Digital magazines still have adverts non-shock
I’m a huge fan of Marco Arment’s Instapaper and usually enjoy his blog, but in Double-dipping, he offers an opinion that, as a guy who writes for magazines, rubs me up the wrong way:
I bought my first iPad magazine1 last weekend: one issue of The New Yorker. […] As I was flipping through it, when I saw the first of many full-page ads, I was offended. I thought, “I paid good money for this and it’s full of ads?”
Consumers have tolerated double-dipping — products that cost customers money and have ads — for over a century.
Double-dipping? An interesting term for advertising. In reality, adverts are a subsidy. Without them, magazines would cost more, and I’ll bet—given that magazines are already often quite expensive—that would anger readers more than a few ads they can skip astonishingly easily.
It doesn’t feel as offensive in contexts that have always had it, such as printed newspapers and magazines, or cable TV.
Ads in digital magazines are a swipe to shift away. They’re easier to skip than adverts on TV.
Maybe these different standards are because the contexts are so different: magazines, newspapers, and TV all feel cheap, since they’ve shat on consumers to make a few more cents for decades,
Just… wow. I remember when I was a kid and bought chunky videogame magazines for about a pound. Typically, in those days, they would be 50 per cent adverts. In some cases, I actually quite liked the adverts; even if I didn’t, it was clear from responses in the letters pages that without them, I’d be paying three quid for the magazine instead of one. This didn’t make me feel like I was being “shat on”—it made me realise that I was getting the same content, but for less money, with the compromise being some ads I could very easily ignore.
Adverts are only really a problem if they’re horribly intrusive, such as when a television show is astonishingly badly cut, or when websites shove ads in your face before you see any content.
… but the iPad or a well-designed website are clean, high quality, and customer-centric.
Or maybe it’s just me. I just don’t feel comfortable paying for an iPad or web publication, no matter how good it is, and then having ads shoved down my throat. It makes me feel ripped off: what did I pay for?
How about the content, and the wages of the people who write the content, and who design the app?
The thing about magazines is that usually the advertisements are tailored to the reading audience. Women who buy Elle or Vogue are going to see full page ads for new dresses or handbags – items they’ll surely buy (or ask their significant others to buy them) for holidays and birthdays.
I love Macworld’s advertisers, as I’ve purchased several items because of their displays between articles. If Macworld had a bunch of advertisements for new Dell computers or McDonald’s hamburgers, there’d be no value in it for the reader.
Advertisements aren’t all necessarily bad – how excited do we get at Superbowl time to see the new ads from big companies like Pepsi and Doritos? I don’t drive a Volkswagen, but I sure loved the “Darth Vader” commercial from this year.
Internet ads can be intrusive, like those miserable inline link ads that pop up a little bubble when you hover over them for a millisecond, or those full-screen pop-over video ads you find on sites like the Huffington Post, often because they aren’t tailored to our own tastes.
But at the same time, those sites often give away their content for free to gain readers. More readers mean more ad impressions. More ad impressions mean more money, etc… It’s pretty safe to say most readers on online content aren’t going to pay to read it, especially if they’ve been getting it for free all along. They’ll just find somewhere else to go, regardless of quality.
Which brings up one last point – quality. Macworld has a quality staff of writers, editors and photographers. Same goes for the New Yorker, New York Times and Tap! Magazine 😉 You pay to read people like Jason Snell, Maureen Dowd and Craig Grannell, so making one extra swipe past an ad for a new Mac app to get to their content seems like a pretty fair trade-off to make sure they stay in business.
Well said Craig. I was disappointed to read Marco’s opinion on this subject, and find it to be slightly hypocritical of him. I’m an Instapaper subscriber (yeah I know, it’s only $1/month) and I’ve paid for the app yet I still see ads when I load Instapaper up in my Web browser. Also, on Marco’s podcast I listen the increasingly obtrusive adverts despite being a donor to 5by5.
If I took Marco’s attitude, I would want the Instapaper site and his podcast to be ad free. But I don’t. I want them to keep going, and so I accept the ads as a necessary boost to their income in addition to me paying them direct.
(I’ll also briefly mention the hypocrisy whereby Marco can state in an episode that he doesn’t like apps that beg people to rate them in iTunes, yet he puts up with Dan asking listeners to rate and review the programs, mid-show. Sorry but it’s been bugging me for a while.)
I meant to type “Macworld” instead of “the New Yorker” in that last paragraph, but whatever, you get the idea 🙂
Hey Maurice (and Craig),
You’re making a bad, uninformed argument. You can turn ads off for the Instapaper website, if you’re a subscriber. Just click “turn ads off” on your account page.
Also, you’re not paying for the podcast, you’re donating to the site. That’s great, and I applaud your generosity, but it’s a fundamentally different act than paying for content.
Also, don’t conflate Marco with Dan. I am sure Marco would prefer the podcast to be ad-free and begging-free. But he knows that Dan has to do these necessary evils to fund the program.
Because in contrary to a magazine, the podcast is free. Without paying for the service, it would be hypocritical for a listener to feel entitled to anything.
As soon as you pay for something, that changes. It is then legitimate to expect a pleasant, ad-free experience.
As for Marco’s argument, I actually agree with him. He, and the whole mac-tech-blog crowd has been consistent in looking down on the common Android practice of free apps with ads, instead of paid apps without. So the thought of paying for something (a nyt issue) and still having to endure ads does indeed smell off double dipping. I don’t get why you’re astonished by his post, Craig. It is remarkably consistent thinking of Marco.
I’m not astonished with Marco’s post per se, but the attitude. Ads are a subsidy in digital magazines, just as they are on paper and on television. And there are also a ton of paid apps out there (especially games) that effectively include advertising, mostly for the developer or publisher’s products. But the point is that Marco’s post either shows a lack of understanding for how the publishing industry is supported, or a lack of giving a crap about the same. Without ads, you either wave goodbye to a massive number of digital magazines—since they won’t be able to fund themselves—or you ramp up the price significantly. People already moan that digital mags aren’t cheap enough, not least when compared to the paper equivalents (ignoring the massive overheads of content creation, somehow believing printing and paper is the bulk of the cost, and ignoring the costs of app dev and layout), and so potentially making them more expensive through removing ads seems like commercial suicide.
It was disappointing to hear it, and another reminder that Marco’s experience is fairly limited. Not an insult to him, I used to be naïve about printing and publishing, but I’ve worked close enough to it now to understand the costs and what markets will bear to meet those costs.
I don’t mind the ads because I’ve read magazines for years and understand how the profit model works. I also subscribe to magazines that are fully reader funded, like Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated.
It’s simple: if you want your magazine cheap, you’ll put up with ads. If you care enough about the content to pay a very high price, you don’t want ads.
Digital publishing might offer a third path: choose. For example, imaging The New Yorker, a weekly publication that runs about $65 per year for a print/digital subscription and it has ads. You could choose that OR you could select to pay $130 per year and get a digital only subscription with no ads.
Which would you choose?
Perhaps we can head towards a future with a “smart subscription” – the magazine/newspaper you download adjusting its content to better reflect your personal wants and to give better targetting for advertising… the content would still need to be funded to ensure quality, and a stricter control on “advertorial” spreads would be a part of that.
> I used to be naïve about printing and publishing, but I’ve worked close enough to it now to understand
This. Replace “printing and publishing” with “the music industry”, and you have a statement of every pre-iTunes digital music store operator.
Due to iPad, the publishing industry is facing a major format change, and it should be prime time for a disruption of the existing business models.
I expect (crappy) ads in magazines printed on (crappy) paper. But those same ads are jarring when I encounter them on my sleek 600€ device.
I think Marco neglects to mention an obvious point in his blogpost, something so obvious to him that he maybe doesn’t realize he has to mention it:
Taste.
I bet the ads he encountered had none. I also bet that if someone were to make something like the deck or the fusion ad network for digital magazines, Marco would not have an issue.
There are great chances for advertisers to fit ads into digital magazines. Imagine an article on cloud storage, with a small, tasteful clickable ad for dropbox, that gives 250mb of extra space to the person who clicks it.
Small, tastefule, real value-added digitial coupons. This is a selling point for the first digital magazine that gets this right, and the word out. People would buy the magazine just for that dropbox link.
and I applaud Marco’s thinking
There is a tendency to view other industries through the lens of our own experience. Marco is a software developer, to him there are two broad categories: free (ad supported), and paid (no ads). The publishing model is alien to him, where the cover price pays for the printing (or in this case hosting, app design and development), and the ads pay for the content. It is difficult to understand how expensive publishing can be if you haven’t experienced it directly.
Hey Felix,
Thanks for the heads-up on the ability to turn off ads – I was not aware and I’m happy to stand corrected. I will of course leave them on so as to help support the site, and retract my judgment of the Instapaper service.
I stand by my position on the podcast though. Yes, it’s Dan’s “network” but it’s Marco’s “show” – he has the choice of doing it or not. If he does it with 5by5, then he’s using an ad-supported medium.
Also, I’m going to quote directly from the 5by5.tv/donate page: “Although we do have sponsors, your support helps us keep them minimal and our ad spots non-intrusive, and allows us to be selective in the sponsors we choose – partnering with companies we feel are the most relevant to our audience and not merely those with deep pockets.”
I interpret this to mean that I am not solely funding the site, I am funding the podcasts as well. I don’t expect the podcasts to be ad-free, but I don’t expect the hosts to complain about other ad-supported mediums in their blogs.
I don’t work in publishing, and I never have. Like Marco I come from software development and digital content, so please answer this question by a curious outsider: what, exactly, do the ads subsidize?
Are they subsidizing the production of the content – the writer salaries, the editorial staff, etc – or are they subsidizing the costs of physical production and delivery – paper, printing press, trucks, mailers, etc? When considering a digital magazine which happens to be an electronic analogue to a physical item, how does the subsidy change? Bandwidth is still a cost, and the editorial expenses are the same (though shared), but there is no paper or press or physical maintenance…
So it becomes a very interesting question: the economics of digital production are different, with lowered producer costs that should translate to lower subscriber costs, which means that if I actually pay – not donate, but purchase – for this ethereal, ephemeral experience, then it’s not unreasonable to not expect it to be filled with ads.
Thoughts?
The subsidy changes depending on the country and also the model the publisher uses. In the US, people have been used to insanely cheap paper subscriptions, used to get more eyes and more ads, and so ads subsidise pretty much everything. Without the ads, the magazines simple cease to exist. In the niche sector, especially in the UK, ads are fewer in number, so they’re used to bolster costs, typically paying for better/more editorial content. Remove the ads and you drop the budget, which either means upping the cover price or cutting pages. This isn’t really any different in digital.
I get the point that people are used to this slick experience on iPad, but they’re also used to two other things: very cheap apps (usually pay once, free updates) *and* dirt-cheap magazines (especially in the USA). So how do you tally all of these things? If the magazines match their print counterparts, people whine, even though much of the cost of any magazine is in producing the content, and creating specific layouts for iOS offsets ‘savings’ from not having to print anything; if the magazines contain ads, people whine, because they’ve paid for something with ads in; but if the cost of the magazines shot up, people would go nuts.
What people want:
1. Cheap/free magazines, certainly cheaper than on the newsstand.
2. High-quality publications.
3. No adverts.
You can have two.
I don’t adverts per se but what I dislike with the ones I am trialing is the inability to remove them after purchase.
When I kept old magazines I would slice out the advert pages for faster viewing when I wanted to find something.
I can’t do that with the digital ones and it seems I will have them for life. Overtime the adverts will go out of date as well.
>What people want:
>1. Cheap/free magazines, certainly cheaper than on the newsstand.
>2. High-quality publications.
>3. No adverts.
>You can have two.
Wasn’t Marco’s point that he didn’t get the tradeoff you are proposing? He got a high-quality publication but he had to both pay enough for it that it felt expensive and he had to put up with ads. That was his whole point, that both paying for the issue and putting up with ads is double-dipping.
What he felt was expensive was still no more than the newsstand price, though, right? (I’ve no idea how much the New Yorker usually costs for a single issue.) To that end, he paid for content that was subsidised by ads, and it would have been pricier without them. From my experience within the industry, your options are:
– Free or cheap tat that’s ad-free.
– Expensive, high-quality publications that are ad-free.
– Decent content that’s subsidised by ads.
There are other, worse variations, of course (cheap tat that has ads, for example). Judging by Twitter, plenty of my followers would kill for option two (some even suggesting mags like Tap! offer an ad-free version for an additional sum). But given how many people on iTunes and the wider web are bitching about how expense of digi-mags in general, I wonder how much of the market such people cover.
[…] costs, and typically the purchase price only pays for a fraction of those. Jason also linked to a blog post from Craig Grannell, who also hammers the idea that publications need ads to cover costs, and […]
All advertising is intrusive, it’s just a matter of degree.
@Felix that’s a different model though. Is it double dipping that I have to spend $49-$399 for an iPod (shuffle to 64gb iPod Touch) to play music and then the price for the songs/albums?
Even if you go pure digital you are trading the printing and distribution costs for programming and infrastructure costs to build and maintain the app/reader and deliver the issues over the air. Marco can make a living, support infrastructure by selling a $4.99 reader and having subscriptions. Imagine if on top of that he had also support the salaries of just 1% of the writers whose articles are saved to Instapaper? The general public isn’t interested in that business model and just as Marco chooses to only focus on the iOS market, publishers are choosing to focus on the largest market segment. It isn’t non-trivial from a practical standpoint (I imagine users willing to spend a premium price on content are some of the most valuable to advertisers, so allowing them to self-select out lowers the value of advertising to the rest of the readers) to support both business models in apps and production, just like it is non-trivial for Marco to have an Android app just because he has an iOS one.