Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Declining sales do not mean the end for glossies. More platforms mean better ways of connecting people with their passions...

As it launches a new weekly tech magazine on iPad, publisher Future puts some numbers on impressive tablet magazine gains, but overall revenue is slightly down.

 

Magazine publisher Future says its tablet magazines are earning it $1 million per month in gross revenue.

 

It is now selling 239,000 tablet magazines per month, led by T3 in the UK (30,000) and MacLife in the States (65,000), plus dozens of other mostly replica editions amongst its more than 100 tablet titles.

 

[Valuable insight  into tablet-only magazine publisher ~ Jeff]

Beyond distribution and a better user experience, being web friendly fits into the Flipboard business plan. The company has begun selling full-page ads mixed in with regular content like what you might see in a high-end print magazine. Larger professional publishers, including the owners of this publication, currently have revenue-sharing agreements in place for their own magazines, but the company plans to expand that to other content and curation creators.

Around two million magazines have been created since the March launch of the DIY tool, and many of the top ones are being curated by enthusiasts rather than pros — photography, maritime shipping, beer, and GIFS are some example themes. There’s a lot of additional reader attention to sell against.

But what about the publications trying to figure out their online (and mobile) business models? Why should they want Flipboard to get a piece of their precious few remaining ad dollars via alternative destinations like native apps and now its own web links?For some of them/us, the answer is going to be that they don’t have the resources to build good web sites and mobile apps anyway. For others, it’s that they can build their own products but don’t know how to monetize them well....

NewsBeast Labs team creating, teaching digital journalism.

"Journalism across the board is moving away from the 'ta-da!' moment of publishing," Keller said. Social media editor Brian Ries added, "it's a result of the nerds taking over in a way. Print and magazines are very closed by nature and developers are coming in from an open sourced world where everything that you learn is shared," he said, noting that one of NewsBeast Labs' primary efforts is to help educate the newsroom.

"Sharing and educating is an obvious thing if you come from a software background," lead developer Andrew Sprouse noted. "The reason digital journalism has some of these beautiful user interfaces is because you are standing on the shoulders of programming giants before you. And everyone here in our newsroom is intelligent and capable of learning this stuff to some degree," he said....