Making the iPad work for publishers | 18 May 2012

Are publishers making a success of their iPad publishing? With the shiny tablet just celebrating its second birthday, it seems timely to look again at what some hailed as the ‘Jesus tablet’ that would lead struggling publishers to a digital salvation. Especially since the Financial Times, which has made a roaring success of its digital publishing with more than 270,000 paying subscribers, announced at the beginning of May that it was about to shut down its iPad app for good…

On the plus side, it is clear that iPad users like reading newspapers and especially magazines on their devices, and early research suggests that they enjoy the experience so much that they tend to spend more time reading publications than they did before they owned their iPads. And the launch last September of Apple’s Newsstand, which offers readers a mini-store devoted to publications and neatly gathers your publishing downloads and subscriptions into a single place, allowed some publishers – Future in particular – to sell hundreds of thousands of magazines using cheap ‘turning-page’ digital replicas of their print editions.

But it has by no means been all plain sailing. Some publishers have spent very considerable sums on developing special, highly-interactive editions of their publications that made the most out of the iPad – and have seen scant return on their investment. Jason Pontin, publisher of MIT’s respected Technology Review, complained bitterly that it cost him $124,000 to develop an iPad native app which ended up garnering just 353 iPad subscriptions at $25 each.

Other publishers, notably the Financial Times, objected strongly to Apple’s decision to charge them 30% of the subscriptions they sold through their apps, ban any links to their websites from their apps, ban them from selling subscriptions cheaper than on iTunes, and prevent publishers from seeing their subscribers’ demographics unless those subscribers specifically opted-in to the release of the information. The FT responded by withdrawing from iTunes a year ago and launching its own web app aimed at Apple users, deploying HTML5 technology that allows the editorial content – words, headlines, images – to adapt automatically to the size and shape of the device screen being used to view it. Cunningly, when iPad or iPhone users first access the app, they are offered a couple of options that allow them to download the day’s newspaper for offline reading, and to access the FT every day via a desktop icon that takes them straight to the latest edition. In practice, this makes the FT‘s web app – which completely bypasses all Apple’s charges and restrictions – almost indistinguishable from a ‘normal’ native app, apart from the fact that it doesn’t show up in Newsstand. So successful has the FT been in wooing its loyal readers away to its new web app that it now feels able to pull the plug on the original iPad app.

So, what lessons can publishers learn from these last two years? And what is the way forward?

I’m a print publisher: what should I do about an iPad edition? 

You’ve already paid your designers to lay out your print magazine. Creating a special iPad version means you then have to lay it out two more times, as iPads show the same page differently in portrait and landscape views. This is expensive, especially as you’ve possibly also created a digital replica for your website… and maybe a different version yet again for your iPhone native app. If you want to reach the millions of people carrying Android smartphones, that’s yet another layout exercise.And then Apple will slice 30% off the top of your subscription revenue. So, unless you have good evidence that there is a huge and new readership just panting to buy your magazine on iTunes, test out the market by putting the digital replica on the iPad before spending tens of thousands on building a native app, and tens of thousands more on laying out the same pages four or five times over.

I’m launching a digital-only magazine: should I go onto the iPad as well as the web? 

Depends – are your target readers heavy users of iPads? Or would having an iPad edition make your advertisers and stakeholders take your publication more seriously? If not, then every pound spent on iPad editions is a pound wasted. But you might find (for example) that your readers tend to have smartphones, in which case you might want to bypass the iPad and go straight for the iPhone and Android smartphones instead. On the other hand, if you’re planning a luxury consumer launch and your readers tend to be well-heeled iPad owners, then a native iPad app allied to a strong marketing campaign is probably the right way to go.

Is HTML5 the answer to all our problems? 

Good grief, have you learned nothing from the lesson of the ‘Jesus tablet’? The real problems that most publishers suffer from have got nothing to do with which media they’re using for their publishing. Problems like not knowing who your readers are, not doing enough marketing, not creating compelling content that people are prepared to pay for, clinging to outdated advertising models and so on. HTML5 does indeed have some compelling properties; it allows you to build a magazine once, and then publish it to many platforms. But there are some caveats; first and most important, it’s early days for HTML5 and some browsers support it better than others, and you have limited control of how the magazine layout will look on the screens of different devices. So the HTML5 route favours simple, copy-oriented layouts rather than complex, heavily-designed spreads with lots of elements. Another way of saying this is that HTML5 may be most apt for B2B publishers whose readerships want editorial content rather than fancy layouts.

How can I make money out of digital publishing? 

The basics are exactly the same as for publishing in print; create excellent editorial content that is well-targeted at specific readerships, and then market assiduously so that your desired readers know about the good stuff you have for them. If your content is really strong, by which I mean better than (or better focused than) what’s out there already, then people will buy it. But remember – profit comes from making more money than you spend. If you build six different versions of your publication, you are creating a mountain of cost that subscriptions and ad revenue will struggle to cover. So do your research and be cautious before launching different editions all over the place. And stop blaming Jesus for letting you down.

Mark Rosselli is chairman of CPL