Are Magazines Not Doing Well on the iPad?
GQ announced that they have sold 365 copies of their December 2009 Men of the Year issue. The magazine was priced at $2.99, which is $2 less than the newsstand price, and made a profit $1,091.35.
With sales figures like that, you'd think GQ would be angry for using the iPhone and iPad as a distribution platform, but apparently they're not.
“This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage,” says Pete Hunsinger, vp/publisher. “Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”
Mashable notes that the latest issue of GQ (May 2010) is the top selling in app purchase, at least according to iTunes. This means that people are coming back for more issues when they're released, which is a good thing.
Of course, this news comes just as Vanity Fair launches on the App Store and WIRED has been announced to launch this summer.
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jiubreyn
May 20, 2010 at 2:50am
GQ actually has the right idea here, Popular Science is charging MORE for the iPad edition of their magazine than the news stand edition. For a product that does not require any printing costs or postage fees, charging more is simply not logical from a customer standpoint.
Loup407
May 18, 2010 at 3:23pm
The math on the magazine business isn't particularly great to begin with; the cost of paper and shipping (both unprinted paper and printed magazines) keeps going up. Subscription income is a minor revenue stream compared to ad sales anyway. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing preferential pricing for iPad (or other electronic) subscriptions, compared to print. As alluded in the article, magazines are laid out electronically (most likely on a mac), getting to an electronic delivery format is easy and practically free compared to printing and shipping a physical magazine. The tough part is the paradigm shift in the publishing industry, which is (mostly) bleeding cash. Be patient, I suspect in a year, those sub numbers will be very different.
kylerwalker
May 18, 2010 at 2:40pm
im suprised that newsstands and magizine stores would not be mad at imag or other stores online sell them for less
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