Relish Magazine Goes Mobile

DM News is reporting that the Publishing Group of America (PGA) has teamed up with DMD Mobile Holdings Inc. to offer pay-per-use mobile content to readers of print magazines Relish and American Profile.

Mobile content available from Relish, a food-focused monthly, includes recipes as well as searchable recipes on demand, according to the report.

We’re not thrilled about the “pay-per-use” idea; that sounds like a recipe for disaster (pun intended). The text service for each of the two magazines costs $9.99 per month, DM News explains, which consumers sign up for by texting codes they find in banner ads in the print versions. Then they receive a confirmation SMS text message that notes the charges will be added to their next phone bill. PGA is currently looking for ways to sponsor mobile content with ads, which makes much more sense to us, providing they ditch the exorbitant subscription fee.

Steve Minucci, director of business development at PGA, declined to say in the article how many subscribers the text service had aggregated since launching in May, but “intimated that subscription levels were higher than expected,” which we interpret as greater than zero.

PGA teams up with DMD for mobile content [DM News via MocoNews]