Once Magazine for iPad publishes its last issue
This post is also available in: Spanish
Once Magazine, a magazine for iPad born 1 year ago, has published its last issue. John Knight, Once Magazine editor, says: “The technology felt like a never-ending battle”.
BJP (British Journal of Photography) (they publish an iPhone and iPad App) says that they are about to get more revenue from the iPhone and iPad sold issues than the printed issues. Then, must we forget the idea of publishing a magazine for iPad and iPhone? What kind of strategy we need to publish this kind of projects?
Technological problems: bad decisions
Once Magazine say that they had to abandone the project due to technological problems. They wanted to publish the magazine also with an iPhone and web-app version. As they had to buy software to publish the iPad version and this software is not ready yet to publish magazines for iPhone, they had to abandone the idea. And… they invested a lot of money buying this software, so they couldn’t get another software to start publishing the magazine on iPhone and web-app version.
Free
Nowadays users are used to receive contents for free. They can feel interested in what we publish, but it’s hard to convince them to purchase a single issue or a subscription. Chris Andersson published in 2009 a really interesting book on how to offer our customers free products… and how this is becoming a predominant business model: Free - the future of a radical price . It seems that ‘free’ is what our customers expect - so we have find a way to provide them with what they expect without losing money.
