e-Reader Mania Hits Magazine Publishing

With an online newsstand for magazines supposedly just weeks away, magazine publishers are rushing to create new, electronic versions of their titles. Rival publishers Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith are said to be backing the planned company, which would sell e-reader versions of their titles.Condé Nast last week showed off what an imagined e-reader version of its glossies would look like, starting with Wired. And Time Inc. is developing e-reader versions of such titles as Time and Sports Illustrated; it’s expected to introduce those iterations early next year.But with magazine-friendly e-readers perhaps months away and their audience potential in question, many publishers are using the smaller screen as a test bed.Digital publishing company Zinio is getting ready to roll out a platform that—like a Condé Nast product that just launched with GQ—will replicate the print magazine on the iPhone. Zinio’s platform is expected to pilot with nine titles including The Economist, Popular Science and Car and Driver and eventually roll out to the rest of its clients, which include Elle, Esquire and Reader’s Digest.The iPhone version will be free to existing subscribers of Zinio-powered digital editions and will sync with those versions. Among other features, users of the iPhone version will be able to e-mail articles from the magazine, access the issue straight from the Web and read text-only versions of articles, an option designed for long stories. “The fact you’re going to be able to see virtually all of the magazine is what excites us the most about it,” said Gregg Hano, Pop Sci vp, publisher. “We really want the readers to be able to get a great editorial product.”Buyers applauded magazines for exploring new digital translations of print. But they also cautioned that audience sizes will be slow to grow. And many questions remain about how big audiences will be and how advertising will be sold and priced. “The advertising opportunities will be high-powered and highly accountable, a 180-degree difference from the opportunities that exist today in book,” said Robin Steinberg, senior vp, director of print investment and activation, MediaVest.Beth Fidoten, senior vp, account director, print, Initiative, said that e-reader versions that are consumer-friendly and paid for by readers stand to be big with advertisers. “Where there’s a paid content, there would be room for advertising because you know who you’re sending advertising to,” she said, adding that the product has to deliver. “It will behoove [publishers] to make sure their Web versions are different from their magazine versions.”How ad pricing will be determined still seems unclear. Buyers said e-readers are likely to command higher rates than print because of their video and e-commerce capabilities.“I think it will be more engaging if the ad message can be immediately actioned,” said Barry Lowenthal, president of The Media Kitchen. “They’re going to go in looking for print CPMs, simply because they’re higher. Since it’s new technology, I think they should set a high price.”But those rates will be tempered by the lack of audience size, at least for now. “The scale is going to be tricky. We just have to set expectations with advertisers. It’s early adopters,” said Brenda White, senior vp, publishing activation director, Starcom USA. “There’ll be higher levels of accountability and ability to target more than you have with magazines.” Such answers will be awhile in coming. Hano, who will include the iPhone version with print ad buys, acknowledged that it may take awhile to build that business: “We need a critical mass of subscribers. Right now, I don’t know exactly how we will break out or separately develop ads. What we really want to do is focus on great digital content and understand over time what pay models will work.”

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e-Reader Mania Hits Magazine Publishing

Lucia Moses

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