Too many Hoops for Hulu for Magazines?

Next Issue Media has launched a 'Preview Service' with seven magazines sold on subscription or as single issues. Next Issue Media has been called the Hulu for magazines and is the creation of Condé Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corporation and Time Inc. Only seven magazines currently feature in this Preview Service, but they are top drawer items: The New Yorker, Popular Mechanics, Fortune, Esquire and Time etc. The consortium is advancing on a narrow front both in content selection and in delivery channels, and at this point only the Android operating system, but no phones, and the only tablet device is the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Narrower still: since at this point the magazines are only available via the Verizon WiFi service and an app in the Vcast (Verizon) app store. But more magazines and more channels are promised for the autumn (more details at MediaMemo -- Peter Kafka).

There are plenty of difficulties in running consortia, and I take my hat off to the NIM team for getting something out of the door when all the backing companies will inevitably have very different views on how the terms shall be crafted, and wary of precedents being set. Perhaps for this reason they are at this stage offering 'monthly subscriptions' and 'single issue purchases'. Supporting two very different access/license models indefinitely could get very complicated. Its also complicated for consumers that, depending on the title, 'existing print subscribers are eligible for a free or discounted digital upgrade'. If a subscriber to two print titles gets free access to the New Yorker but has to pay a digital upgrade for his sub to Popular Mechanics, NIM's customer support lines will soon be red hot. Building a system that manages all this reliably, will not be a trivial undertaking. And the consortium will lose its way if the magazine access model is not standardised across all the titles served, when 100s of magazines are on offer. Allowing publishers to set the price of their services is one thing but allowing the publishers to set different access models and subscription rights is fraught with difficulties.

It is going to be a challenge for this Hulu for magazines to achieve the Hulu-style popular momentum that they will need to secure the continuing support of their backers. But they do have a chance, because their backers are strong media players, all with an interest in maintaining some leverage over other players who will be driving digital consumer acquisition. Having a 'tame' Android platform with some market penetration will be useful for all these publishers. But consider the range of devices that Next Issue Media will be playing with or against. These will include:

1. Apple for the iPad (in pole position)
2. Apple for the iPhone (not to be overlooked as its a somewhat different delivery proposition)
3. Amazon for Kindle
4. Amazon for soon to emerge Android App store (and likely Amazon media-consumption Tablet). Amazon may have several tablet form factors.
   
5. Barnes and Noble magazines on Nook and next generation Android tab
   
6. Android app store (ie the Google managed app store, with flavours for several levels of Android phone/tablet). Lets call this 6a, 6b, 6c.....
   
7. Blackberry Playbook platform (with its own set of 'Android' complications)
   
8. HP Web/OS (Next Issue Media say that they will support this before the end of the year)
9. Nokia/Microsoft tablets when they come...

We have at least nine different platforms right off the bat, and the chances are that there are several more, some with a significant spin that we don't know about yet, that could play a part in the digital magazine market next year. Who says strategic planning for digital magazines is a straightforward business?

Apple's Terms of Trade Finally Win Acceptance with Magazines

Suddenly the dam seems to have broken and the major consumer magazine publishers are lining up for iPad editions sold on subscription through iTunes.

In the last ten days, Time Inc, Hearst and Conde Nast have all announced moves towards selling their leading consumer magazines as subscriptions on the iPad. They are also offering free iPad access to their existing print subscribers, a simple and very necessary step as we have been emphasizing for months.

In disclosing these new offerings the major consumer magazine companies have been stressing that Apple has been willing to make concessions and to grant flexibility (see reports of such by Peter Kafka at AllThingsDigital). I expect some modest concessions have been granted, but on matters of detail and to help with 'bedding in'. Apple has not had to modify its developer contract or bend on its commission terms. Apple has the whip hand and, more to the point, Apple will not make concessions on issues that put obstacles in the way of the successful operation of the iTunes service. Apple will not make concessions which force it to re-write its end-user license agreements. Apple will not make deals with magazine companies on its 30% commission when it has been completely impervious to the pleadings of the music publishers on royalty rates. The bald and uncomfortable truth for these giants of consumer publishing is that Apple is not going to do deals. Apple is not going to cramp the economy of iTunes for the sake of the magazine business. So what follows?

1. Magazines will sign up to the iPad service in a growing avalanche. Now that the big 3 of the US consumer magazine business have moved over to the Apple way of doing business, we expect that most major magazine companies will move over to producing iPad apps for their key magazines.
2. Within 12 months iTunes will contain many more iPad magazine titles than has ever been collected in one physical kiosk or emporium. Finding titles in such a rich product mix will become more of a problem. But magazines are better placed than most categories to thrive since magazine titles are (usually) so clearly branded and so distinctive.
   
3. The magazines in iTunes will be offered primarily on a subscription basis. Hitherto iPad apps were being offered on a single issue basis.
   
4. The major consumer magazines in all the major national markets will soon be offering iPad apps through iTunes and they will also be offering free digital access to their existing print subscribers. Magazines will do this because in that way they retain more control over their subscriber base and can avoid having all their subscription services handled by Apple. They retain, indeed enhance, the crucial relationship that they have with paying customers.
5. The prices for digital magazines within iTunes will be pitched at increasingly aggressive levels, Bloomberg Business Week costs $36 per annum. The Esquire iPad app will apparently cost $19.99 pa. Apple's pricing rules mean that international pricing will level-down to the best home market subscription offers (US subscription prices for consumer magazines are low in comparison to European prices).
6. These recent announcements have all been focussed on the iPad. Conde Nast and Time Inc are committed to producing iPad apps, it is not clear whether the iPhone market is being by-passed or merely temporarily left behind.
   
7. Android apps also appear to be taking a back seat. It will be interesting to see whether this week's Google I/O, now in its second day, has any mention of digital magazines. Not much sign of them in the opening sessions.
   
8. The apps that are being produced for the iPad bear a remarkable similarity to the print product. The idea that a magazine app needs to be something radically different from the page-oriented, highly designed and issue-based package that we all know, is losing ground. Most magazine publishers cannot afford to run two parallel design, production and editorial processes.
   

There is no question that the iPad is a very good device for reading digital versions of print magazines. The magazine publishers have, of course, realised this from the outset. They are now beginning to realise that Apple's terms for trade are not so bad. When Amazon brings out its Android tablet I suspect that these same magazine publishers may find that the Amazon terms of trade for digital magazines are just as unyielding, and perhaps in some ways worse than those that Apple have set before them. My first take on the Amazon app developer rules certainly caused me to blench.

Conde Nast Needs to Redouble its Bets on the iPad

AdAge is carrying a story that suggests that Conde Nast is pulling back from its out and out commitment to iPad apps. With hints and whispers that its initial forays have not been working too well. An anonymous company source opines:

"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."

"They're not all doing all that well, so why rush to get them all on there?" the publisher added. AdAge: Conde Nast Taps Brakes....

The piece has a sufficient concrete detail on Conde Nast's plans and intentions to suggest that the story stands up. So what has gone wrong? Nearly everything.

Conde Nast's mistakes can be divided between mistakes about the direction of the technology, and mistakes about the kind of success that digital magazines should be aiming at on a new tablet platform. First, mis-taking the direction of the technology:

1. For no good reason at all, Conde Nast assumed or hoped that Apple would back-track and embrace Flash before launching the iPad.
2. Conde Nast has relied too much on an alliance with Adobe and a fallacious confidence that Adobe's knowledge of the design and content management process in print production would somehow enable Adobe to come up with a winning magazine app work-flow. But Adobe's Creative Suite software solutions for building apps seems to be unreasonably cumbersome. Too slow and too complicated and in most cases the finished article is disappointing as an app.
   
3. Conde Nast (and most of the other big magazine publishers) have expressed the hope that Apple would gradually 'loosen up' and provide publishers with access to consumer usage data sufficient to support the existing advertising revenues that magazine publishers depend on. The idea that digital advertising revenues and metrics will be controlled by the magazine publishers is a major delusion (incidentally even less likely to be realized in the Android tablet market which many consumer publishers are gazing at fondly).

Although Conde Nast made some very rum bets on the technical direction that the iPad platform was headed; the worst mistakes they have made have been strictly publishing gaffes. Here are three:

1. It is tempting to think that you can charge your existing subscribers MORE for delivering an iPad app. Tempting but fatal. First, because your existing subscribers will feel that they ought to have free access to stuff that they have already paid for in print (see the comments on the iTunes page for the New Yorker iPad app). Second, because publishers who price their digital offerings as though they were competitive with their print offerings will lose print subscribers: if a publisher treats his print and digital editions as though they were 'substitutable' purchases and prices them accordingly, he will find that the market treats them as substitutable. Above all, publishers have to look at this from the subscriber's point of view. The point of having digital and print editions is that you capture your subscribers from two different directions, not that you force them to choose between print and digital.
   
2. Like most consumer publishers, Conde Nast have been looking at the apps market as though it was a completely new opportunity. When fundamentally a magazine app has to be the magazine, and this gives the publisher real strength if they can leverage the resources in their back issues and the archive. Far too many consumer magazines have ignored their archives when producing apps. Yet the archive is something that can most easily be given new impact and immediacy from a digital perspective. Since Conde Nast already has a fabulous archive for eg The New Yorker and Wired, they should have designed their apps to take advantage of this richness.
3. Conde Nast is still not selling its iPad apps on subscription -- now presumably as a mark of its displeasure with Apple for not providing sufficient access to consumer data. However much Conde Nast may be irritated by Apple's firmness/intransigence, it should be selling subscriptions to iPad and iPhone users, not selling one issue at a time. The iPad is most certainly and obviously a market for selling subscriptions. Music companies know this, games companies know this, film and TV companies understand this. Magazine publishers are good at selling subscriptions and they also know that it takes time to build subscriber momentum behind a magazine. If the Conde Nast management wastes two years from the launch of the iPad in not-selling-subscriptions their successors and heirs will pay a bitter price for this intransigence and this slow start.

Final thought. The next iPad, call it iPad3, will come out next year. The chances are it will have much better graphics and a screen with higher resolution ('retina display'). There is a growing perception that Apple is getting to a kind of 'escape velocity' with its iPad offering, so that competitor tablet platforms, lacking manufacturing volume and the pressure hose of iTunes, will find it very difficult to compete with Apple. The effective competition, when it comes, may well be from the low end, or from quarters other than the mainstream media experience epitomised by consumer magazines and iTunes. But Conde Nast wants to play at the high end, which is where Apple will probably be the strongest player for the next few years. Conde Nast needs to have its magazines on the high end tablet platform when it moves to the next level in 2012. It needs to wake up fast.

The New Yorker App: Fabulous but Flawed

One of the best magazines of all time and the acme of American style, The New Yorker, this week they launched an iPad app, and it is in some respects a brilliant effort. There are some very strong aspects:

1. A sensational front cover by David Hockney, painted on the iPad with Brushes and with a second interactive page where you can see the way he painted it (brush strokes re-played). One might say that this is a very simple idea and a very straightforward implementation. But it is nevertheless brilliant. This will be copied many times by iPad magazine covers and digital magazine art; but perhaps never bettered.
   
2. There is a funny commercial for their new app by Jason Schwartzman (directed by Roman Coppola) and you can see Jason taking a shower with his iPad here.
3. The visuals in the app are mostly fabulous (we have a bevy of design quibbles, but this is very much a first effort and the designers have taken some risks) and the quality of much of the design of the magazine comes through brilliantly.
4. Some of the ads are astonishingly strong, especially the small ads with links -- for example try the Swan Galleries ad with its links through to catalogues for current auctions which can all be viewed with great detail from within the app. This placement gives the right kind of information-dense ad incredible 'focus' and visibility.
   
5. The cartoons are, as is to be expected, brilliant and can be viewed in place, scattered through the magazine, or together in a cartoon gallery.

We should aplaud a great first effort, and I continue to enjoy the magazine days after downloading it. The creative talent associated with The New Yorker is second to none. However, there are a few 'buts' which we notice in a spirit of friendly and constructive criticism.

First, the information design of the Condé Nast apps inherits a matrix-framework built for them by Adobe. The Wired apps were the first to show it, and it seems as though this duplicated portrait/landscape rendering of a magazine layout could become a standard Adobe packaging technique. The app produced in this way is rather 'portly' (though much smaller than the Wired apps) and it seems that The New Yorker has some reservations about the approach. We saw the Deputy Editor, Pam McCarthy, noting for All Things Digital, that the Adobe method of scrolling a long story doesn't work, “It’s pretty clear that when you have a 10,000-word story, smooth scrolling [in the vertical] is not a good option,” she says. For me, the Adobe technique of hanging each story as though they were page proofs draped on a 'washing line' through which users can navigate the magazine as a matrix, is not a good option either. Furthermore I am sure that Adobe will have to change their model of what a digital magazine is, because representing and designing a magazine in two different orientations creates more work for designers and, much worse, it creates unnecessary work for digital readers who have to learn about two slightly different digital representations of the magazine both variant in important respects from the magazine as it has been loved and learned in print. Finally, in precisely targeting the screen size and functionality of the iPad (the app is not at all available for the iPhone) Adobe seem to have created an endless design treadmill for their magazine customers who may have to produce subtly different solutions for each tablet platform. The only practical way to solve this looming problem (there will soon be many tablet formats and Android will not help by having variant app standards) is to treat the print magazine as a virtual book (if you insist a 'page turning' object) and then build interactivity on top of the virtual book. In that way a scaleable and generative solution can be delivered for a large range of reader devices. You will find more precise questions about the design solutions chosen for the app at MagCulture, but this fundamental issue of order, predictability and information architecture is the basic flaw in the Adobe method.

The second reservation, is that Condé Nast seem to be stuck in a publisher stand-off with Apple their necessary distribution partner for the iPad (no one can get an app on to the iPad without Apple approval!). Condé Nast President Bob Sauerberg as quoted by the Wall Street Journal:

"It is important to the New Yorker that we have offerings that allow long-term relationships with the consumers. Obviously, we don't have that in place for the moment with Apple. We are very keen to do that." WSJ, September 26

The astonishing thing about this comment is that Condé Nast already has a broad and a deep connection with its long-term consumers (the last time I looked it had just over 1 million of them), and it could easily enable them to access the iPad app if it adopted the strategy which the Wall Street Journal itself adopts of giving free iPad access to print and existing digital subscribers. There is no need to ask Apple's permission to do this. If Conde Nast does not switch on its loyal print subscribers -- which is perfectly within the constraints of the iTunes/Apple proposition -- it is very rich to complain about Apple not allowing the company to connect with its readers. When Sauerberg was promoted he noted

"We want our readers to engage with our brands in a variety of ways, and we feel our success will be based on being able to provide our content seamlessly across every appropriate platform that exists now and in the future. We want to take that engagement and continue to try to increase it and revalue the consumer proposition. We want to do that with our magazines and our websites and our digital applications." (Folio Magazine -- Transcending Print Q&A with Bob Sauerberg)

Fine words and correct. But where is the follow through? The iPad could be a seamless bridge to the consumer's existing subscription (well a small hump of a bridge, almost, almost, seamless). The iPad actually gives Condé Nast a very straightforward way of serving existing print subscribers and were Condé Nast to do this, they would immediately have a much stronger digital connection with many of their readers and one which in the long and the short-term will serve them much better than a relationship mediated and controlled by Apple. To argue that Apple is not letting you connect to your subscribers when you do not connect the subscribers that you already have, and for which Apple will make no charge, is simply absurd.

The WIRED app -- Who is in Charge?

I recommend the WIRED Magazine app. If you have an iPad (it will not run on an iPhone) and have been a Wired reader do get the app ($4.99) to make up your own mind about it. These are some of the things I most like about it:

• Gorgeous graphics and 'interesting' design -- we will get on to that.
• Excellent and pithy articles on topics that any iPad owner will find interesting (lots of stuff: eg Steven Levy on why and how tablets will work)
• Helpful navigation through the 'layout' mode for viewing the whole magazine in article strips (icon at top right)
• I liked the interactivity in the Mars article (but its hard to read/navigate because a bit lacking in stability - patience!)
• Great ads and they are all there, sometimes with links
  

There is already quite a bit of controversy about the Wired app and it has had a painful birth. Originally, Conde Nast and Adobe were working together on a prototype that would have used Flash and the expectation was that Apple would support Flash directly on the iPhone OS, or that the Adobe cross-compiler solution would do the business. Steve Jobs shot down this idea. So they have clearly had to cobble together something pretty fast, abandoning a framework that must have cost them a lot of time and effort. The resulting app is massive (500 Mb) and has some obvious misses -- no search! But they will surely be able to improve the delivery when they move forward. Here are three important links if you want more insight into the reactions and the controversy:

1. Adobe's blog, welcoming the arrival of the app: 'The future of magazines is now - and it starts in a tangible way with the WIRED Reader.' (They must know that isn't right, they know that this version of the Wired app was a rescue mission and pretty much lashed together when they had to come up with something fast. Adobe do not come out of this whole affair at all well. They do not have a 'road map' for magazine publishers and had better come clean on that. See Bill McCoy's comments).
2. Interfacelab (Jon Gilkinson) has many astute comments and insights. Its also rude verging on insulting: "Sure, it’s a print designers wet dream – but it really should be a consumer’s wet dream. And it most certainly is not that." Gilkinson's answer is to put the business back in the hands of the web designers at Wired HQ and deliver the whole thing in HTML5. The circulation director or publisher is going to reject this proposal as there is some sign that users will buy apps, but not so much that they will buy 'urls'.
   
3. Print designers wet dream? Well try Oliver Reichenstein's blog at Information Architects to find out why it isn't that. This blog even brought in some thoughtful comments from one of the type designers consulted by Wired over the design of this issue of the magazine (Jonathan Hoefler)

Reichenstein's critique gets very detailed and very nerdy, but it is truly surprising that he focuses on the typography, not on the images, illustrations and navigation. His key point is foreshadowed in this objection:

But text is a different story. It needs a lot of rhetoric skill and typographic care to do what it should: to communicate. On the screen things become even more complicated. While WIRED journalists and graphic designers are still at the top of their game, the typography and the interaction design of the iPad app doesn’t come even close.

So Reichenstein presumably thinks that magazines should be root and branch re-designed for the iPad. "You can’t design iPad apps in InDesign and export them as flat files. That’s nothing short of amateurish. " But of course you can design magazines in InDesign and then export pages to an app, and this is a very strange comment unless you believe that magazines need to be re-designed in precise and granular detail for iPads. InDesign does not exist to design iPad apps, it exists to design magazines and other forms of document. But it is equally inevitable that most documents will now need to be read, used and presented on iPads (iPhones, Android devices etc). So a modern magazine, newspaper, book, catalogue etc better look good or 'reasonably OK' when it is rendered on some of these devices in widespread use. The transition has to be automatic. No text designers involved. Does anybody seriously think that text in magazines needs to be designed and then redesigned for each and every piece of consumer computing technology that comes along. Will magazines need to be 'redesigned' for next year's Android and then again for the 2012 super-iPad? So that they can support different screen resolutions or styles of 'text flow'? Magazines do not need to be redesigned for the iPad, their use and their usability as digital objects has to be understood before they are transformed to an app platform. This is not primarily a task for text designers, or even for magazine designers.

Wired has always had a deliberately various, bold, edgy, contrapuntal visual design. It has been a notable strength of the print magazine. The variety and confusion has worked so well in recent years partly because it apes in print the choice and chaos of the web; each Wired story carrying its own design conventions or layout, as though we were tipped into another web site as we turned the page. Each article node with its own style-sheet. I suspect that the post-modern jokiness and anarchy of Wired's visual design, which works so well when it is a print-only magazine, may be something of a weakness when it comes to its digital existence. Perhaps, as it heads to a new digital existence on the iPad and whatever comes next, Wired will need to forsake the promiscuous hurly-burly of the designer's chaise-longe for the sobriety and solidity of the app store.

Reflecting on this Wired app, which it has to be said is a bit of a 'curate's egg', I have been asking myself who has been driving this project forward? Adobe may have been at one stage, but they seem to have driven this proposition off the road (see Bill McCoy Wired is Tired). Conde Nast appears to have given the leadership role to Wired's distinguished designer Scott Dadich, but getting the digital strategy right is not merely a design decision, it is not just a technical decision. The project should now be driven by the publisher, even better it should be driven by the circulation director of the Conde Nast group. One can understand why Wired would be one of the first magazines from Conde Nast to have its own app, but whatever solution or platform is chosen for Conde Nast's magazines should really be one that can deliver across the group. Si Newhouse must have expected his premier publishing company to have chosen the best strategy for digital magazines by now. The solution is overdue and I think/hope they will get it right soon.