Category Archive: 'Tablet'

Can Next Issue Increase Digital Magazine Subscriptions?

Date: April 6, 2012 Topic: Subscription Business Model, Tablet Tags: , , , , , , ,

You may have heard the buzz. Looks like five of the major publishing houses for print magazines (Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corp., and Time) have teamed up to create Next Issue Media, an independent venture with a eponymous app for viewing digital magazines on tablets. (Scroll down for a video introduction to the service.)

Next Issue seems to be answering a need with some good business sense. Americans apparently love e-reading, and are especially eager to buy magazines on tablet displays. The Big Five have also timed their product well, offering consumers a paid content, subscription-based option early on in the tablet adoption timeline.

But they’ve also been smart about their offerings, playing into schema consumers already have about how to buy print content. They offer single issues (comparable to newsstand sales, which consumers do like to do when testing a new publication or are particularly interested in a topic a general magazine is covering in one issue), subscriptions to digital issues of a single magazine (great for aficionados of a publication or print subscribers), and an unlimited subscription plan that works on a cable model. That is, the unlimited plan has a basic package for $9.99/month, and a premium package for $14.99/month.

The app is available on the Android Market Google Play and has a generous 30-day free trial for both the basic and premium plans. The site first asks a visitor to register for an account with simply an email address. You then have to go back and choose one of the plans again to start your free trial by entering a credit card number. This is a two-step process that allows for two best practices — confirming an email address and getting a credit card number when signing up for a free trial.

Next Issue is also letting print subscribers get digital editions of the magazines they subscribe to for free. This may be a savvy way to transition print audiences online, but we hope they’ll change this practice and value their digital content separately from print.

Here’s that video I promised (ignore the Chariot-of-Fire-like theme music):

Posted by MinalB21
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Paid Content Popular With 50% of U.S. Tablet Owners, But Not for News

Date: March 19, 2012 Topic: Tablet Tags: , , , , ,

New data from Nielsen may put a temporary smile on many paid content producers’ faces. It looks like American and European audiences are quite comfortable paying for content on their tablet — in fact, 62% of U.S. tablet owners have paid for downloaded music, 58% for books, and 51% for movies.

What’s interesting, is that fewer were willing to admit they would pay for content — only 46% said they would pay for music, 45% for  books, and 38% for movies. This may mean consumers are trying things out on the tablet and the numbers will later drop (or that they simply hate market research questionnaires).

The loser? General news, for which only 19% of U.S. consumers were willing to pony up any money. This is likely because there are more ways for individuals to access general news for free, including broadcast television and metered paywalls for many news sites. But news outlets may want to start translating their content into Italian, what with 44% of Italian consumers paying for news on their tablets.

Check out the graph below for more US-European comparisons by content type, including numbers from Germany and the U.K.:

Data from Nielsen's 2012 findings on tablet usage

Data from Nielsen's 2012 findings on tablet usage

Posted by MinalB21
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Inkling Habitat Competes With Apple iBooks by Wooing Publishers

Date: February 16, 2012 Topic: Tablet, Technology for Subscription Sites Tags: , , ,

For amateur and self-employed publishers, Apple iBooks may be your digital publishing platform of choice, but publishers producing ebooks at scale seem to be excited about Inkling Habitat, a new cloud-based publishing platform.

Inkling Habitat lets users incorporate HD video, interactive features and 3D content through its free program. Users are then required to make the finished product available through the Inkling store (available through an iPad app and through the Inkling website), through which Inkling will take a cut. But users can also sell the finished product through other platforms/sites and Inkling will not take a cut.

Given the fact that Inkling CEO called out Apple as a direct competitor, it’ll be interesting to see if Apple still keeps Inkling’s app. The software and user-end licensing agreement makes Inkling Habitat an attractive draw to publishers, but if they lose their iPad app, they’ll also lose users. Then again, they emerge as the “Android” of the digital publishing world.

Posted by MinalB21
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Lessons from Sesame Street: Designing Digital Content for Children

Date: January 25, 2012 Topic: Mobile, Tablet Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Ebooks now make up 11% of sales for children’s books, and seems to be a growing preferred platform for the little ones. Furthermore, the durability of tablets have made parents more apt to share their digital devices with children or hand down their old ones. This is backed up by additional research showing that tablet usage soars during prime-time and just before bed. So if you’re targeting the 0-8 age group and their parents, it’s time to start thinking of how to get your content on tablet devices.

Fortuitously, Sesame Street recently presented its lessons learned in publishing digital content for children, particularly mobile apps, at the Publisher’s Launch conference, and had some interesting take-aways:

(Full disclosure: I used to work for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, and have a soft spot for their research-based content creation.)

  • All content should never be more than two taps away.
  • Design for small hands and growing minds (big, colorful icons that are easily distinguishable).
  • Make it easy to skip over instructions after they’ve played once. Kids don’t like waiting and neither do parents.
  • For early childhood, audio cues should be accompanied by visual cues (perhaps a “soft glow” around an item).
  • Young children have a hard time holding a tablet vertically, so design in landscape mode. Also keep icons away from the bottom of the screen where children tend to rest their hands.
  • Content should be related. Don’t just throw in extras as a bonus feature. Parents don’t like encouraging ADD in their kids.
  • Parents may be open to cross-sells but don’t want their children to come across them. Keep cross-sell/up-sell advice in a separate “For Parents” section.

And ethically-speaking, children shouldn’t be able to purchase anything without parental action or oversight. Seriously. You may get great conversion rates with children, but if parents aren’t on board, you’re likely to be satirized as a drug dealer on The Daily Show.

Posted by MinalB21
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