AppleInsider Staff
Hearst Magazines has hit its goal of one million digital subscribers on devices like Apple's iPad, as well as competing tablets such as the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Hearst had planned to hit the million subscriber milestone by the end of 2012, but the publisher missed its goal by 90 days, Hearst chief David Carey told AllThingsD. Carey expects that the magazine will have about three million digital subscribers by 2016, about 10 percent of Hearst's entire base.
Hearst publishes titles such as O, Food Network Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Cosmopolitan.
The million subscriber figure no doubt includes users on devices like Amazon's Kindle and Kindle Fire, Android tablets, and Barnes & Noble's Nook tablet. Given the popularity of Apple's iPad, though, a good number of Hearst's subscribers may be relying on Apple products to access publications.
Services like Apple's Newsstand — which provides a repository for a user's periodicals — have provided a foothold for magazines in the tablet era. While the revenues coming from digital sales are usually nowhere near those gained from physical magazine sales, iPad users have been estimated to spend north of $70,000 a day on Newsstand content, and such sales have encouraged some publishers.
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4 Comments
ok, good.
it's only good if they are making money (or losing less money) than their print additions. Making money in more sticky transactions, lower operational costs (mailing/printing/paper/ink orders), and ideally better content for each subscriber (narrowcasting. I don't want the same gardening magazine as my 10 acre suburban brother... I want an urban gardening magazine that focusses on 'little spaces'.
it's only good if they are making money (or losing less money) than their print additions.
I truly don't see how they couldn't be.
No paper to buy, no paper to cut, no paper to bind, no paper to waste, no ink to buy, no ink to print, no ink to waste, no shipping, no packaging, no processing, and the entire storefront is taken care of.
Instead of all that nonsense post-layout, they can literally just take the completed digital layout and ship it off to everyone.
That every single nationally (and internationally) distributed magazine isn't already on iOS is a testament to sheer stupidity on the part of someone, somewhere. Whether it's at Apple or at the publishers isn't for me to say.
I guess Hearst probably doesn't want to offend which stores aren't doing as well as the others, but this would be a more interesting article if there were a breakdown by platform.