The week Newsstand launched, ‘NY Times’ for iPhone app had 1.8m new downloads

THE LAST few years have not been easy for print publishers.

But could it now be possible that one of the last legacies of Steve Jobs will be the salvation of newspapers and magazines with the launch of Apple’s Newsstand feature on iPhone and iPad?

Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS5 has a number of new features, including Newsstand. A cross between an app and a screen folder, Newsstand looks like a wooden bookcase and stocks and displays magazine and newspaper subscriptions in one place.

Once a publisher offers subscriptions in iTunes and selects to go for the Newsstand, its app automatically migrates to the folder. The fact that all newspapers and magazines can now be collected in one place rather than scattered all across the mobile device screen is a big plus for content vendors.

In addition, as new issues become available, Newsstand automatically updates them in the background. To date more than 290 publications have their apps in Newsstand, including Irish Wedding Diary.

Exact Editions, a US aggregator of paid-for PDF versions of magazines, says downloads of free sample editions jumped by a factor of 14 times in just a few days after Newsstand was rolled out, while some titles’ issue sales have more than doubled.

The week Newsstand launched, the New York Timesfor iPad app saw 189,000 new user downloads, up seven times from 27,000 the week before, according to the New York Times.

But the newspaper's iPhone app saw 1.8 million new downloads that week, 85 times more than the 21,000 downloads the week before. Nearly one-fifth of the 9.1 million people who have ever downloaded the NY TimesiPhone app did so with the launch of Newsstand.

National Geographichas reported a five-fold increase in paid subscriptions since Newsstand launched a few weeks ago.

In Britain, Future Publishing chief executive Mark Woods is an evangelist for Newsstand. “Future sold more digital editions in four days through Apple’s Newsstand than in a normal month,” says Woods.

“It’s clear that Newsstand creates an amazing opportunity for publishers.”

Condé Nast is also boasting of a big spike in digital magazine sales. It says that new subscription

sales, per week, across all nine of its digital editions, were up 268 per cent in the first two weeks of Newsstand, with single copy sales up 142 per cent compared to the previous eight weeks.

Hearst, publisher of Cosmopolitanand Esquiremagazines, is now selling more than 300,000 digital issues a month on platforms including iTunes and the Barnes Noble Nook e-reader. That number has more than doubled since the start of the year.

Writing in the Guardian, Frédéric Filloux observes that magazines make up most of the Newsstand population because magazines can adopt to the system for relatively little expense.

“Without redesign expense, publishers can shovel PDF versions of their magazines into any Newsstand. It limits the reader’s engagement but no one really seems to care yet. Copies are counted as sold when they’re downloaded.”

Filloux adds that digital subscriptions to daily publications remain quite expensive since they are expected to contribute a great deal to the bottom line. As for the format, most newspapers can’t be reduced to a zoomable PDF to be read on a tablet, let alone a smartphone.

"In order to really take off, daily publications' digital editions will have to morph into dedicated applications designed for tablets or smartphones. That is exactly what the Guardiandid recently and its new iPad iOS5-only application is by far the best on the market."

The Guardianapp is currently offering a free subscription until January 2012. After that it will cost £9.99 per month, which works out at about 50p per issue – less than half the cost of the print edition.

If publishers place their content apps on the Newsstand app, they will be featured in the special section of the App store where more subscribers are likely to find them. However, this option

means ceding subscriber data

and giving 30 per cent of revenues to Apple.

Alternatively, publishers can choose to operate a standalone web-based app using HTML5 to replicate iOS5 functionality which allows them to control their customer data and receive all the revenue of any subscriptions they sell.

But the gamble is whether people will look outside Newsstand to find them.

And in the longer term, the question is whether the surge in publication sales will continue, particularly as the novelty value of Newsstand wears off and more and more titles crowd the Newsstand.

siobhan@businessplus.ie