Slashdot Mirror
'Hulu For Magazines' Relies On Users' Data
Toe, The writes "In an interesting twist on the free/closed mobile platform debate, Apple's closed platform appears to be at least nominally on the free side when it comes to magazine distribution. Magazines have always relied on the demographics of their subscribers to sell ad space to companies who would want to reach that demographic. This apparently has been a sticking point between publishers and Apple, because the latter is unwilling to allow its tools to expose the vast wealth of data that can be tapped from a modern mobile device connected to a purchasing account. For that reason, the so-called 'Hulu for Magazines,' Next Issue Media, will only be available on Android. Still unanswered: do people even want digital magazines?"
I like to call them "web sites."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Hulu isn't a selling point for most people. It's a black screen for anyone outside the US.
So the question you're asking is not, "do people want digital magazines?" but, "do americans want digital magazines?".
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Somehow I doubt that mobile magazines will go anywhere. They're worthless on a desktop browser or a small phone. Tablet's are their best chance, but I really think they'll have to do something novel for it to matter. However, I think the truth is readers are moving away from one source for multiple sources of information, just like music. Why buy an entire album when you really just want one track? With articles and news, even in one sitting session, why limit your focus to one distributor of reading material when a twitter, rss feed or whatever will give you many sources that you can quickly flip through? Even in our local market, well over half of the traffic to our news site is from aggregators and search. As opposed to people who come straight to the site just to see what only we have to offer. I'd guess that that ratio will only increase.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
No, no, no... HTML is great for typesetting! Web browsers are just terrible at rendering it.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I don't want to buy content that can peer back at me.
I certainly wouldn't buy a magazine through an iTunes storefront if I knew that such a sale would result in Apple sharing with the content provider everything they knew about me (which is almost certainly too much but how can I tell?)
The magazine buying experience should be no more entangled than anonymously getting a National Geographic at an airport to pass time. If you choose to subscribe that should mean nothing more than a regularly scheduled money transaction to the content provider.
I don't know why a digital magazine would need to include advertisements specifically managed by the individual magazine content providers. Because that's how things have been done in the paper print days? That is a lame horse-and-buggy argument.
Ad networks for websites manage to deliver globally localized ads without the website content provider having to go in and do anything at all.
Given that these are *digital* magazines, it would be positively retarded for content providers to make the ads static members of the "pages" that would form the content issue. Flip through the pages of any old Nat Geo you might have lying around. How many of those ads are still relevant? The brands may persist but the product-specific ads go stale very fast.
It would make most sense to leave the user in control and make the ads a customizable nuisance you can dial up and down in quantity and personalization and resulting worth to offset the magazine content cost.
The selection and personalization of the optional, and dynamically injected ads, should be performed by a globally operating ad network to ensure the ad content is locally and perpetually relevant. Magazine content providers should be able to tag their content in sufficient detail so that the ads selected by the ad provider can be tactically placed with high relevance (and exposure worth!) to specific articles. This would be similar to how magazine articles reviewing a specific product often have an ad for the same product on the next page. But with a digital magazine, upon later re-reading the original ad might have been replaced with something advertising the newest model, or perhaps a competitor's model.
My point is, there is no reason why the original editorial staff or magazine content providers should have to manage the process of replacing and inserting the digital ads. That should be some org that is above them or serves all the magazines and specializes in this business, and can operate competently in more markets so that magazine content can be translated, localized and resold outside of original target market.
Further, that advertising org should be possible to filter out completely by the premium-paying user so that no ads even enter the picture.
The digital magazine stand user should be able to select which, if any demographic attributes they are willing to (relatively anonymously) expose to the advertising org, and will be rewarded with a higher or lower discount on the magazine issue price depending on how valuable their filtered profile is for those ad networks.