Dear the internet: yes, digital magazines do cost money to create
One of the UK’s Mac magazines, MacFormat, which I regularly write for, just unleashed its new digital version on the App Store. On the iPad, it uses the same underlying framework as the spiffy Tap! magazine, making for an entertaining and interactive experience. Hurrah! So, inevitably, people are already bitching about it on the App Store. Here are two choice one-star reviews:
4.99 for a digital version? They are pricing themselves out of the digital magazine market! I have contacted them personally about the pricing structure before. However they have not replied and seemingly not interested in what I have to say.
Gosh, I wonder why?
No paper cost, No press cost, No postage cost and it is £44.99
NO THANKS
If I subscribe the magazine version I get the magazine and the downloadable pdf to read on any computing device including iPad, now tel me why digital iPad version is so pricy. Yo must think Whether you are too cleaver or iPad users are so stupid.
Yeah, those MacFormat guys think they are far too ‘cleaver’ for us mere mortals, taking our cash and rolling around naked on £50 notes, laughing maniacally. Or perhaps, just perhaps, digital magazines actually cost money to produce too? Maybe, when it comes down to it, paper/printing/mailing isn’t actually such a massive chunk of production costs as wages, paid to the people that plan, write and edit each edition? Just possibly, there’s the teeny tiny issue of interactive content (videos, touch interfaces, ‘3D’ photography elements) actually taking time and therefore costing money to create? And, clearly, being a quid cheaper for a single issue than on the newsstand (or two-quid if you take out the rolling one-month subscription) is just wrong, too. At the very most, the magazine should obviously be free, because it’s created by magic editorial elves, who don’t need to eat and pay their mortgages. Really, MacFormat should be paying us a crisp tenner every time we download an issue, because, man, we paid for this expensive iPad hardware and, DAMMIT, we are entitled! We deserve free things! We don’t understand how magazines work and that people need to be paid! And so on!
Also, just to prove they’re entirely evil, MacFormat’s also gone half-price for a short period of time, giving you single issues for £2.49 and a year’s subscription for £24. Those utter, utter bastards.
UPDATE: I’m informed by MacFormat’s production editor that the half-price offer only relates to the current issue, which is £1.49 instead of £2.99. The £24 subscription—that’s a permanent deal, but wasn’t reflected in App Store details when the new issue went live. Naturally, some people are still complaining that figure’s too high.
The largest problem with the price of magazines both dig and paper for me and most is that individual issues cost, for the US, 3 to 5 dollars an issue but a yearly subscription cost only 10 dollars for 12 issues. So for most two months cost the same as a yearly subscription. Could this be allowed for dig magazines?
@Dave: The US model is broken, and doesn’t reflect the costs involved. Effectively, many US magazines are produced for subs at a loss (postage often being more than the cost of the single issue), and this is subsidised by direct advertising (in the mag itself) and resale of information (i.e. you are the product). Direct advertising is in sharp decline and information resale is something Apple doesn’t allow to the same degree as traditional print. Therefore, I think there will be a big rebalancing in the USA, which may sadly involve readers deciding not to buy and many magazines closing.
I’m hoping this won’t happen in the UK. Here, subscriptions are typically cheaper than on the newsstand, but not to quite the same extent, because here the majority of income is from purchases rather than advertising. (You usually get 25 per cent off or similar.)
Especially great are the people that leave 1-star reviews on newspaper/magazine apps because “the app is free but we have to PAY FOR THE CONTENT WTF???11”
“here’s the teeny tiny issue of interactive content (videos, touch interfaces, ’3D’ photography elements) actually taking time and therefore costing money to create? ”
Excellent, then if you offer me a version without that pointless crap I’ll get it even cheaper than the current discount over print.
@Dudley: No interfaces would make for a curious experience. And if you want PDF churn, you can get it, but it probably won’t be any cheaper. Also, people actually like a bit of interactivity – spinning review kit so they can see it from all angles, watching videos of games so they can better understand how it plays, and so on. Probably also worth noting the majority of funds goes into content (i.e. writing/editing), not little extras that ensure mags aren’t just linear Instapaper-style experiences.
@Mr Elf: Quite. The fallout regarding the Guardian’s app was epic. “YOU MEAN I’VE HAD YEARS OF FREE CONTENT AND NOW I HAVE TO PAY?” Well, yes, otherwise the content you appear to like will cease to exist when the Guardian goes splat. Depressingly, they’re still only at about 17,000 on the iPad. I hope your lot are doing better than that.
Who knows? Trying to get specific numbers out of the management is near impossible. Something like 150,000 digital subscribers I think, i.e. web and tablet editions.
@Dudley: as Craig says, cutting out the bells and whistles still doesn’t make it free to create. Unless you want press releases copied and pasted with minimal editing, and surrounded by obnoxious adverts, somebody’s got to sit there writing this stuff, somebody’s got to design a page for it to fit on, and somebody else has got to edit it, proofread it and annoy the first person by asking them pedantic questions about their copy. (The third step, sadly, is becoming increasingly optional these days.) Each of those people probably wants to be paid.
I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who complain about paying comparatively tiny amounts for great content. Take iOS games. Look at just about any game in the App Store and you can find reviews saying “Can’t believe I paid 69p for this crap!” Sixty-nine pence? You couldn’t even get a 48K Spectrum game for that price back in the 1980s, when I got 50p a week pocket money and the average salary was about £8,000. Now you can buy a game with graphics sound and occasionally even gameplay that would make a Spectrum owner spontaneously combust for less than the cost of two pints of milk.
I really do not mind paying more for a digital experience that is not a gimmick but genuinely adds to the value I get out of the content over and above what I would have gained from a printed or basic digitised version. That value can be just entertainment and convenience in some cases.
I think there are three states of digitisation of magazines:
1. PDF version of magazine with little allowance for use on digital devices – this is irritating with, for example, photographer magazines that have two colour spreads that can not be displayed in this was on most PDF viewer apps, including Acrobat
2. Basic digitised version of the magazine, no additional content but the content is optimised for presentation on digital devices with convenient page selection, zooming in/out, etc – typical of most content on Zinio
3. Digital experience – the same content as printed magazine plus additional digital specific content and enhancements to original content (interactions, workflows, etc).
Whilst happy to pay for added value, on the other hand, I object when:
a) basic digitised version is significantly more expensive than printed version (which usually excludes access to any cover mount content)
b) a Zinio basic digitised version (for any platform) is more expensive than an iPad version (I am on Android)
c) a print subscription includes free digital versions but only for iPad – no doubt this is simply a reflection of the relatively low number of Android tablets in consumer hands compared to iPad but reasonable scale will probably be achieved before long
I am sad enough to prefer digital magazines, for a number of reasons (the first two of which also apply to my preference for ebooks):
i. my eyesight is not great and I often struggle to read some magazines in less than ideal lighting conditions (I travel a lot for work, and spend a lot of time in hotels, so local lighting is often poor) – my vision is not terrible (it is safe and legal for me to drive a car, for example), I just need decent light for reading
ii. I am fickle and like to switch between magazines depending on my mood, so being able to carry many publications is convenient for me
iii. magazines are, for me, a great reference source and it is a lot easier to search electronic editions (wish it was easier to search amongst multiple publications though)
The expectations that many seem to have that digital should be substantially cheaper than printed versions is unfortunate and ignorant, stemming, in the latter case, from the effect of priming (people are used to “low” prices of apps) and lack of understanding of the modern economics of print production and distribution (which is probably true of most people outside of their specific areas of work or interest). I think only clear added value propositions, particularly providing fulfilling experiences that simply cannot be reproduced through other channels (particular print media) will break this attitude. That of course takes time, money and innovation. Good luck to all involved.
Lmao, that is a ridiculous amount to pay for a digital subscription. In the US, for a non Mac digital subscription, it’s at most 1/2 that – 1/4 in some instances.
But Craig, I used to subscribe to MacUser and pick up MacFormat regularly on the newsstand. Since the Internet got good, I get everything I used to get from those two mags from free sites. I was linked to this site from the Guardian’s free website – why would I pay for a digital (or paper) version of that site that doesn’t even update more than once a day?
That’s said, £24 for a year eh? Maybe I should give a go and see if you can persuade me to stay longer …
Paper/print/mailing doesn’t cost so much? I guess that’s why the print unions fought so hard when News International moved to Wapping – because they would be working for free.
As for staff costs, Macformat has six staffers (several working on other magazines) and three people selling advertising. This is the key reason why digital magazines cost more- consumers won’t put up with page after page of adverts unlike the equivalent paper version. Worse, advertisers won’t pay for something they know readers won’t see.
So why not stop all the pity us poor journo rubbish and 3d costs money too. Instead just say you are producing a great magazine and would like £4.99 for it (Apple takes 30%) so if that’s too much then don’t buy it. That’s the joy of consumer choice.
Macformat has 25000 readers. It will be interesting to see whether that rises or drops with this move.
Some responses:
@Stuart: I think all of your points are fair enough. On priming people about pricing, it’s pretty clear we’re entering a period of time where expectations are that ‘online’ equates to ‘free’. The ramifications for any creative industries are massive, and it’s clear music and publishing in particular are under threat. I had a to-and-fro with someone on Twitter about this yesterday, and his argument was that business models should change and ‘free’ should become the new norm. For both music and publishing, I don’t see how that can work without heavily impacting on quality. But then there’s the question whether most readers even care about that any more.
@kp: Got some examples of annual digital subscriptions for equivalent niche publications that are $15 per year? Most of those I’ve seen are comparable. Even on digital, anyone going for $1ish per issue is doomed long-term. The US model for publishing simply isn’t sustainable. (It’s probably also worth noting that the US model also cannot support niche titles. There, I’ve seen publishers freaking out when a magazine falls below 100,000 readers, because then ads are pulled and the financial foundation’s gone. In the UK, magazines can survive on much lower readership levels, due to the way in which they are funded. This probably also explains why every time I’m in the USA, bookstores are increasingly full of British magazines.)
@MTK: Why should you pay for digital/paper versions of publications that don’t update daily? Well, there’s no reason why you *should*, but there are reasons why you might consider it. Not least, paid-for journalism enables publications to continue. On The Guardian, I appreciate the content and its free nature, but the corporation is losing close to £1m per week. The only reason the paper (and therefore its website) survives is due to the massive war-chest built up over the years. Elsewhere, free is usually supported by ad models that are under fire. Advertising is increasingly tough to secure and provides less funding. Worse, it’s also driven by traffic. This means more websites are prone to link-bait and quantity over quality—something that rarely affects magazines, which are far more likely to heavily curate content and pay writers a reasonable amount of money to pen articles (as opposed to online rates, which are mostly best described as ‘hobbyist’.
As for the mags you mention, I’d say MacUser’s really great these days. Adam Banks has turned the publication into some kind of Creative Review with an Apple bent, and he’s not slavish to the usual norms of a Mac publication. I don’t read every issue, but those I do always have content in that you simply cannot get online. (The recent Steve Jobs piece was, I thought, excellent. Perhaps only Ars Technica might have done something similar on the web.) MacFormat’s also just redesigned, and for the sake of £1.85ish per issue, you might find it worth a punt.
@Tony: I’m not saying that paper, print and mailing doesn’t cost anything. My point is that many people suppose they are the vast majority of the costs associated with a magazine. When magazines that cost six quid on the newsstand go digital, people expect them to be £1 or less, because “you’re not paying for paper, print and mailing any more”. On staffing, MacFormat’s are mostly shared across the Apple group; advertising is the same, as far as I’m aware—the staff work across a range of titles. As for page-after-page of adverts, I wonder if you’ve read a Mac mag any time recently. Back in the 1990s, MacFormat, MacUser and the like were about a third or even half ads, but these days—not so much. The latest MacFormat, for example, is 132 pages, including the cover. It has ten pages of ads and eight house ads, so under ten per cent of the page count.
I’m also not running on a ‘pity us’ angle, but more ‘these things cost money’. I’m sick and tired of people giving magazines on Newsstand terrible reviews because they have to pay for content within the free container apps. I’ve seen plenty of reviews with people arguing the magazines should be free, because they already paid for an iPad. Others complain that magazines should be dirt-cheap, because of the aforementioned lack of costs, despite the majority of costs coming from creating the content and—hopefully—creating something interesting and entertaining for people to sit down with every month.
“I’ve seen plenty of reviews with people arguing the magazines should be free, because they already paid for an iPad. ”
This one always amazes me. It’s the same as “I paid for my car so why should I pay for petrol?”