs have moved for the app model with in app purchases replacing editions. This just might be a category that won’t allow a price point for Apple to take its cut and publishers to make their nut.
Obviously they wouldn’t use anything but the typical roundrects. But they could allow magazines the ability to change their app icon without having to force an app update if they wanted, and most importantly, be utilized outside of Newsstand, right on the home screen. With or without a changing app icon, of course the notifications help. It’s just a nice touch that Apple could provide.
It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs or whatever Apple has done. There are just far too many things to read online and writing has become dime-a-dozen commodity available free of charge. There are a few differentiated brands that can get paid subscribers, but The Magazine isn’t one of them.
Not only we have millions of clickbait articles, between there are also countless curated experience too, from Flipboards, Instagram recommendations, email newsletter, and countless other list services.
The users already have more things to read than they have time. It’s difficult to sustain a business where the users are charged to read the articles where the publication isn’t sufficiently exceptional.
“The Magazine” had a generic brand, but was aimed at developers and people in tech.
People in tech are a small % of people who have iPhones (strike 1), yet if they were looking for a tech magazine “The Magazine” wouldn’t attract their attention at all by the way it’s branded (strike 2).
It had articles where authors then posted the same articles publicly (strike 3).
To blame Apple is to blindly ignore all the other mistakes The Magazine did to drive itself into an unprofitable niche.
I totally understand this. I even stopped subscribing to the New Yorker after 20+ years recently because I stopped reading it (in print and digital).
There’s something I call subscriber fatigue, and I don’t know if there’s a periodical industry term for it. Most people lose interest in most non-news publications after a while. There’s a churn of subscribers leaving and new ones coming on board.
Our problem was that we had an acceleration after iOS 7 of existing subscribers leaving, and then a higher churn of new subscribers leaving after that. We kept getting new people on board, but not fast enough. The Newsstand changes hurt our ability to deal with churn, but didn’t destroy it. It was just one of multiple factors that, added together, kept us with net loss.
I would have loved to be able to switch to a standalone app, and then see what changed. I suspect it would have been a significant improvement, but there was no way to A/B test it.
iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, plus, since May 2013, mobile responsive Web site.
We rebranded very early with a broader interest.
Alternative take: Admit that readers don’t actually want digital magazines and be done with that.
Magazines are not valuable anymore, I think.
And a digital pseudo-magazine even less so.
(Seriously. I’m a voracious reader and consumer of ideas and news.
I do not have any desire for any digital magazine I can conceive of, let alone any I know exist.
Has there been even one successfull digital magazine?
As far as I know there has not. At some point maybe we should stop blaming that on implementations [not that some of them are not bad and blameworthy] and suspect the very concept of being flawed in the age of the Internet.)
You know Glenn, I too was a subscriber for many months.
First was to support Marco, then I continued for a bit after he sold. However, what got me to finally cancel was not a question of quality, but a question of value for Yet Another Service I Pay for.
I did the math a few weeks ago and I pay close to $120 a month on random subscriptions ($2 here, $5 there – things like feedbin, evernote, hulu, netflix, natgeo, spotify, crashplan, etc etc etc). It starts adding up.
No doubt The Magazine articles were well written and it was a well organized publication, but in today’s internet age, where we get bombarded left, right and center for paying for things, I think people are getting turned off. I completely understand people need to make money (which is why I probably pay for more things than I use), but at a certain point, you have to weigh the value of what that particular monthly payment brings to you.
The $5 for evernote, $10 for Crashplan family bring a lot of value and peace of mind. Others have mentioned it, but there are many places on the internet where you can read well written articles without paying a subscription fee. For me, I usually go out and seek what I want to read which suits my lifestyle more than a subscription telling me what I should be reading (and I believe I’m definitely not in the minority).
We unfortunately live in a world where there are many more individuals who don’t value a good publication than those that do, and for those that still do value it (and are willing to pay for it), there are so many publications on the market vying for those dollars that it’s incredibly difficult to run a successful endeavour.
Good luck in the future Glenn and thanks for your contribution.
It’s the music industry all over again.
People don’t want albums (magazines/publications), they want pick and choose individual songs and pay much less for it (articles).
I think your observation is spot on. Digital magazines are just another example of skeuomorphic design from the past.
Time to move on.
Magazines are being replaced by websites and apps like pocket and storehouse. Content updates faster. The on-screen experience between a website, app or ‘magazine’ is the same. Maybe magazines just don’t need the label ‘magazine’ anymore. I read much more magazine-like content. Just not in a magazine.
How would app icons help? If one is a mag or newspaper reader, one will have the a Newsstand icon somewhere useful. Go inside it and I see new covers for the periodicals inside I’ve installed. Don’t you?
Uh there are plenty of apps that don’t throw ads. Paid apps are normal to me.
A consistent complaint from readers when they unsubscribed (and told me) was that the Newsstand approach prevented them from remembering to read us, and they wound up with weeks or months of back issues and gave up.
I have at least 100 emails from people since iOS 7 shipped about this. So I imagine it was true for 1,000s?
I also understand that people lose interest. The combination of subscriber fatigue and Newsstand, as well as the frankly wonderful growth of freely available long-form content not that different from our approach (and ad supported and often paying writers decently) made us less special. All true!
This is totally a thing I agree with! It’s a component of our problem. Some small percentage of readership stays with you forever. With most periodicals, over the course of a year you might lose double-digit percentages of readers, some who were signed up for a month or a few, others for years. Managing that is the problem, and marketing is how you get more people in — including word of mouth.
Because of some structural issues, such as Newsstand, coupled with attention and the rest, we weren’t able to replenish subscribers as fast as we lost them.
Born-digital/digital only? Not many! There are billions of hours a month spent reading print publications’ digital editions as apps, though.
Thanks for the reply Glenn. Thats exactly what I meant by exacerbation in the earlier comment.
Around the time I had the subscription for The Magazine, I had such a craze for reading new stuff, for me personally it didn’t matter if the app was hidden under the News Stand folder.
I do have the subscriber fatigue for almost every single subscription I have had (including Netflix, Spotify, Umano and print magazines).
A lot many apps / big names have also burnt their fingers by going all in on NewsStand, and I don’t know why Apple is keeping it alive, since background updates work quite well right now.
Was just trying to make a point that Apple is not the only party responsible for the shut down of The Magazine.
Good luck on your future endeavors!
Did you really just blame Apple for “not giving a shit” about digital magazines? Are you really complaining about the “issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand?”
Update your fucking magazine. Try that first.
Subscriber already lost, now I’m no longer reading your website either. Good luck asshat.
Disagreement is fine. Name calling is unacceptable.
The Loop has basically stolen money from me and all of its’ loyal subscribers. I’m not sure about The Magazine, but I can tell you that is what’s wrong with The Loop magazine. The fact that the same people are complaining about the perils of the Newsstand business is rich when you haven’t actually given it a fair shot. Bad business isn’t limited to a certain platform, app, or store.
So, all bets are off on the name calling, hypocrites!