GQ sells 365 copies of its Apple iPad — or $1,091 in sales
The iPad is making its mark on magazine publishing – albeit a rather small one –according to figures release by GQ publisher Conde Nast. The glossies publisher announced that 365 people downloaded the December issue of GQ onto Apple’s latest must-have gadget.
The downloadable issue was priced at $2.99, $2 less than its paper counterpart, which for Conde Nast meant £1,091.35 in sales.
OK, so it’s little over a grand – a paltry sum for a publishing behemoth such as Conde Nast, but the implications for publishing are interesting, despite some saying that the iPad might not be the saviour that some have flagged it as.
Pete Hunsinger, the mag’s US publisher, said: “This costs us nothing extra – no printing or postage.
“Everything is profit and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”
In spite of the modest returns, Hunsinger’s comments tallied with the fact that GQ stablemates Glamour, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired are to become available as iPad downloads demonstrate how serious the mag industry is taking the iPad.
But it’s early days and observers are still somewhat in the dark – iPad app sales data is elusive, although there are some interesting figures out there: Rupert Murdoch recently announced that his WSJ app attracted 64,000 subscribers, while broadcaster ABC said its app was downloaded more than 200,000 times. But an important point – both are free to download. And so really as we already know — free content is not going to save anyone.
So until take-up of the iPad reaches some kind of critical mass, it is impossible to predict just what impact the technology will have on paid-for mags and traditionalists can – for the time being, at least – still sleep easy in their beds.
All Comments
This article was about as vapid as the magazine executive quoted. “This costs us nothing extra”. Of course it does. You had to set up to format the content and publish it on the ipad platform. You had to pay Apple a cut of your paltry income for it. And most likely many of those people who bought the app will drop the casual copy of the magazine that they used to pick up at the newsstand.
Dont get me wrong – I’m not saying publishers should ignore going digital. In fact they have to do it. But the idea that it is “extra money” is laughable. What ding digital represents is a seismic change that will force magazine publishers to streamline their product and operations dramatically to survive in the cutthroat world of near infinite competition, including free sources of entertainment.
Expecting the Ipad to save you is a joke. Apple is just pulling these publishers along by the nose. They are going to face savage cuts in the end – and apple will be taking a cut of every penny – the few pennies that they get. They had best forget these closed platforms and quickly get to publishing value added digital media in a open format that anyone can access and buy whether you have an expensive apple toy or not. Oh wait, that will probably be flash-based and Apple has forced them to do extra work if they want to use flash, rather than complile and publish cheaply and easily.
Lambs to the slaughter….
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by BrandRepublic, Media Week, Wendy White, Fraser MacLellan, Fraser MacLellan and others. Fraser MacLellan said: RT @ BrandRepublic GQ sells 365 copies of its Apple iPad — or $1,091 in sales http://fwd4.me/OwE <-doesn't seem much but needs more research [...]
[...] The print magazine industry, somewhat clunkily in many cases, is releasing titles onto Apple’s must-have – GQ publisher Conde Naste recently trumpeted that it sold 365 copies of the US December issue of the men’s mag as a digital …. [...]