Digital magazines still have adverts non-shock, a response to Marco Arment’s Double dipping, where he complained about adverts in iOS magazine apps, was one of the most-read and commented-on (and also divisive) things on this blog for months. Those in the publishing industry backed my stance, and readers tended to offer a range of opinions, from siding with Arment to agreeing wholeheartedly with me.

Arment has since followed up, clarifying some points and linking to an article by Nicolas Barajas, who attempts to guess at some costs and how digital magazines without adverts could be funded. Barajas initially has some good news, at least in theory:

With [my] figures — a staff of 29, 22 illustrations and five contributed works per issue — the bill due at the end of the year is $3,642,200. You’ll need just over 20K subscribers to break even.

I say “in theory”, because 20,000 subscribers would wipe out a fairly large chunk of the UK’s niche magazine industry in one fell swoop. In the US, magazines sometimes start panicking when circulations dip under 100,000, but UK niche mags rely less on subscriptions and more on retail, hence being able to survive with lower readership levels.

Anyway, Barajas then admits:

But in order to make the numbers a lot neater, I’ve eliminated a lot of basic things: There’s no talk of renting space; we haven’t actually built a website, iPad app, or content management system; maintenance and support costs for a server and subscription model haven’t been touched. We’ve assumed our writers submit nothing but flawless prose, thoroughly fact-checked and without a single typo or grammatical error.

And that is a problem. To be honest, for many of the mags I write for, the guesswork Barajas makes for editorial staff is a little excessive, but the lack of taking into account infrastructure of any sort means you’re talking 20,000 subscribers always being around to fund just the editorial content of his imaginary digital New Yorker—and that’s a big ask. Throw in infrastructure as well and that subscriber base would have to be much higher. That’s a bigger ask.

Arment’s response has been to change tack slightly:

[…] the bigger issue is that I actually don’t want all of that content. Obviously, this is a personal detail, and it’s not The New Yorker’s problem, but I skip the Goings On section and most of the Reviews. I don’t need most of the Talk, and I wouldn’t notice if half of the illustrations were missing. Less than half of the proposed staff is working on content that I’ll read: mainly, the feature articles.

He and others have hinted at magazines opening up their content and allowing cherry-picking. You’d pay just for the features you want to read, or for specific sections. In a sense, that’s more or less a commercialised Instapaper, so it’s no wonder Arment likes such an idea. It’s not something I’d dismiss out of hand, but I do wonder where that would leave the industry as a whole. There would certainly be a danger of ensuring every article would be commercially viable on its own, potentially reducing risk and following a more web-like ‘eyeballs are all that matter’ model. You’d lose ‘browsing’, hitting upon something you actually find interesting in a section you don’t often read, or about a subject you don’t usually find appealing. And rather than coherent publications geared towards certain demographics, you’d instead end up with an editor curating content for smaller and smaller niche markets.

It doesn’t sound very magazine-like—more, as I said, a commercial Instapaper or a bit like Kindle Singles. Perhaps that is what people want—I certainly don’t have any answers there. The one thing I do sense is that there’s a massive shift ahead for publishing, but no-one knows what it is yet. Until we find out, we’re going to continue seeing existing models being reworked slightly for digital, frustrating the likes of Arment and like-minded people, yet also delighting those who still enjoy magazines but don’t have space to store bound paper editions.

A couple of weeks back, the Tap! app went live. I had nothing to do with it, so I got the same experience as everyone else on grabbing it and downloading a copy. It’s hard for me to not be a little biased (given that I’m a contributing editor to the magazine), but I think it’s all kinds of lovely, with a great UI, issue pricing that’s way cheaper than buying the printed mag, and components that take advantage of the medium (such as video previews of games).

Now iOS 5 has arrived, Future Publications has made a big deal about its 50+ Newsstand-compatible apps, and the reviews have been flooding into the App Store. They’re so diametrically opposed that they would be comical if they weren’t so utterly depressing. Take Tap!, for example. At the time of writing, it has eight reviews on the UK App Store. These break down as follows:

5/5: Four

1/5: Four

The negative reviews appear to be one general grievance (a guy who likes the app but, for whatever reason, hates the content), and a lack of demo content (which I think is a fair point—and I imagine that will arrive soon for those mags that don’t yet have it). I’m not sure the latter warrants a 1/5 review, though, instead of a letter to the mag itself, and the sad thing is, these are the best of them. Trawling through Future’s other app reviews and you stumble across a slew of entitled ‘reviews’, complaining that—gosh!—someone downloaded a free app and yet they then had to pay actual money for magazines! One particularly inane review complains that since they bought an iOS device for hundreds of pounds, they should damn well get free magazines! (Just like when I bought an expensive new TV, I automatically got free DVDs and Sky+ forever. No, hang on…) Others simply whine that when an app says ‘free’, it should mean ‘free’, despite in-app purchase being for a long time now a major part of the iOS app ecosystem. In perhaps the worst example, someone who clearly has an axe to grind against a certain publication lets loose with a spew of almost libellous garbage.

I posted about this subject on Twitter yesterday, and despite it being a Sunday there were plenty of replies. Some sided with me (“The app is free, the content isn’t. How hard is that to understand?” complained a friend of mine who works on the iPad version of a major newspaper), whereas others said that labelling an app as free cements an expectation that it isn’t something that you should end up paying for. One guy suggested these kinds of apps should be badged in a different manner, with ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘free’, although it would obviously be down to Apple to implement such a solution and could cause further confusion with mag/newspaper apps that enable you to buy single issues rather than enforcing a subscription.

The thing is, I’ve seen these problems dozens of times before when working on iOS games. Almost every time a dev drops the price of a game to free, the 1/5 reviews flood in. Some complain that the game “doesn’t work”; others whine when the game has IAP to add extra content; many just moan for the hell of it.

But that’s the problem with ‘free’: anyone can review, because anyone can download an app, without making any investment whatsoever. Typically, when people have paid money for something, they are more considered. And in making an app something other than free, you filter out the idiots. I’m not sure what the solution is for mag apps. I’m sure Future Publishing (and others in a similar situation) did a ton of research before deciding on the ‘free app and paid content’ model, realising what the risk would be. But I wonder if a lowish app price (say, £1.49) that bundled the current issue would be beneficial from a feedback standpoint. Of course, that isn’t necessarily beneficial for the consumer, because you’re ‘forcing’ them to buy the current issue, even if they don’t want it. But as is often the case, consumers en masse don’t always know what’s good for them and so end up with inferior solutions; I wonder if that’ll be the case in the medium term with mag apps, especially if the negative reviews keep flooding in.

Update: on the ‘free issue’ front, Ian Betteridge writes: “Mens Health has really suffered: they got lots of 1/5’s for “no free issue!” when there’s quite clearly a free (old) issue.”

Update 2: On Tap! specifically, read editor Christopher Phin’s response in the comments below.

Update 3: Tap! now has a free sampler edition, featuring content from the October issue.

Regular readers of Revert to Saved may remember that I’m Contributing Editor to Future Publishing’s rather fab Tap! magazine. The title is dedicated to iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch, and I’m responsible for its games section. For issue 5, editor Christopher Phin tasked me with writing a cover feature about iOS gaming, covering the best available games, what games designers think about the platform, exploring kit, and offering the odd nod to retro-gaming. Designer Chris Hedley then created one of the best covers I’ve seen on a consumer tech mag, featuring a ton of iOS gaming characters.

The magazine of course also includes all the usual iOS news, reviews, tutorials, features and columns. If you’re a UK subscriber, you should get your copy within the next couple of days (if it’s not already arrived). Alternatively, the magazine should be on newsstands (WHSmith, Tesco and other stores) some time during the next week.

As regular readers of Revert to Saved probably know, I’m Contributing Editor to Tap! magazine, Future’s spiffy bi-monhtly iOS publication. (I plan the games section and write quite a bit of it, too.) But today there’s some big news from the Future mothership:

Tap! is now going monthly.

Issue 4 will arrive in stores on May 12, and then subsequent issues will follow every four weeks. Personally, I’m thrilled at the development, because I know how much passion and effort goes into every page of the magazine. I’d like to publicly thank editor Christopher Phin for his faith in giving me an entire section to play with; also, thanks to each and every person who’s bought a copy of the mag so far, enabling us to now get you twice as much Tap! goodness every year.

As you might have noticed, this blog’s gone into one of its quieter patches, mostly because I’m currently drowning in iOS games for my Tap! magazine duties. The good is that I get to play and write about cracking* iOS games. The bad is that I don’t really have time to do anything else for a few days. However, this also gives me a nice excuse to mention the spiffy new website for the publication, www.tapmag.co.uk, which will carry reviews, posts from editor Christopher Phin (and maybe some of us other contributors if he gives us the magic key), and handy links so you can subscribe.

Anyway, back to Dungeon Raid and Liqua Pop.

* As in “Cracking cheese, Gromit!”, not dodgy app piracy.