App for That: Magazines Forge New Vision of Digital Future

"Consumers May Not Pay for Content Online, but They're Happy to Purchase for Mobile

Everybody knows digital media's arrival hasn't exactly been easy on magazines. Ad rates on the web couldn't match their levels in print, many magazines struggled to build compelling websites, new competition strove to steal readers' attention, and the web itself engendered an attention-atrophied reading style that undermined readers' very ability to settle down with a good, fat print issue.

But as mobile devices added capabilities, app stores took off and the dawn of e-readers and tablet computers finally arrived, magazines have pushed aggressively to participate, experiment and hopefully make money from the new opportunities presented. And with an emerging economy of app "stores," they may have found a way to get consumers to pay once again.

Despite some stragglers, it seems like nearly everyone has an app out by now, at a minimum reinforcing readers' relationships with their brands. But magazines' push into paid digital content, in the form of apps that carry price tags, is looking even more interesting.

Condé Nast Publications, which has taken heat for focusing too much on traditional ad pages, was the first to deliver issues as apps, starting with GQ's December issue. By mid February, it had sold 6,835 copies of the December app and 15,068 copies of the February issue at $2.99 each. That's small potatoes compared with the magazine's print circulation, which averaged 193,440 single-copy sales per issue over the second half of last year. But Condé calls it a start, a play to get in position for the iPad, and probably a net positive in any case, arguing that many of the app purchases will come from people who don't buy GQ in print already.

"We still be studying carefully both through research and analysis and the data we have, but we suspect it's going to be a mix," said Condé Nast Digital President Sarah Chubb. "Maybe a newsstand buyer who bought it on a newsstand sometimes but maybe someone who'd been interested in the GQ brand but for whatever reason never picked it up." ~ AdAge.com

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