“Jim!” came the cry echoing across Bauer’s London offices as I sat at my desk. I looked round to see our CEO approaching. Suddenly (and I don’t know why, because usually I’m a pretty confident bloke) my heart was in my mouth.
“What’s the answer?” he asked.
Putting an open-ended question like this to me is dangerous. I have a habit of speaking before thinking, engaging mouth first and brain second. Resultantly, I could say literally anything in reply. Doesn’t matter who’s asking the question. It could be the CEO or an intern.
On this occasion, my first considered but unspoken response was ‘42’ – a reasonably sensible effort, seeing as it is indeed the ‘answer to life, the universe and everything’, according to the late Douglas Adams. My next thought, logically, was that I was the answer, seeing as I am 42 years old. Other potentially ludicrous responses flashed in front of my eyes in the split second before my brain saw sense and I replied, “The answer to what?”
“Apple Newsstand,” said the CEO, referring to its imminent demise, which had been announced earlier that day.
It was a pertinent question and, a couple of weeks further on, while I know what’s going to happen to our magazine apps on Apple’s App Store, I don’t have a clear answer on how we best utilise Newsstand’s replacement – the imaginatively titled Apple News – in terms of using it to grow our paid content revenues.
Apple’s announcement marks a significant point in digital magazine publishing. For the first time, the strategy that’s going to govern how we produce and sell our magazines digitally over the next couple of years is becoming clearer. Pretty much all the major tech and software suppliers we’re currently working with are telling us the same thing: apps allowing for continuously published free content, uploaded 24/7, possibly via RSS feeds from relevant websites, with clear upsells to paid editions, are the way to go – in combination with carefully selected content published free, one article at a time, on Apple News and Facebook Articles.
You can see where we’re headed. Or at least, where Apple, Facebook, Google and others would like us to be headed.
I agree with the continuous publishing exercise in our apps. We’ve been looking at it for a long time. The analytics are clear – people engage with magazine apps for the two or three days after a digital edition appears, read it, then go. The other 25 days or so of each monthly cycle? Well, the app sits on your device, unused and unloved – a waste of an opportunity. Increasing engagement with apps so readers use them more often has obvious benefits and is a strategy we’ll be pursuing in the near future with our flagship titles.
Increased visibility
Apple News offers opportunity and threat. It’s pointless at this moment to speculate on how successful it will be in terms of user adoption. That will depend entirely on the breadth of content available, how easy it is to find and its relevance to the individual consumer. It may take time to really find its feet, though I have no doubt that Apple will nail the UX.
The good news is, allowing users to search for specific, specialist content through News and social outlets will almost certainly increase the visibility of our digital brands. We can link through to our native apps from News, which could and should, in theory, improve levels of free and paid downloads. And from there, via continuous publishing and having great interactive editions, we hopefully retain users and convert them to paid subscribers. Apple News is just another broad entrance to the great tunnel of monetisation, then.
But, of course, Apple is going to tell us all that. They want lots of free content for their users so they can sell devices. ‘Buy the new iPad! Get top quality free content in Apple News!’ is a simple and attractive sell. Let’s make no bones about it, Apple couldn’t give two hoots how much revenue we and they accrue from actually selling digital magazines via iTunes – that’s a drop in the ocean to them. But top-quality, free content for their customers? Now that’s useful, another cog in their all-mighty strategy to increase device penetration globally.
It will also propagate the belief among the consumer that content should be free. And as we know from the Google Newsstand experience, which is great at delivering eyeballs, more consumers looking at your content doesn’t always equate to more cash in the coffers from paid downloads. Yes, we can monetise News through ads, but realistically, is that going to work for specialist content producers? To me, it sounds better geared to large news outlets, where a higher CPM and more article views can be garnered.
Putting my publishing hat on, what’s most annoying for me is that this demonstrates yet again how we’re at the mercy of Apple and Google, regardless of whether those decisions are right or wrong. When, as an industry, are we going to do a Taylor Swift and fight back, telling Apple to ‘go do one’? We need to grow some balls. After all, Apple News won’t work anywhere near as effectively without us.
I would love to be in a position where we control our own digital publishing platforms and garner the majority of our digital content revenues through it. Bauer already owns the basis of such a platform in its Great Magazines website. Indeed, out of all the platforms, this is the only one that’s shown any real growth in terms of digital editions sold over the last six months. Despite an average UX, it now contributes over a third of Bauer’s digital magazine sales, so there’s obviously an appetite among consumers to buy digital editions this way. Therefore, it follows that investing in it sensibly could make commercial sense and remove any risk we have associated with our agreements with third-party platform operators.
I’m next down in the London offices this Friday. If the CEO comes up to me again and asks me what the answer is, I’ll have a better idea how to reply. Though I might say ‘42’, just for the hell of it…
