*** From the Archives ***

This article is from March 28, 2012, and is no longer current.

Publications in iPad Newsstand Thrive

While moving $70,000 per day isn’t much for some Silicon Valley firms or metropolitan newspapers at their heyday, it’s a remarkable number for the iPad Newsstand that launched only six months ago. The Newsstand is the iPad uber-app that sells and distributes subscription-based periodicals, like newspapers and magazines. The report, by analytics firm Distimo, says that the top 100 Newsstand apps account for the $70,000 in sales.
More mining from the report shoes that Newsstand apps account for 7 percent of the top 200 apps sold on the iPad and that all “almost all this revenue is coming from in-app purchasing,” Distimo reported, meaning that users purchased subscriptions or individual issues while within the publication’s app.
It’s an impressive sales number to be sure, but there’s more to it than that. The publishing industry is imperiled. Publishing on tablet devices was supposed to save a business whose net worth has plummeted. But it’s generally accepted that the success of digital subscriptions for print publications has been lukewarm at best and that print subscribers would never embrace tablet devices.
This report suggests that the death of publishing has been premature. For the month of February, the top-grossing Newsstand apps were The Daily, NYTimes for iPad, New Yorker Magazine, National Geographic, and Cosmopolitan. All but one of these are print publications that are embracing tablet-based publishing.
The numbers also gives a boost to services like the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite that allows designers to produce iPad apps from InDesign files. Two of the top five grossing applications are created with DPS. In January, DPS-produced apps accounted for 14 of the top 20 Newsstand apps. (To see the January 2012 Adobe report, click here. A gallery of publications that are produced for the iPad and/or Android-based devices is available here and it shows an amazing variety of topics, scope, and languages.
The takeaway from the Distimo report is that, while it’s not out of the woods, publishing is finding its way through the digital landscape. And that’s good for all creative professionals.
 

  • Anonymous says:

    Are stock photographer’s sales down? Ye, but whatch them start to rise when new electronic publications begin to catch om. Photos are not going to go out of date – just the delivery method has become out-dated. –Rohn Engh photosource.com

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