Are Failing iPad magazines? And if so, why?

In the last few days have been reported more around the Web about how iPad magazine titles are failing. Here's a slice of a recent article at BGR on this subject:

Each title of big name available on the iPad magazine saw its purchase rate decrease since the introduction and most found great success in the first place.

Glamour, for example, sold only 4,301 copies in its early months. Sales dropped and then 20% in October, and another 20% in November, landing at 2,775. GQ sold 11,000 copies in November, down from an average of 13,000 per month between May and October. Sales of Vanity Fair slipped 8 700 copies in November by an average of 10 500 between August and October. Men's health, which is an average of only 2,800 copies in the spring, sales sold 2,000 copies per month in September and October. Wired, who had a month of Monster when he made his debut in June with more than 100 000 downloads, has fallen to an average of 31 000 between July and September and an average of 21 500 between October and November.

There are also a few items trying some of these numbers seen in their context, arguing that the case of failure is perhaps not as strong as originally expected. Some of these numbers, when looked at in light light approximately 10 million to the United States iPads now as opposed to the population of 300 million are perhaps not as dark.

I don't know publication numbers in the industry, so I have some thoughts on how good / bad / terrible, these figures are for sales of iPad magazine. I don't think the whole if iPad magazines are omitted object is if - not even very interesting because I am a huge fan of the iPad reading and think that there is an enormous potential in this area.

For the last day, or if I have also followed this topic in a new favourite Web conversations - Quora. QUORA is a site that gathers questions and answers, but it is much more than that and is a very intelligent discussions on topics of lots of the technology (and others).

There are some very good responses to Quora question ' why magazines iPad sell does not well?'. Here is the response summary of this article:

Summary of the response

Price (too expensive)
Lack of features
User experience problems.
No subscription model
Large downloads
Little additional benefit on the web version (free)
Low penetration of iPad - there is only ~ 10 m to 300 m magazine buyers United States iPads.

I think this is a good set of answers to explain why iPad magazines are not taking off in what are still the early days of the App Store iPad. Given this, it seems clear that these titles may look much better sales by 2011 as long as a few things:-Apple and major vendors are working on a model of good subscription reasonable. One just to publishers and easy for users to work with. I hope that we will see a dedicated booth / store a kind of app to do this, or maybe an add-on to iBook. -Publishers, with a decent work with subscription model reduce their prices to iPad editions and / or provide better drop-down list for printing, online subscription plans and iPad editions. -publishers produce much better titles. Editions real iPad instead of "posting in" glorified PDF reports online sites or similar.

If we see these things to happen that I do not see why we shouldn't see some very successful iPad 2011 editions.

All them are you? IPad magazines are failing? What can help sell better in the future?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure that you subscribe to my RSS feeds! Tagged as: iPad magazines

View the original article here