It’s clear that tablets are set to become the preferred device for reading periodicals. They excel at re-creating the intimacy of the old relationship we had with a favourite magazine or newspaper – where you sit and lose yourself in it for hours. Even the first generation of new digital-only design features are already wowing users and adding value.
A Forrester report of February this year shows about half of tablet owners are already reading newspapers and periodicals on them, and about 20% have reduced their print consumption.
It found tablets would reach one third of US online consumers by 2015 and that tablet owners are a high-value demographic, with a mean income of US$132,000.
In addition, this bond readers have with their tablet periodicals means that ads delivered on this device will be high-value, just like in the glory days of print publishing.
Our own early research shows tablet advertising working really effectively. An eye-tracking study in Sweden found that ad dwell times for ads in a Mag+ publication were nine times higher than for the same page online, and significantly higher than the print page as well.
In the periodicals business, there has been a lot of hesitation about making the move onto tablets. Titles invested a lot in their websites over the years; they have designed and re-designed workflow, sacked management teams, brought online journalists into the fold, put them back into a separate department, then changed their minds again – and the cost has been high. The question about how to make digital pay is still frustrating publishers. Whether it’s online advertising or erecting paywalls, few have found a model that truly works over time.
We’re already seeing that the tablet world is not falling prey to these same economics. Just a year after launching on iPad, Popular Science+ has sold 13,000 iPad subscriptions, more than 100,000 single issues and earned nearly US$500,000 on consumer revenue alone.
This is not dumb luck. The only way that publishers can comfortably bring their titles to tablets is with eyes wide open about the costs involved, particularly the expense of additional headcount to produce the digital issues.
What makes the tablet race so different to the birth of the web is a much higher focus, even from these early days, on the business side of things, and that focus is going to be beneficial to concepts and content too. At last, designers have caught up with the technology and vice versa, so that they are able to produce work that readers find tactile and easy to build a relationship with. You don’t have to be geeky to consume digital media any more, and you don’t have to build a dedicated tech team to produce it. The connection from designer to technology user is more seamless.
At the moment, there are a number of suppliers, such as ourselves with Mag+, with custom-designed, end-to-end tablet publishing systems. Then there are enhanced PDF replica providers, that simply port through the print layout to a variety of devices.
In the tablet space right now, there is no question that iOS is the most important. Apple has the volume, the products and the most mature app eco-system with millions of credit cards on file. But this race is far from over; I think we'll see a lot of really rapid development in the Android field during the coming months.
If I’m right, the key challenge publishers will face is this: iOS is one platform, the iPad one device (both iPad 1 and 2 have the same screen size and ratio). Android devices however, vary in screen sizes, ratios and resolutions. Publishers will have to find a solution that allows them to support both iOS and as many specific Android devices as possible, without drowning in the production expense.
If you’re fine with producing print replicas, this is less of a challenge. But if you’re looking to innovate and develop high-value publications, specifically designed for these new devices, making use of the rich feature set and exciting characteristics that make them so desirable, you need a smart approach to the creative production. This is also what consumers expect, and what they will pay for.
This is an extremely exciting time to be a publisher - we have an entirely new medium accelerating into consumers’ hands at a rate we’ve never seen before. It’s a medium perfectly suited to our strengths: delivering creative content that users want, in an ecosystem that’s easy to shop in. With the right strategy and tools, and with an open mind and willingness to experiment, the long-term reward for the innovative publishers will be significant.
