Netflix business model for magazines

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First off, full disclosure – I hate digital magazines. I love print magazines. Digital has huge file sizes, annoying download issues, widely varying user interfaces and price structures. Print is print, for better or worse.

Now that we’ve got my bias out of the way, I was still very impressed with the concept of digital magazines from a company called Next Issue Media.

NIM is a joint venture of five U.S.-based publishers (the service is only available in the U.S. for the time being) – Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc. They have just announced the availability of their iPad app in the US – the Android version has been available for a few months.

The CEO of NIM is Morgan Guenther, a former president of TiVo, told VentureBeat, “We’re focused on premium content,” he said, “content that’s not available for free on the web.”

To that end, at iPad launch, NIM has 39 titles to start, “with many more expected later in the year”, NIM’s Chief Technology Officer, Keith Barraclough, told me in an interview. The list of titles include popular magazines such as TIME, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Bon Appétit, Golf Digest and many more.

But even more interesting than the titles is what TIME called “a wrinkle that might be a game-changer, and is intriguing at the very least: flat-rate pricing.”

There are lots of digital magazines already available in a variety of ways, some of which are included in NIM’s stable. From standalone apps like Wired’s to “mobile reading application” Zinio to Apple’s own Newsstand. But the “all you can eat” model NIM is offering is intriguing.

NIM offers two pricing plans – “Unlimited Basic” which includes those titles that are published monthly and bi-weekly, like Car and Driver, Fortune, Vanity Fair and others. It also includes all the back issues of those same magazines – but only back to the beginning of 2012. Unlimited Basic is $9.99 per month.

“Unlimited Premium” includes all titles in the NIM catalog, including weeklies such as Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and TIME and all their back issues to the beginning of 2012, for $14.99 per month. Plans are paid monthly via an automatic charge to a credit card and there are no annual or other prepayment plans.

NIM also offers individual magazine subscriptions from $1.99 to $9.99 per month and single magazine issues are available from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue. If you already subscribe to the paper edition of an included magazine, Barraclough told me all you have to do is enter your account information into the app and you will be credited with the digital version. Best of all, NIM is offering a 30-day free trials for all their subscription plans.

The Big Question is, will it encourage more people to go digital for their magazines?

According to AllThingsD, “Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation.”

I’m certainly a prime example. I love paper magazines, subscribing to ten monthly and weekly editions and often buying individual issues of others like Esquire or Vanity Fair that have an interesting article or two. But I’ve never found digital offerings compelling enough.

I haven’t yet tried the NIM app but I was assured by Barraclough the issues of user interface have been solved through the app. While the titles will retain their unique look and feel, they have been given a consistent UI through the app, eliminating one of the confusing aspects of the differing magazines.

More good news/bad news – the Next Issue Media iPad app supports all generations of the iPad. That means it will look fine on my original iPad but those of you lucky enough to have the Retina Display of the latest iPad will have to wait until “later in the year”, according to CTO Barraclough, before the app is optimized for higher resolutions.

Another issue is the lack of issues. While 39 titles at launch is quite a few, they are primarily “mainstream” magazines. If your interests lie outside that range, you’re out of luck. For example, my favorite hobbies – motorcycling, skiing and photography – aren’t represented by a single title, even though there are dozens of magazines covering those markets. But Barraclough said this is just “version one” of the app and they are working hard to bring on many more publishers and titles – even ones not printed by the five partners in the venture.

Bottom line – is it worth it? At $120 – $180 per year, unless you’re a magazine junkie, probably not. But if you are, and the titles hold even a little interest, it would be. The ability to have all your magazines on hand and to even read magazines you don’t subscribe to just for an article or two, might be compelling. If you’re a household of two or more magazine readers, it becomes much more of a no-brainer.

If you would like, you can to listen to the entire audio interview I did with NIM’s Chief Technology Officer, Keith Barraclough.



  • No

    well according to Wired article. magazine publishers are unwilling/unable to get digital fonts of their magazine fonts from the font publishers (There is an irony). So they have rely on jpg images which I guess is not copying.

    • Neil Ticktin

      This is not true — and there are many ways to skin this. MacTech does it just fine for our iPad app.

  • http://twitter.com/leicaman leicaman

    I can understand why print is still viable. I’m involved in a project to convert a scholarly journal (hardly a paragon of design) into a digital edition. They’re using Quark’s tools to create apps that work in their reader. There are so many issues involved, not the least is bugs out the wazoo that cause it to crash if you actually look at too many of the photos at popped up size that covers most of the screen, and then rotate pages. And let’s not even talk about the bad choices magazine designers use (such as turning whole pages with complex graphics into jpegs if they’re not in the first dozen pages). Or talk about InDesign’s tools for the same thing.

    Digital magazines have a long, long way to go to make print irrelevant. It’s not even close.

  • lucascott

    for most of the folks I know the issue with digital magazines is that the execution has sucked. They have been just PDF or image files of the print version with little to no added material or even UI work

    Only in the past few months have the publishers really started to actually make digital magazines rather than just digital images etc

    • Neil Ticktin

      The issue is not that execution has sucked — it’s that the business model is difficult at best. That means that there aren’t generally the resources to do things that publishers know and want to do. The business model for print is well vetted and works — the model for iPad does not necessarily. That said, brave publishers move forward with it and experiment. But, this isn’t experimenting in the way one experiments on the web — it’s betting the life of a title for most publishers. That’s why there are, comparatively, so few titles on the iPad compared to print.

      • lucascott

        “the issue is not that the execution has sucked”

        oh so you are going to presume to tell me that the opinion my associates gave me is false. I guess I heard them wrong. Good thing you were there to tell me what they really said.

  • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com SSteve

    “those of you lucky enough to have the Retina Display of the latest iPad will have to wait until “later in the year”, according to CTO Barraclough, before the app is optimized for higher resolutions”

    So does that mean even the text is non-retina? If so, that will be a major drawback. When I compared the iPad 2 and retina iPad side-by-side the difference in text clarity was breathtaking. I’ll download the trial and see.

    • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com SSteve

      Here’s my quick review after downloading a copy of The New Yorker (which is alphabetized under “T” in the title list) to read at lunch.

      Many, many pages would not display because I didn’t have an internet connection. One of those pages was in the middle of an article I was reading so I had to stop reading the article. (When I got back to work to look at that page it turned out there was a cartoon on the bottom half.)

      The text is, of course, not text. So you can’t, e.g., tap a word to get a definition. It looked pretty good until I compared it to text in iBooks. But it is readable enough.

      Because of the requirement of being online, though, I will have to cancel before my 30-day trial is over. I don’t have a 3G plan for my iPad and there are a lot of places I would want to use this app where I wouldn’t have WiFi.

    • Publisher

      Of course, this is only a problem is the text is made into an image. If it’s properly done in text … similar to what happens in a PDF … resolution is not an issue.

      Aquafadas’ technology does it in this way. I’m sure that others do as well.