Interesting points relating to the IPad by Steve Smith of MIN Online in his column, Eye on Digital Media:

IPad Reality Check

Whether the tablet platform is in fact the game changer many publishers
want it to be, it is easy to let the glare of the iPad blind us
to some realities of the platform that are apparent to those of us who
have used the device extensively since day one.

1. The iPad will change your Web strategy. At a recent min Webinar
on magazines developing for e-books and tablets, I was surprised to see
that excitement for the iPad exposed the ongoing frustrations publishers
have with the Web. Low user engagement, brand dilution, poor monetization, and poor
design sense all seemed to characterize the experience of many magazines on the Web.
Condé Nast vp/editorial operations Rick Levine showed a chart comparing the monthly
time spent with Gentlemen's Quarterly in print, online, and in the iPhone app. For the
first three issues that GQ appeared on the iPhone, its users spent about 70 minutes per
issue, on par with the print GQ and about five times longer than time spent per unique
user at gq.com. If these new mobile screens take off, publishers will be rethinking and
perhaps scaling back the Web strategies they have been developing for years.

2. Not so fast. Apps now compete with the Web. One of the unanticipated consequences
of the tablet platform's larger screen is that full Web browsing is now much more viable
than it was on smart phones. The tablet format diminishes that rationale for an app and
so a publisher's branded magazine app will compete with its own Web site.
Entertainment Weekly has tried to recognize the divide by integrating a Web site
viewer with its good Must List app. USA Today engages the problem by re-engineering
its Web content so thoroughly into a better touch-driven experience in the app that
you don't bother hitting the brand on the Web.

3. The ads on the iPad suck. I am not sure why these haven't been raised yet. Most
of the early ad units in magazine apps rely almost entirely on the impact of the original
print ad or pull in a tv spot. There are very few consumer brand apps except for
a forgettable trifle from The Gap and a more ambitious athlete trainer from Nike. The
real opportunity for publishers with in-app advertising is to develop mini-apps for
clients that run within the media’s app and truly leverage the touch and multimedia
capabilities of the format.

4. Cost and standardization will be the choke points to adoption of tablet magazines.
Publishers appear to be digging in their heels over price and seem ready to
defy the loud consumer sentiment against high single-issue pricing. If "Tablet-ized"
magazines are going to keep "enhanced" pricing for "enhanced" iPad magazines, they
need to make a much better case for where they are adding the value.

Being on the iPad with some cool navigation and added videos or little spinning
twirly things does not earn a publisher multiples more than what a reader pays for a
subscription. Publishers need to start thinking about including tangible assets like
special subscriber-only utility apps or in-app games and puzzles. And speaking of
spinning twirly things...stop reinventing the wheel. It is irritating and ultimately
counterproductive to have readers learn a new interface for every digital magazine.
The bottom-line lesson that overarches all of the above is that publishers should not
mistake the Tablet app environment as a full break with the past. Users are bringing
certain expectations for pricing and usability that are informed by a decade of Web
experience. Magazine apps have to share a platform with the Web, and what your brand
does on the tablet platform will have to work in concert with print and Web strategies.
If you think that the iPad promises a simple "reset" of the digital relationship
between publishers and readers, then think harder.

Shoot This Magazine! F&S Builds an Anti-iPad Print App

They call themselves “The Gun Nuts,” but two of the most popular bloggers at Field & Stream magazine’s Web site are not crazy when they tell readers to go out and shoot the July issue. In a novel attempt to publicize an upcoming TV series as well as the uniqueness of the print media, the July “Gun Nuts” issues of F&S comes with a printed target and an invitation for readers to send in snapshots of themselves shooting the page. The winning entry will win a gun, naturally. “Magazines are supposed to be dying out, killed by the Internet as delivered on home computers, laptops, phones and iPads,” bloggers Phil Bourjaily and David E Patzal write at the “Gun Nuts” blog. “Maybe someday, but for now we are proud to say we have created an app for a magazine that can’t be replicated on a screen.”

The contest is also promoting an upcoming TV show on the Outdoor Channel starring the two F&S gun editors. The duo will give gun reviews and practical hunting advice. The show premieres on June 30.

Despite the lukewarm reviews (see below), Wired's IPad app appears to be doing well:

Wired magazine sold 24,000 copies of its $4.99 app in the first 24 hours of its release, according to a tweet by John Abel, the mag’s NY bureau chief. With the 70 percent revenue split, that means that Conde Nast took away $83,832. It helps that Wired’s tech audience tends to be early adopters, so it remains to be seen if other Conde Nast titles will enjoy that same immediate sales jump.

Not surprising, the Wired app has already shot up to number one among the paid apps, way ahead of Vanity Fair, whose $4.99 app was released two weeks ago and is at number 90. The Wired app number is impressive, especially since Conde Nast has already counted about 63,000 paid app downloads across both the iPhone and iPad since November, all of which go toward its total circ, under the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The publisher is planning a few additions to drive paid downloads further.  For example, unlike Conde Nast’s GQ app, there’s no automatic subscription notice for the Wired app yet, but execs told paidContent earlier this week that this feature is coming soon.

From paidcontent.org. Full story here

 

By John Herrman

I'm Still Waiting for a Great iPad Magazine

With the new Wired app, Conde Nast has built, unequivocally, the best magazine for the iPad. And yet I find myself asking, is this it? And will it cost this much?

I love Wired. I love magazines. But with the launch of the magazine app, Wired's much-previewed, profoundly hyped and unexpectedly controversial claim on the future of the magazine, the uneasiness, and the pit in my stomach that I felt during the first wave of iPad magazines—dominated by PopSci's ambitious re-imagining of the title, but comprised mostly of blatant halfassery—has only grown deeper.

Consider the facts:

• Wired's app is $5. I could buy a subscription to the magazine, for a year, for around $10. A year of Wired purchased from the App Store would cost $60. Conde is apparently working on a unified pricing scheme across print and digital for the New Yorker, so maybe it'll filter over to Wired? Who knows. I know it must have cost a ton to develop this thing, but readers don't care about that: They care about the words. These words cost too much. (Also, it's not like this magazine doesn't have ads. It's got a fucking ton of ads.)

• It's over 500MB. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are lovely, and the videos look great. But in the time it took me to download and install this app on my iPad, I was able to walk to a bodega, take out cash at an ATM, get a cup of coffee, come home, and send a few emails. Hell, I could have picked up a copy of Wired while I was out; I spotted a few copies in a stand next to the counter. (Last month's issue, but still.)

• It's still quite obviously a magazine. It may seem like a fine distinction, but with this app Wired hasn't reinvented the magazine, they've just reinvented Wired. Wired's graphic design is legendary, and I'd hate to see it sacrificed for the iPad app. But some of these magazine conventions don't really work—in this app, I never feel like I've truly tucked into an article, as I do with the print edition, or even an Instapaper bookmark. PopSci had this problem, too, and it's worrying that none of the mag world's stars have figured out what to do with it. (Interestingly, the best handling of long-form writing I've seen in an iPad app came from Vanity Fair, which is published by the same company as Wired.)

• The little things! For example, you can't copy and paste, or share an article. (Some of this is coming in the future, apparently.)

And then, well, there's the experience, the look, the feel—there's the app itself. We saw the demos before launch, in Wired Reader, and we gushed. Rightfully! Even watching them now, I'm impressed. But in my hand, it's... emotionally underwhelming? Visually overwhelming? I don't know. It doesn't really click—the layout and design are to my eye impeccable, and the interactive infographics are objectively impressive, but I find myself wishing for a web page, some flat text, or something.

But man, those early demos! Magazines were going to be interactive, y'know? There was much talk of the future, of revolution. And following the buzz, there was execution. This is that app, minus about, dunno, 15 experiential percent?

The video, the diagrams, the interactivity—it's all here, but in my hands, it doesn't capture the magic it had before, on that video, and more importantly, in our eager imaginations. Wired didn't break their promise; we just bought too far into it.

Wired's app is a broad step toward the ideal of an interactive app. Sure, it's a pain to swipe through all those ads—I don't know why digital mags should adhere to the same ad conventions as paper ones—and there's still a lot of tuning to be done, but I guess I see what they're going for, vaguely. It's attractive and flashy, impressive, but expensive. It's aspirational.

The alternative ideal for digital magazines is a stripped-back approach—either scanned PDFs, or near-bare OCR scans of the current issues, more or less like web content. These cost very little to make, so—and this is why I call it an ideal—publishers could give readers their entire archives, on tap, for almost nothing. But that's only attractive for a certain category of readerly, word-heavy magazines, and again, it's unclear how you'd sell that, either: Is it a bonus to the regular mag? A separate subscription?

These aren't new questions—they're the same ones that more cynical observers have been asking since the first eruptions of iPad hype around the press. It's just that with Wired, the uber mag app, they still haven't been answered. [Wired]

From MIN Online. Full story here

Conde Nast continues its promised roll-out of print titles for the iPad. Vanity Fair was released late last week for both the iPhone and iPad at $4.99 an issue. The mobile iterations follow closely the model used in GQ. The full contents of the magazine can be thumbed in facsimile format when the iPad is in landscape mode. Facing pages appear on the screen and the usual multi-touch controls manage zooming. In portrait mode the current article’s text is rendered in a long scroll beneath the splash image, which can be zoomed to full screen or swiped to show any more images in the set. Text fonts in portrait mode can be enlarged.

Editorially, the mobile issues also add some extra content: video of the Hawaii shoot for the cast of Lost; an extended piece on the last season of the show, an extended profile of Emma Watson and an app-exclusive spotlight on illustrator Ed Sorel. On the advertising side several of the sponsors have video spots attached to the renderings of their print ads.

Vanity Fair for iPad follows a less radical approach to redesigning the magazine reading experience than Bonnier’s efforts with Popular Science’s iPad app. At the same time it accommodates the hardware more adroitly than Rodale’s Men’s Health, which adds more multimedia enhancement without altering the print format. Apparently recognizing recent complaints by iPad users that the single issue pricing of these apps is multiples higher than a subscription rate, Vanity Fair is giving a price break to customers. Once one buys the first iPad edition for $4.99, subsequent months will cost only $3.99.

Interesting blog (Reflections of a Newsosaur) on how newspapers can capitalize on the expected popularity of the IPad. Full story here

Excerpt: 

How media can profit from new iPad

While it may be difficult for Apple’s new iPad to live up to the hype that accompanied its release today, there can be no doubt that this slick new device has raised the bar for interactive content delivery.

Unfortunately, as discussed previously here, most media companies already are late in developing editorial and advertising strategies to meet this new challenge.

 Significantly, publishers and broadcasters should be single-mindedly focused on finding ways to charge (checklist at left) for all the exciting new content, services and advertising opportunities that will be enabled by the ’Pad and the imitators that follow.