HOLY TABLETS

Tablet ownership is rising swiftly in most developed nations and the shiny rectangles are being hailed as something of saviour by the magazine industry. But few local publishers have ventured into this space, let alone thrived.

Mindfood, which is increasingly focused on the overseas market, is one of the biggest success stories, with its app chosen by Apple as one of the best of 2012. A digital subscription sells for $30 and single issues sell for $6.49 and back in January publisher Michael McHugh said “we’re way, way ahead of budget, so it’s a really nice surprise from a financial point of view”.

He says apps are often a way to get readers to pay for digital content, whereas magazine websites are likely to be funded through advertising. But it’s not as simple as uploading a few PDFs, copying and pasting a few links and sending it to the App store. Appropriate training was brought in for the design staff and it takes four extra days to design each issue.

“We didn’t just want to replicate the printed page. And I think that’s where a lot of the publishers go wrong,” he says.

OHbaby launched its Newsstand app for iOS in March. Previously, the parenting publication had a Zinio version, but with the iPhone and iPad apps, it is able to introduce interactive elements, such as animations and video—both editorially and for advertisements.

It has been downloaded over 4,000 times, with around 90 percent of them from New Zealand. About one quarter are already print subscribers. To make the app version more attractive, it has also created a new subscription tier, which gives a discount for those subscribing to both print and digital and acts as a buffer against cannibalisation of print readers.

“We wanted to make both products attractive for readers, while retaining the value of print, which is where most of our advertising comes from,” says managing director Angela Pedersen.

Elsewhere, Bauer’s North & South iPad app was one of the first to launch in this market, but it has since been left to flounder; APN embraced the ‘freemium’ model with a new responsive design website for the NZ Listener that combines free and paid content and enables subscribers to read the magazine on any device; and NZ Rugby World launched its iPad app in May, with around 30 percent of its over 4,000 downloads coming from overseas.