Interchange Project

Hearst has about 400,000 digital subscribers as users embrace tablets

Reuters is reporting that Hearst Magazines expects to each 1,000,000 digital subscribers by the end of next year:

The launch of Newsstand in iOS 5 seems to have helped spur more digital subscriptions on the iPad. Newsstand is a central place on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to subscribe to and manage magazine and newspaper subscriptions. New editions show up each day, week and month automatically and a user’s subscriptions show up on a bookshelf in a very user-friendly format.

Newsstand is not a feature designed for expert users. Expert users already knew how to easy manage their news subscriptions. The beauty of newsstand, however, is how it is allowing more users to enjoy news content on their iPads.

Part one was making a device that could work well for magazines and now part two is making it really easy for users to subscribe to and manage magazine subscriptions. There are high hopes that Amazon will be able to done the same with the Kindle Fire in the future. Other Android tablets are not seeing many digital subscribers to magazines and don’t have a good way to subscribe to and manage magazine subscriptions.

The current 7-inch Kindle Fire is not a good magazine reading experience, but Amazon is expected to release an iPad-sized tablet next year.

The quality of news apps on the iPad is all over the map. Some are just digital versions of print, while others are embedding in a lot of interactivity and multimedia. Some news apps are extremely hard to use and are a substantially worse experience than their own websites on the iPad.

It will be very interesting to see the quality of news apps in a few years.

Condé Nast subscriptions up 268% since Newsstand launch on iPhone & iPad

Darrell Etherington reports that Condé Nast publications are seeing huge gains in subscriptions since Apple launched Newsstand on iOS, echoing similar findings for other companies:

Not only did subscriptions increase, but single issue sales also skyrocketed with a 142 percent increase when compared with the eight weeks prior to Newsstand’s launch. Both represent increases as measured across all nine of Condé Nast’s digital titles available on the iOS platform.

What makes this so fascinating is that most geeks aren’t that high on Newsstand. In fact, after Newsstand was launched, there were countless blog posts about how to hide the Newsstand icon. But Newsstand is so powerful precisely because it’s not a geek tool.

Newsstand makes it much easier for non-techies to subscribe to and manage their magazine and newspaper subscriptions. A geek already knew how to do this, including how to group news apps together. Many people don’t grasp how to group apps together.

But Newsstand is bigger than usability. It puts news content front and center on every iOS device. Geeks knew that they could buy and consume news content on iPads and iPhones. Many regular users did not. Now everyone knows, and everyone can see how easy it is to subscribe to and consume news content on iOS.

Let’s see if this trend continues.

Magazine publishers already seeing uptake in sales from Apple’s Newsstand

Paidcontent reports that some magazine publishers are seeing substainally higher sales with Apple’s new newsstand service that puts magazines and newspapers in one place, instead of as disparate apps:

“Sales across the board have shot up, more than doubled the normal daily sales rate,” according to Adam Hodgkin, co-founder of Exact Editions, which digitises print titles including The Spectator and Press Gazette for purchase over the web and as iOS apps. “Some magazines have experienced a 150 percent increase in sales. This appears to be continuing beyond the launch weekend.

“Exact Editions noticed exceptionally high levels of activity over the weekend. Freemium sample apps were downloaded much more over the weekend than normal. Sales through iTunes are rapidly getting stronger and stronger.”

I’m not surprised. Newsstand is a much more elegant way to consume news content on the iPad. By putting magazines in one place, it’s much easier to consume magazine content on the iPad. In addition, newsstand downloads magazines and newspapers in the background. After a new issue is released it automatically downloads to your iPad.

Most news apps still have a long way to go, but newsstand should help make the experience better for users. A better user experience should mean more sales.