This follows Apple’s decision in late 2015 to cease Apple Newsstand, abruptly closing down the most powerful marketing engine available to magazine tablet editions, says Shortlist Media.
CEO of Shortlist Media Ltd Mike Soutar says: "We’ve all been very proud of the success of the Stylist tablet edition which we've been publishing for just over the last two years. It has been a critical, commercial and technical success. In scale terms it's easily been the most downloaded women's magazine in the UK. And in technical and design terms it is a thing of beauty. Easy to use, quick to download and lovely to read. Its advertisers have seen great results and its many hundreds of thousands of readers over the months have valued it as a different and useful way to read the magazine they love on mobile and tablet devices.
"The vast majority of downloads and readers have been on Apple devices, via the Apple Newsstand, but unfortunately when Apple changed their strategy and closed the Newsstand area on the Apple Store, publishers and readers were left without a dedicated marketplace to distribute, download and search editions. While the Stylist tablet edition has retained a loyal core of readers they are now starting to decline with no adequate way of recruiting new users."
Having considered all feasible options for continuing the service, Shortlist Media says it has made the decision to cease publishing the edition. The last issue will be the one published on March 29th.
Soutar continues: "The world has changed enormously over the last two years and whilst the tablet was a unique way to distribute our award winning journalism and photography digitally there are now more ways than ever for our audience to access the brilliant content that the Stylist team produce. Over and above the website, which has massively expanded in scale since 2014, we have developed the back end capability to distribute to bigger new audiences on Apple News, Google Amp and, later this month, on Facebook Instant Articles."
