Slashdot Mirror
Why Digital Newsstands Stink
An anonymous reader writes "As Google prepares to compete with Apple in the digital newsstand business, both companies seem to be glossing over the fact that consumer demand for digital magazines is dropping. 'Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.' Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 'Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes.'"
Brent Spiner could not be contacted for comments.
People continue to prefer not paying for things. Also, most people like having privacy in their lives.
Hey, I've seen all those movies where they just throw a big bundle of the latest issues off the back of a truck as they pass by the newsstand.
Even with a protective case that's gotta be harsh on the iPad.
Good god! When has anyone on the internet ever cared about privacy? We're talking *500 million* people who don't mind giving their data to a company whose entire business model is about selling it to advertisers and tracking every move they make.
We're talking hundreds of millions of people that still run tracking scripts from google analytics.
If there's one thing the internet has taught us, it's that people don't give a shit about their privacy. If some business fails, it isn't because people objected to the privacy violations. People LOVE privacy violations.
The privacy issue has to be framed against the fact that they have this same information on you when you subscribe annually in print form. That's why they want it so much - they are used to it! That said, Apple to date has been very adamant about not sharing this information with app developers upon download time, it's actually been a bone of contention, and a major hindrance to magazines with annual subscription offerings. Zinio and Amazon (Kindle) have sidestepped it by forcing you to purchase through their web fronts. PressDisplay does subscriptions through their web sites, and single issues for newspapers through the App Store in-app purchasing, so they get your information when you subscribe, but not when you buy one issue.
But we don't want to watch advertisements while we do it.
Expecting people to pay for online content and ALSO see any advertisement (I mean ANYTHING, even simple words), is kind of like saying HBO wants to continue to charge their premium price for premium services but it is now going to show advertisements.
NO. You can't have it both ways,
You want ads? You can't charge. Period.
You want to charge? You can't have ads. Also, NO tracking. No ads means you don't have to tracks us (You can still track how many people read which article, but not which article any individual reads.)
As long as the greedy morons try to charge HBO prices for TBS content, surprise surprise, no one will pay.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Even if I wanted to pay for news and magazine articles (which I don't) why would I want to go through the extra complication of a separate app for every newspaper, and downloading each magazine? The web already covers this. Am I missing something?
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Go look at the comments for some of the "top sellers" of periodicals on the Kindle. Things like New Yorker, or Economist. You find that there are a ton of people that want to pay for this stuff on their device, but right now the deal is no good. Here are a few examples of what people justly complain about:
- When you buy a digital subscription, you don't get website access that you do get with a print subscription.
- Missing editorial cartoons, and even articles (reported from the Kindle version of the New Yorker)
- They delete access to anything more than 2 months old. Meaning if your device crashes or you have to replace it, you lose those articles.
- Pagination and sections are done in an inconvenient way.
- The cost is no cheaper than a print subscription.
I'm sure there are others. But as a person who recently found himself with an e-book reader and would love to have magazines and newspapers on there, much of this stuff is just a showstopper. Too bad, really.
Put issues in the iBookstore for $0.99.
Add a subscribe option.
Profit.
Nobody is going to pay full retail for an electronic version, it ain't happening. Alternatively come up with a global pass system ala hulu that allows you to read lots of magazines for a flat fee.
Otherwise, $6.99 buys a lot of 3G time to look at your website. For free.
..don't panic
Reading books in digital is great because it is a linear process. But how many people read magazines in a start to finish fashion?
*Raises hand* Scientific American, Wired, The Economist, and MAKE.
So, why should I buy the digital version when the print version is not just better, but cheaper? And I dont need a specialized tool to read it.
It's not "digital newstands" that stink, it's "news" itself. It always has stunk, but it's not until we've had the Internet and free distribution channels for any alternatives that it's started to be seen for what it is.
Most, if not all of the content you find in any given "quality newspaper" is baloney. It's either political public opinion testing ("Obama MAY ban [something controversial]"), worthless human-interest crap and celebrity gossip, sport, re-heated press-releases, or pompous "this writer thinks..." editorials reading only slightly less well than most stand-up comedy routines ("Single mothers!?! What's up with them???!!").
In terms of content, I think newspapers and most magazines have hit the buffers now. They used to fulfil a middle-class need for mental masturbation, making people feel they had to "keep up" with the "news" or they would mysteriously fall victim to being "uninformed" about whether some politician wanted them to know about some policy or other (pretty much consumption of propaganda from government and industry). But with the web, blogs, Twitter, RSS whatever, it's now much easier to get what you need about news that matters to you in more concentrated form than newspapers or magazines are offering.
So the decline in news consumption has less to do with platforms or channels, and much more to do with the fact that the Internet has simply unmasked publications like Newsweek and Wired as being pretty poor-quality against the general free flow of information from non-mainstream sources. In short, content is RALLY king this time. Heck, on any given subject, I would get more out of /. than I would from reading Time's coverage of it.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
To be fair, as traditional media has become more and more consolidated, the companies that own the magazines, newspapers, and networks exert this kind of control too. I'm not saying I approve of this situation, you understand, just pointing out that singling out e-publication as uniquely vulnerable doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.