Last month, we mentioned Condé Nast’s plans to convert every one of its magazines to digital tablet format by the end of 2011. However, it seems Condé Nast has changed its mind, at least in part. A report in Ad Age suggests that the publishing company is planning to scale back its efforts and concentrate on magazines that are most likely to find audiences first.
"It’s a shift," one Conde publisher said. "The official stance was we’re going to get all our magazines on the iPad because this is going to be such an important stream. The new change is maybe we can slow it down. In my opinion it makes Conde look smart because we have the ambition, but we’re not rushing."
The publisher is going to leave how quickly to develop an app more up to individual magazines’ publishers, trusting them to know their audience well enough to say whether an app would be worth the investment. Advertisers are still being cautious about the e-magazine market, feeling that it is still in its infancy and not yet large enough to be worth investing heavily yet.
This confirms my suspicion that the assumption that Apple Magic and the iPad would quickly fuel a shift of magazine publishing to digital isn’t happening. Apple’s contract terms may be driving some publishers away, and users may not like to pay for subscriptions to material that’s little different from what they get free with a browser. The shift may be coming, but it may not be as quick as some assumed.
And advertisers are right to be suspicions of this new markets effectiveness. Paper magazines typically drift through many hands, often ending up at medical clinics and tire stores, where the ads get seen many more times. An iPad subscription typically has only one or two viewers.
Unfortunately the Magazine publishers have totally failed to appreciate the factors that iPad users want in their eMagazines from the beginning and the predictable response by the iPad users has woken them up with a dose of reality. Ridiculously high file size and download times mixed with confusing navigation and unnecessary complexity has punctured the initial misguided enthusiasm. Rushing headlong into a new medium without assessing the important factors and the needs of the reader was a daft mistake.
I do find the statement from Condé Nast very amusing:
“In my opinion it makes Conde look smart because we have the ambition, but we’re not rushing.”
In other words “We shot our mouths off before we engaged our brains. Now we have woken up and .. ‘aren’t we smart to do so!’ ”
Duh …