On magazines and the iPad
My pal Matt Biscuiti likes to ask my opinion on the future of magazines. I’m not sure if this is because he actually wants to know it, or if he just likes to watch me rage.
I worked in the magazine business for 15 years. I am one of a lucky few people who still do, though it is no longer my main source of income. I love print magazines – the way they are made, the way they present information, the thought and imagination that goes into everything from the images to the text to the layout to the paper stock to how they’re bound. But the Internet has destroyed print, mostly because a bunch of Baby Boomer assholes got greedy and interacted unwisely with a technology they didn’t understand.
Which, come to think of it, is the same reason the Internet was able to destroy the music business.
I don’t think either industry is coming back – at least, not any way like it was. And I could go on at length about both, but I gotta go have dinner with my friend Al, so I’ll leave that for some other post. I do want to share a question that Matt just e-mailed me, along with my answer.
First, though, I ask you to keep in mind that what makes magazines and newspapers money is ads, not sales of the actual printed product. Craigslist has virtually eliminated classified ad revenue, and no matter what that’s not coming back. So the question for periodicals is how to maximize the remaining potential ad dollars – not necessarily how to get people to purchase their magazine or newspaper. If you can tell advertisers that 100,000 people will see their ad, then the advertisers will buy, and your periodical will stay afloat whether most of those readers pay the cover price or not. That’s long been the idea behind cheap and free subscriptions.
The Web has killed print because these dipshits who put all of their content online for free didn’t realize that the ad paradigm is different on a computer screen. People can block ads and scroll past them; we’re trained to ignore banner ads. Ads generate a much smaller response on the Web than on the printed page, and thus are worth a lot less – so much less that you can’t keep your business open with revenue from online ads. That’s money publishers were counting on when they made their product free on the Internet (information is the product; not the printed piece, which is just the delivery system) and now they can never go back to charging for online content. Oops.
Putting content behind a pay wall is not really about bringing in revenue from readers. It’s about making it less convenient to read on screen, thereby encouraging people to they go back to the print edition, where ads are actually worth something. Print ads are hard to ignore; they’re tangible and they last for as long as that copy of the periodical exists. They have value that the ephemeral Web ads don’t.
Okay, that was two more paragraphs than I intended to write on this subject. Before I bore you with any more of that shit, here’s Matt’s question:
MB: So has the designer in you been inspired by the iPad yet, or do you still think the business model won’t make up for all the $ given away by the free interwebs?
And my response. I welcome comments on this as it’s a debate I’m passionate about. (Wouldn’t be sharing it here otherwise.)
Newspapers and magazines need one of two things to happen:
- Apple adds a section to its iBookstore for periodicals, with a proprietary reader that you can use in iTunes on any computer.
or
- Everyone in the world gets an iPad.
Anything else won’t be enough.
People go to the iTunes store for music, the App store for apps, and the iBookstore for something to read. But now every magazine is building its own app in the App store – the wrong store! – just to rush something out so it can say it has IT’S OWN APP, we’re “hip”, we’re “with-it”, wow!!!!
Huge mistake – only people who already want that particular magazine will even care that the app exists. No exposure to potential new readers.
Magazines and newspapers are reading material – the race should be on to work out a standard, but flexible, iPad magazine format which would be available in the iBookstore, along with everything else people buy to read. There would be cross-pollination on a virtual magazine rack, and it would be one less thing for people who want reading material to think about. And back issues would be easy to format and sell, complete with ads (which would help periodicals increase ad rates – “your ad will be in people’s faces for as long as they’re buying our back issues”).
This iPeriodical format should also be readable with a viewer in iTunes for everyone who doesn’t want an iPad. The iPad would still be the best way to experience the electronic magazine, but not the only way. And for fuck’s sake, every single periodical still has to take all its content down from the free web!
Honestly, all of these magazine apps seem to be overpriced and stupid. A 500MB download for one issue of Wired, at higher than subscription prices?! What the hell is the point of that? Doesn’t matter how good it looks if no one will bother with it.
Jed.