Posts filed under ‘digital magazines on iPad’

The future of ad sales (2)

Till today, Google has the advertising clout with major brands all over the world thanks to its desktop search empire. Google wants to buy itself into the mobile advertising business by taking over mobile ad firm AdMob (late 2009 and currently being investigated), which will provide the same type of in-app ads like Apple. Despite the lack of track record in digital advertising, Apple on the other hand, has a strong mobile cachet thanks to the iPhone, which has sold more than 50 million units in three years, and the iPad, which sold over 500,000 units in the first week (1 mln after 1 month!). iAd already has analysts rethinking their predictions for advertising on the mobile Web. Steve Jobs clearly believes that ads in the context of apps make more sense and have more effect than the generic mobile search.

Creative agencies who have been presented to by Apple on using iAd and could only reveal bits of the presentation, such as this: each published advertisement will carry the iAd logo to differentiate it from other advertising content, that there will be only one advertising banner per screen and that the ads “look and behave a lot like apps”. Unlike browser-based ads, iAd ads can tap into all major OS features of the phone, from compass and accelerometer to the multitouch interface.

Mediabuyers’ view:  Apple is going to sell 100% of the ads. Apple doesn’t do cheap, they do premium. So I’d expect buyers to become trained very quickly that this is expensive inventory.

Another view (blog by Henry Copeland): Apple thinks it can divide the market as it does with app developers: the creator and the buyer, mediated by Apple. The market for advertising is far more complex. First there are the end clients, or: brands, with the money. There are various types of agencies: creative, ad buying, planning, strategic. Then there are the publishers and other content creators. There are ad networks. There are tech companies running around trying to sell any and all of the other players their latest innovation. And of course there are sales teams larded throughout, each selling to the next level in the pipeline. Everyone talks with everyone, covertly trying to eat their partners’ lunches and win an upper hand.

Copeland goes on: “Maybe Apple doesn’t know this, but most of advertising innovation isn’t instigated by agencies, but by publishers and ad networks and tech vendors competing tooth and nail to win business from agencies and their clients.”  I partly agree with Copeland, but this new medium called a ‘tablet’ is taking the market by storm. The numbers of iPads sold within 28 days are staggering.

Key issues for print publishers these days:

1)      How to stay relevant for readers and brands using their platform.

2)      What publishing format will prevail in the next 10 years – print, internet or mobile apps?

3)      How to protect your expensive content?

4)      How to deal with new dominant players like Apple?

May 9, 2010 at 12:26 pm Leave a comment

The Future of Reading

In Feb this year, Josh Quittner wrote an interesting article in Fortune called The Future of Reading. For those who don’t know Quittner – until Sept 07, he was editor of Time Inc.‘s Business 2.0, which he joined in April 2002 after seven years at Time Magazine, where he served as technology editor and the editor of its spinoff technology supplement Time Digital.  He is considered as one of the magazine industry’s digital drivers.

Allow me to shorten Quittner’s article. Central issue from a (digital) magazine point of view:  will consumers pay for content on a tablet when they can get free web content. Most people still enjoy the printed medium. But they want it delivered in an exponentially more useful way. With the arrival of Apple’s iPad and other tablet computers — touch sensitive, full color, easy to watch video on, network-connected to virtual newsstands and stores — the publishing industry might once again have a remunerative way of giving it to them.

The web is for scanning, not deep reading. People typically spend two minutes or less on a site. Why do you think the killer app is called a browser? It’s hard to make money with online advertising. Today, online ads bring in junk CPMs — about 10% of the revenue per 1,000 views compared with print. No wonder that the Wall St Journal has brought its online content behind a ‘pay wall’ and fighting search engines to make them stop searching and indexing their online content.

While old media can find much to cheer about with the arrival of the Tablet Age, which promises to smooth old media’s transition from paper to digital, the publishing industry still faces considerable obstacles. Key questions raised:

  1. Will anyone be willing to pay for content delivered to a tablet when they can get information for free on the web? Steve Jobs proved with that first iPod that people would willingly pay for music when you made it easier to buy than to steal — especially when the media is linked via a store to a cool, fetishistic device. When you’ve invested in a tablet (or an iPhone or a Droid or a Kindle, etc.) and love it, you want to increase its functionality — with media.
  2. But aren’t tablets just a better way to browse the web? Jobs pitched the iPad as a better way to access the web, in fact. But with the tablet, there ought to be room for great, downloaded apps that are usable offline too.
  3. Reading? Reading is dead. According to the Magazine Publishers Association, 174.5 million people paid to subscribe to magazines in 1970; that number has steadily and consistently risen over the years, to 324.8 million as of 2008. Magazines are just vertical collections of content that feed our individual interests. Like blogs. The trick for publishers will be to figure out how to be compensated for individual articles as well.
  4. How will tablet-based ads work better than the web? While I think most publishers will allow you to skip an ad with a swipe of your fingers, a 10-inch full-color touch screen gives the advertiser a rich enough canvas to grab you by the eyeballs and make its case.
  5. Can traditional publishing companies reorganize and move fast enough to embrace and serve new platforms? They haven’t reinvented or reimagined themselves so far. That’s because the old way of doing business has been blindingly successful. The biggest mistake they made was in ignoring the people who might have been able to solve their problems in the late 1990s when things went bad: their best reporters. Instead they tapped consultants and strategists. Publishers of the greatest newspapers and magazines should have gone to their very best reporters and deployed them!
  6. Conclusion: The model of the magazine as we know it is just outmoded. The publishing industry — books, magazines, newspapers — ought to be approaching the problem of content creation differently. We should be thinking about selling attention. Content creators are battling for a user’s time.

May 6, 2010 at 10:57 pm Leave a comment

Apple Publishing Inc. (2)

Book publishers in general are happy with Apple’s iPad. The 30/70 revenue share was gladly accepted and seen as a way to break the Amazon dominance on the e-Reader market.

So much for the book publishers. One-off (book) revenue deals sound fair, but what about the newspapers and magazine market in the US? Recurring sales on newsstand is one, but just think about the subscriptions! These reader relations are dating back for years and will now be consumed by Apple.

Another issue is the ownership of subscriber data. Publishers have spent millions of the years to collect data about their readers. That knowledge not only influenced their marketing plans, but also sometimes the editorial directions a publication took. By getting separated from these data (Apple doesn’t have a habit of sharing consumer data with partners) publishers claim not to be able to make a good publication in future. Other like Conde Nast are more positive and consider the iPad as a ‘digital newsstand’.  Listen to Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital: “We also don’t get the consumer information in a typical newsstand sale, so part of why I’ve been thinking conceptually about this is, out of the gate, we think of it as a newsstand buyer.”

The companies will also pull in revenue from advertisers through the iPad. Condé Nast has gotten its GQ iPhone app approved by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That means each copy sold digitally counts in the same way as a newsstand copy, and is included in its guaranteed circulation. It plans to do the same with iPad copies. That means if the iPad and iPhone apps take off, Condé Nast could charge advertisers more for each ad page. Smart!

Another interesting thought I read goes like this: media is segmented by format, vehicle and purpose. Books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television and movies stand alone as distinct entities. However, the iPad presents new possibilities for blurring the lines between these various media types. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad mimics the size and portability of traditional printed material such as books and magazines. In the example of the New York Times, the design of the page is easy on the eyes and demonstrates how typography and page design can be preserved in digital media.

And this one:  good news for advertisers, too. The creative ads we are accustomed to seeing in printed publications can be incorporated into page layouts for the iPad app, eliminating ineffective and irritating banner and pop-up ads that plague browser-based versions.

Finally this reassuring one: it is once the dust settles and a preferred tablet OS is established or two (next blog), competing for that space, that we should begin to get nervous about a possible dominant role of Apple in publishing land. For now, I think they deserve a big hug and thumbs up!

“There’s no iMagazines and there’s no iNews,” said Sara Ohrvall, senior vice president, of research and development for Swedish media company Bonnier. “Either we have to package our products much differently, or we just lost the paid content game.” The simple answer is that magazines should offer their own apps to control the distribution.

April 29, 2010 at 12:22 pm Leave a comment

Apple Publishing Inc. (1)

Threat or Opportunity? – We sometimes wonder how much Google can be allowed to be dominant in the sector of web search, but what about Apple? Some people are warning the industry – like at last week’s Ad Age digital conference. Apple has just launched a device that has the potential of changing the world of portable computing, just as it did with the iPod and portable music. But with the iPad – basically a big iPod Touch – it’s not just offering another smart, shiny new consumer device, but it’s also tightening its grip on its platforms as it transforms into a media company. It’s complicating relationships in media, to say the least! Somebody, on the other hand, called it “standard (US) symbiotic oligarchy” (or: nothing has changed).

The NYT recently opened an article on the iPad saying: “the print world welcomed Apple’s new iPad on Wednesday, eager to tap into the 125 million customers who already have iTunes accounts and are predisposed to buying more content from Apple”. A very optimistic view. Think about it: Apple has control on the hardware (the iPad), how publishers create content (the software-development kit), how consumers access media (the App Store) and, since its announcement last week, also advertising (iAd).

And don’t forget the 30% share Apple is forcing on traditional publishers taking their off-line publication on the iPad. Apple chose which publishers would be on the iPad launch platform and hand-picked his favorite papers and magazines. Some welcomed Steve Jobs as the new messiah. Tables were turned. A new digital magazine format inviting publishers to offer their content on it! To put it even clearer: can or will Apple Publishing Inc. decide which media will be available on iPad? Or are they just a media retailer and not a publisher? Kindle from Amazon didn´t create a problem in book publishing either (apart from book price pressure).

Originally, the iPad was an answer just to Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, purely aimed at digital book publishing. In negotiations with Apple, publishers agreed to a business model that gives them more power over the price that customers pay for e-books. Publishers had all but lost that power on Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader. In a newly set price range, Apple will keep 30% of each sale, and publishers will take 70%. This fixed agreement with Apple gives publishers leverage to negotiate with Amazon on future pricing. Apple’s strategy could bring significant changes to the e-book market, where Amazon has so far captured more than 90 percent of the market. Apple just brought back competition in a market dominated by Amazon.

Five of the six largest publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster— had signed on to provide e-book content for the new tablet. Only one book publisher did not sign (yet) on to the iPad: Random House, the world’s largest publisher of trade books.

April 26, 2010 at 4:07 pm Leave a comment

Who’s publishing with iPad?

The Apple wireless tablet publication, or iPad, (or XL-size iPhone if you wish), is entering the publishing market by storm. It offers publishers a full color and interactive e-reader platform. The question whether the storm is just caused by the Apple tribe can’t be taken too lightly. Whatever happens with iPad, publishers know they got to act quickly not to miss the boat ready to leave the digital port. Some of those publishers have built really new apps for the tablet, while others are kicking off with converted versions of existing iPhone apps.

I’m listing all the first seven US print publishers joining iPad (with help of Advertising Age).

  1. Conde Nast: Wired, Vanity Fair, Glamour and The New Yorker are expected later this year. Kick- off on the iPad is with its GQ app, (i-Phone optimized version). Each issue of the GQ app costs $2.99/issue.
  2. Rodal: publisher of Men’s Health offers an iPad edition for $4.99/issue. Each issue will include all the editorial content of the print edition plus extras such as video. Gillette secured sponsorship of the April and May issues of the Men’s Health iPad edition by increasing its other ad spending with Men’s Health (hence the print+ model).
  3. The New York Times: NYT’s “Editors’ Choice” app is offering a selection of news, opinion and features, available free to consumers and relying on advertiser support. The Chase Sapphire card is sponsoring the app at the start.
  4. Bonnier: Popular Science is the first iPad app by the Swedish publisher. The app will feature content from the magazine’s April issue and touts flow navigation “more like a panning camera than a flipping page.” Future issues will sync with the print publishing schedule and will be on sale within the app.
  5. Time Inc.: this iPad app will include all the magazine’s weekly content plus additional slide shows and video, costing consumers $4.99/issue. Initial advertisers include Fidelity, Korean Air, Liberty Mutual, Lexus, Toyota and Unilever.
  6. USA Today: this app will include much of the editorial content from each morning’s paper and will update around the clock. It’s free to consumers for the next three months, courtesy of a sponsorship from Courtyard by Marriott, but will require a paid subscription after that. USA Today has not yet set the subscription price.
  7. The Wall Street Journal: WsJ for iPad is a free download with some free content, but complete access will require a subscription that runs $3.99/wk. The subscription will include news throughout the day, top picks from editors and access to the last seven days’ worth of print content. Initial advertisers include Buick, Capital One, Coca-Cola, iShares, FedEx and Oracle, with full-screen ad units that appear between article and section pages.

April 15, 2010 at 2:51 pm Leave a comment

is iPad just ‘print plus’?

An interesting publishing debate is going on since Apple launched the iPad. All major publishers, media agencies and advertisers are closely studying how consumers are using this new tool. Trying to figure out how they can benefit from they way content is consumed and how interaction takes place in that process.

How will this new pattern of content consumption influence their buying and selling of magazine and newspaper ads on this new device? Is it a threat or opportunity? Are ads worth more or just less? Are you selling or buying ads in fixed combination with print or just separate?

The first sponsors didn’t wait for the outcome and just jumped on the iPad publishing bandwagon. Like Marriott’s Courtyard Hotels joining USA Today. USA Today, is selling iPad ads completely separately. Its iPad edition, which is already available, will be free to consumers for three months, courtesy of a sponsorship sold on its own to Courtyard by Marriott. The paper is free for hotel visitors, so it will be interesting to see if they can get them pay for it after the three months are over.

“These (print and iPad) effectively are going to be very different media,” argued David Hunke, president and publisher of USA Today. ”

“For us it probably makes sense to have some flexibility with that,” said Gini Gladstone, senior director for Courtyard marketing. “Because we’re buying less print and more digital over time, it would be difficult for us to say ‘Let’s bundle those together.'”

April 14, 2010 at 10:49 am Leave a comment

Advertising Jobs saved by Steve?

I believe the launch of Apple’s iPad is going to change ad sales dramatically and in a positive way. How exactly nobody knows yet, but the debate is worth following for those in ad sales business and the ones closely connected.

This blog wants to keep track of the different thoughts on digital magazine ad sales. Who are the leading publishers, the media agencies’ opinion, the advertisers and the new tools available.

April 14, 2010 at 10:23 am Leave a comment


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