The good news: It’s still a really big publishing company, with 23 percent of the U.S. magazine business. And once it is done firing people, it may make money again.

The bad news: It’s a really big publishing company that’s trending the wrong way.

Overall revenue was down 5 percent, to $737 million. Subscription revenue was down 11 percent, and the main reason advertising revenue was up 2 percent was because Time Inc. now has control of Golf.com and Sports Illustrated’s website, which used to be run by Time Warner’s cable networks. And the additional money Time Inc. makes from those sites is basically wiped out by the absence of licensing fees they used to charge the cable guys for those sites. Magazine ad dollars were down.

Time Inc., or whatever the new company will be called, should still be profitable for a while, though. The company lost $9 million this quarter, but that’s because it spent $53 million firing about 6 percent of its workforce.

If you are an optimist, you can imagine a scenario where the new company is able to leverage the cash flow it would normally produce into acquisitions, new lines of digital businesses, or … something to turn the top line around. Stranger things have happened.

Jeff Bewkes

People have been wondering for a long time when Time Warner would sell off Time Inc. And for a long time, whenever anyone asked CEO Jeff Bewkes or senior management about the publishing company, they’d inevitably say something like “we like it, we’re keeping it.”

But when analyst Jessica Reif Cohen asked CFO John Martin the same question back in September, he gave a different answer, and people in and outside of Time Inc. took notice. Here’s the excerpt of their conversation at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s media conference (I’ve highlighted  a few key parts):

Cohen: In June, News Corp announced plans to separate the publishing business and other small entities from the core media and entertainment franchises. In the second quarter, Time Inc., reported, or your publishing unit reported revenue down 9%, advertising was down 7%, subscription revenue 11%. I mean this is not really a great numbers, so they really kind of dragged down the overall company growth. I mean, would a separation of Time Inc. from your cable network and studio business make sense at some point?

Martin: I wouldn’t rule anything out at some point, but I don’t think it’s exactly synonymous Time Inc. to whatever News Corp’s decision was with respect to particularly newspapers. I mean, Time Inc. is a company that is dealing with nationally branded environments and transitioning to digital and there’s a lot of commonality between the strategy and the issues that we’re facing in our TV and home entertainment businesses as there is in our publishing businesses – probably more commonality now than there has been in the past.

Having said all of that, I would also – I think it’s fair to say we’re disappointed with the results at Time Inc. It’s being driven by the industry, not by the performance of the management, and so we’re proud of the management’s execution against what is a really, really difficult industry backdrop, but I would say – and I think our past is an indicator of this, given what we’ve done with Time Warner Cable and AOL – is that our job is to figure out how to value maximize. And so I wouldn’t rule anything out in the future, but right now, we are working hard and Laura Lang, the new CEO and her team, is working hard to figure out how to meaningfully transition that business to be a multi platform branded environments business, where we’re going to have to continue to obviously make sure that the costs match up against the revenue trajectory as well.

We’ve got a lot of great things going on at Time Warner, and we’re really proud of and while we’re proud of the performance of our publishing unit, within the publishing industry, I think it’s fair to say that we’re disappointed with the secular dynamics in publishing right now.

Translation: We’re in the TV and movie business, and we happen to have a publishing company. We’ll say good things about our publishing company, but please notice that we’ve already sold off our cable pipe business and our Internet business. Meanwhile, we’re going to have to cut costs.

Last week, Time Inc. took care of the cost-cutting part. So today’s report, from Time Inc. publication Fortune, that Time Warner is talking to a “serious buyer” about offloading most of its Time Inc. titles, including People, shouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Since we’re all speculating about buyers, let me suggest that you certainly don’t have to be in the publishing business to be interested in buying most of Time Inc.

The magazine industry is in trouble, but the world’s biggest magazine publisher still makes a lot of money — $420 million in operating profit last year. Wouldn’t be shocked to see a financial buyer who thinks they can cut more costs and pocket a lot of the profit. [UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Meredith, the publisher that puts out titles like Better Homes and Gardens, is the mystery buyer. Still think that "non-strategics" will take a looksee.]

Reminder: Turner used to have a bunch of online sports inventory to sell to advertisers. But it recently had to give much of that to its corporate coworkers.

Last quarter, Turner handed back control of Golf.com and Sports Illustrated’s Web site to Time Inc., ending an unhappy arranged marriage between the two Time Warner units.

By my math, the divorce cost Turner about $40 million a year in ad revenue, a deficit it’s trying to fill with Bleacher Report.

Here’s where I’m getting the numbers: Last week, Time Warner CFO John Martin told investors that the addition of Golf.com and SI.com improved Time Inc.’s advertising revenue by 2 percent last quarter.

That is, without those sites, ad revenues would have slipped 9 percent, from $508 million to $462 million, instead of falling 7 percent, to $472 million. That’s a $10 million gap.

It’s possible that $10 million is a quarterly anomaly. But assuming it’s not, that implies a $40 million annual run rate for those two sites. Now look at the reported $30 million that Bleacher Report is supposed to make this year, and the deal lines up quite nicely.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for thoughts on what the transaction says about low-cost Web “content creation,” let me suggest Mathew Ingram’s take, over at GigaOM.

The logic for the deal is that Turner has a small presence in online sports — it manages sites like PGA.com and NBA.com, but doesn’t own them — and Bleacher Report’s nine-million-plus visitors will help fix that.

But it’s worth nothing that, up until this spring, Turner used to have a much bigger presence in online sports, via an arranged marriage that didn’t seem to make either participant very happy: For the last couple years, Turner managed Sports Illustrated’s Web site on behalf of Time Warner’s Time Inc.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is famously uninterested in corporate synergy, so I’m not quite sure why he thought having the cable guys sell ads for the print guys would work. And from what I could tell, no one on either side liked the deal. The guys who made the content for the site thought the ad guys didn’t do a bang-up job, and vice versa.*

But that pairing ended in divorce this quarter, and Turner’s sports group has said it was going to create its own “branded digital destination.”

Perhaps they’ve decided that buying is easier than building. As it turns out, Bleacher Report’s traffic matches up almost precisely with SI.com’s, according to comScore. Convenient! (Click to enlarge.)

 
*This dynamic, we should note, also exists at nearly every commercial Web site, everywhere.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

If that seems like non-news, consider that it took the two companies two years to figure this out.

Up until now, Time Inc. has been the notable exception to Apple’s digital subscription plan, which lets publishers sell access to their digital titles from within its iTunes store, in exchange for certain concessions. For instance, the publishers don’t automatically get to see all of a subscriber’s personal information, and Apple collects a 30 percent fee for each subscription it sells at its store.

Again, unless you’re in publishing and/or paying attention to this stuff, you wouldn’t notice. But here’s what the subscription page at Sports Illustrated looked like on Wednesday — note that there’s no way to actually subscribe via the app:

And here’s what it looks like now:

What changed? It could be as simple as Time Inc. trying to boost sales, which haven’t been stellar recently — a slump at its People magazine title is particularly troublesome for the publisher. Or perhaps parent company Time Warner got some other concession from Apple for one of its other units, like HBO or Turner.

Worth noting: Earlier this week, Tim Cook announced a tie-up with Facebook, another company Apple has tussled with for the last couple years. One more of these peace-making deals and we can call it a trend.

The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”

Previously a vice president in the mobile-phone maker’s media division, Mr. Linardos will be responsible for increasing sales of Time Inc.’s digital products at a critical time. Magazine publishers are grappling with how to serve the small but fast-growing audience tablet audience while hanging onto more lucrative print readers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The weekly is rolling out an “all-access” plan that kicks in Thursday. It will give readers a chance to purchase bundles that will give them access to the magazine in multiple formats: Print editions delivered to their mailboxes, app versions beamed to their iPads and other tablets, and Web versions at Time.com.

This is the second time Time Inc., Time Warner’s publishing unit, has rolled out a print/digital bundle. Earlier this year it announced a similar “magazines everywhere” package for Sports Illustrated.

You can read pricing details in the press release below. What you won’t see there: News that, along with the bundles, the magazine will put up a paywall on its site which will keep non-subscribers from reading the print version for three months after it hits the newsstand.

If that sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Time.com put up a wall for its print magazine content almost exactly a year ago, and said at that time it would be doing that for most of its titles.

It’s unclear to me when and why the title knocked down its Web barriers — right now, for instance, you can read all of Time’s most recent issue for free — but they are going back up this week, and some Time staffers I’ve heard from are grumbling about the move. But as I’ve said before, it’s likely that the vast majority of Time.com’s visits and page views come from stuff that isn’t in the magazine, and that will continue to be free, so most site visitors may not notice any change at all.

Also worth noting is that while last spring’s Sports Illustrated announcement focused on Time Inc.’s deal to sell magazine subscriptions via Google’s Android platform, today’s news notes that the subscriptions will also work with Apple’s iPad.

That is: Even though Time Inc. isn’t using Apple’s new iTunes subscription service, it’s able to use Apple’s new iTunes subscription terms to deliver iPad subscriptions on its own. Time won’t sell subscriptions to the magazine through iTunes or via the app, but it will encourage readers to head to a Time Inc. Web page to sign up for a bundle. That means the company loses a marketing resource, but retains 100 percent of its subscription revenue, and all of the subscriber information it treasures.

TIME LAUNCHES “ALL ACCESS”
Readers Will Now Pay A One-Time Subscription Fee To Get the Print Edition
Plus Access to Tablet Apps and the New Magazine Channel On TIME.com

(New York, July 19, 2011)—TIME announced today that, starting this week, subscribers
will now pay one price for an “All Access” subscription to TIME magazine content wherever
they want to read it: in print, online and on tablet apps. This subscription model rewards loyal
customers with more choice and quality at no additional cost.

With TIME’s “All Access,” current subscribers to TIME will continue to receive the print
magazine, plus have access to a new paid magazine channel on TIME.com and be able to
download their issues on Apple iPad, HP Touchpad and Samsung Galaxy Tab. The TIME.com
magazine channel will be a paid section of the website that will contain all new magazine
content on an ongoing basis beginning with this week’s issue. Subscribers will activate their “All
Access” accounts using their existing magazine account number or mailing address.

New subscribers will have three options to access TIME magazine content:
1. Subscribe to TIME “All Access” for $30/year and receive 56 print issues, full online
access and all tablet apps
2. Sign up for a 1-week short term pass to access magazine content on TIME.com for $4.99/
week
3. Sign up for a $2.99/month “All Access” subscription. Each month readers get all of the
print editions of TIME, the tablet editions and access to magazine content on TIME.com.
This subscription can be cancelled anytime.

The new magazine channel on TIME.com is one of a series of new content verticals the site
has launched in the past year and a half, including Newsfeed, Swampland, Lightbox, Techland,
Healthland and MoneyLand. TIME.com has 95% original content separate and distinct from
magazine content and has broken multiple traffic records in 2011. In June, the site had 93 million
pages views, up 31% year over year, and 11.3 million unique visitors, up 27% year over year,
according to comScore. TIME is up in ad pages and revenue for the first six months of the year,
up 8.1% in pages and 11.2% in revenue. TIME is the #1 magazine brand on Twitter with more
than 2.6 million followers.

TIME is the second Time Inc. title to launch a subscription plan allowing consumers to pay once
and access their content across multiple platforms. Sports Illustrated announced a similar “All
Access” plan in February 2011.

An updated version of that magazine’s iPad app lets users subscribe to the weekly magazine for $5.99 a month, or the equivalent of a $1.50 an issue. That’s a steep discount from the app’s old model, which only sold individual issues for $4.99 a pop.

Conde Nast is selling an annual subscription to the iPad app for $59.99; a yearly subscription to the print version of the magazine costs $69.95. Very important: Conde says print subscribers will get iPad access for free.

At least, I think that’s the case. I’m basing all of this off the New Yorker app’s description in iTunes, but I haven’t been able to get the updated app to work yet on my iPad. The information syncs up, though, with what both AdAge and the New York Post reported last week. (UPDATE: After some futzing about, I’ve got it to work, as advertised. The app still allows you to buy an individual copy for $4.99.)

Assuming Hearst goes through with its plans, Time Warner’s Time Inc. will be the most conspicuous magazine holdout. Time Inc. and Apple just agreed to a deal that allows print subscribers to get app versions of Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Time for free, but they still haven’t agreed to subscription terms–which they’ve been stuck on since last summer.

Other big print publishers who have agreed to Apple’s terms include the New York Times, which has said it will start using iTunes to sell subscriptions in June. In February, Conde also announced it would sell digital editions of its magazines for Google’s Android platform, but has yet to do so.

Publishers–and other media companies–have previously balked at both Apple’s proposed cut–it will take 30 percent of each sale–and its control of subscriber data, including credit card information.

But it’s possible that Apple has backed off some of its original terms. Last week Hearst suggested it had gotten Apple to modify at least some of its conditions. And if that’s the case then Apple may be offering revised terms to all subscription partners. I’ve asked Apple and Conde Nast for comment.

The notion of iPad apps enthralled magazine executives a year ago, but sales have been underwhelming for many titles. One common complaint: Publishers have sold the digital titles at the same price as paper-and-ink versions, while most customers have expected to buy them at a steep discount, and to get them free with existing subscriptions.

Now that big publishers are starting to actually do just that, we’ll see if sales improve.

UPDATE: Just got some clarity on the agreement Conde hammered out with Apple. Apple’s fundamental proposition hasn’t changed, but the publisher has gotten a few concessions out of Steve Jobs and Co. Examples via people familiar with the publisher:

• Apple still controls crucial subscriber information, and only allows Conde Nast to ask for name, zip and email. But the publisher now has two chances to ask for user’s email: The first as a standard opt-in screen, and then again on a screen that asks for email and a password in order to get exclusive content.
• Conde has more flexibility on pricing than Apple originally offered. For instance, at one point, Apple didn’t want the publisher to be able to offer a print+digital bundle at a $10 premium to digital-only, but wanted all prices to be the same (which they will be when GQ offers subscriptions later this month: $19.99 a year for digital-only, or digital + print).
• The agreement extends to international markets, etc.

Small stuff, but important to the publisher. Meanwhile, Apple gets what it wants without giving up much it cares about. Steve Jobs wins.

Last week, Yahoo’s advertising unit got the once-over from its new sales head Wayne Powers. And, this week, its new Audience unit head Mickie Rosen is making a series of executives moves.

First up, sources said that the current head of its powerful Yahoo News, Mark Walker, will be leaving for another another company and a new head of the news site is close to being hired.

Already hired is top Time Warner digital exec Ken Fuchs, who will now run Yahoo’s huge sports, games and entertainment sites. He ran all digital distribution at Time Inc. Digital, overseeing emerging platforms for more than two dozen Web properties. Before that, he also ran Sports Illustrated’s online site and, previous to that, worked in strategy and development for Fox Interactive Media.

And Associated Content head Luke Beatty will be adding a lot to his portfolio, now running the Americas region community and local businesses, including Flickr, Groups, Answers and hundreds of local sites.

Yahoo’s current local head Matt Idema, sources said, will likely be leaving the company.

Lastly, Erin McPherson will be running all of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s much dispersed video offerings, branded and original entertainment, across the Americas region.

In related news, Matthew Rothenberg, product head at Flickr, said in a blog post that he was leaving the company.

Yahoo declined to comment on the moves.

But Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. Which is why Time Inc. just showed off a new subscription option that will work on Android tablets and phones.

As I reported yesterday, Time Inc. hopes to power all of its magazine offerings using this platform, so consider the Sports Illustrated offer that kicks off today a preview of the future.

The broad strokes: Consumers download the magazine app from Google, but go to a Time Inc. Web site to enter their billing info and pick out a subscription option. The three main flavors:

• Print/Digital (Samsung Galaxy/Android Smartphone/Web): $48 annually or $4.99/month
• Digital Only: $3.99/month
• Current print customers will get the digital version for free until the end of their subscription.

Google will keep an undisclosed percentage of the transaction, but that money isn’t crucial to Time Warner’s publishing unit. The data is. (For a good overview of why that matters, check out this essay from former Time Inc. SVP John Squires.)

So now Time Inc., at least, gets what it wants. Will that be enough to make tablet users happy?

Time Inc. executives, along with their counterparts at every other big publisher, believe the reason iPad magazines haven’t taken off so far is that they’ve been selling them at print newsstand prices–a single copy of Sports Illustrated’s iPad app goes for $4.99. All of them pay close attention to the reviews they get from iTunes commenters, who are consistent complainers about price.

“It bums us out when we get reviewed as being a shitty application, simply because it costs too much,” SI Editor Terry McDonell said at the publisher’s news conference this morning.

So why not just slash the price? Because Time Inc. and others really want to sell subscriptions, and they want a big price difference between a single copy and a multi-issue commitment. And now they have one: Four issues of Sports Illustrated on Android costs less than a single copy on your iPad.

But it’s also possible that iPad magazines haven’t taken off yet simply because they’re still replicas, more or less, of paper magazines, with a dash of extra video or other multimedia goodies. And that when push comes to shove, print magazine readers may enjoy reading magazines in print magazine form. And that tablet users may be looking for something else altogether, which doesn’t really exist yet.

And now that price isn’t an issue, we get to find out.

This one will be more limited than yesterday’s announcement: A source tells me Time Inc. is launching a subscription offering on Google’s Android platform for a single title–Sports Illustrated–but that the plan is to expand the program over time.

But in both cases, the subscriptions are to be powered by a platform Time Inc. has built and will operate itself.

Time Inc. has used Sports Illustrated as its Google guinea pig in the past: The magazine was the publisher’s first entry into Google’s Chrome App store late last year.

I don’t have other details for now, except to note that this is separate from the newsstand concept that Next Issue Media, the publishers’ joint venture/consortium, wants to launch this year.

Subscriptions for tablet magazines have been a sore spot for publishers since last summer, when Apple rejected Sports Illustrated’s plans to sell subscriptions for its iPad magazine app. Time Inc. and its parent company Time Warner have been vocal about their disappointment with Apple, and their desire to work with other platforms that will give them the terms they want.

HP has agreed to let Time Warner’s publishing unit provide subscriptions for magazines on the device maker’s new tablet, due out this summer, according to a Time Inc. source.

Time Inc. will initially sell four magazines via the HP device: Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People.

HP is about to show off the new device, built using Palm’s webOS platform, at an event today, so we should get a few more details then.

But for now the deal means that HP is the only tablet maker to give a big publisher the subscription terms it wants. Time Inc. and other publishers had expected to sell subscriptions via Apple’s iPad/iTunes ecosystem last summer, but those plans fell apart, and negotiations haven’t gone far since then. The crucial sticking point was control and access to subscribers’ billing information and other data that are crucial to publishers’ business model.

Publishers are also expecting to work with Google and its Android platform, but have yet to announce anything.

It’s worth noting that this arrangement is between HP and Time Inc., and not Next Issue Media, the joint venture that is also supposed to represent publishers in their discussions with tablet makers.

I’ll also have more later today based on some comments from Hugo Barra, who chatted about the work that went into Honeycomb, as well as how some of the features will make their way back to the phone version of Android.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110202/mobilized-gets-hands-on-with-googles-honeycomb-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101118/sports-illustrated-lets-its-ipad-app-stand-up-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20101118/sports-illustrated-lets-its-ipad-app-stand-up-again/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:06:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26048 Earlier this fall Sports Illustrated made a counterintuitive move: It stopped letting people read its iPad app any way they liked.

Instead, the magazine pushed users to read its app in just the horizontal “landscape” mode, and essentially disabled the vertical “portrait” mode.

At the time, Time Inc. editor Josh Quittner said the publisher was doing so because:

• Viewing the app horizontally was better for users;
• Producing just one version of the app saved money;
• And since Apple wasn’t cooperating with Sports Illustrated‘s effort to sell subscriptions to the app, it didn’t make sense to throw more resources at the project.

That was back in September, and since then Time Inc. (like just about every other big publisher) has yet to reach an agreement with Apple about how to handle subscriptions in iTunes. But in the meantime, Sports Illustrated has apparently thought things over, because readers can once again view the app in landscape and portrait modes. Behold!

I only noticed the change today, but it turns out it has been in place since the magazine’s October 18 issue. What gives? Or what gave?

A statement from a Sports Illustrated rep doesn’t shed much light: “We are constantly exploring the iPad’s numerous functionalities for innovative ways to present Sports Illustrated to consumers. Each issue delivers something unique either in its design, functionality or content.”

So in the absence of better information, I’ll make a couple of guesses that aren’t mutually exclusive:

• I think app users complained quite a bit about the change, because conventional wisdom is that people like access to both modes, and they particularly enjoy reading magazine apps in the vertical mode, because that’s the way they read the paper-and-ink versions.
• Someone at Time Inc., or its parent company Time Warner, rethought the notion of negotiating with Apple by making its product look less attractive.

That said, it’s worth noting that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes himself has been quite vocal, in a corporatespeak sort of way, about his company’s eagerness to work with tablet makers beyond Apple. (This mirrors what the magazine industry’s Next Issue Media joint venture is saying, too, by launching with Google’s Android platform first.)

Bewkes made noises about it during his company’s earnings call earlier this month. And he got more forceful about it–again, by his standards–yesterday during an onstage interview with the New York Times’ David Carr.

If somebody that makes a tablet–you can nominate who it is–wants to not have app support for what we’re going to put over the internet, they will degrade the capability of the tablet that you bought.

So if you’ve got a tablet that whoever gave it to you, they don’t want it work well, that will be their actions not ours…

You’re the customer, you bought the device. Are you going to tolerate a device, that doesn’t let its app support give you the full range of capability that is offered by the publisher or the network?

Because we’re going to be very public about what we offer, and it’s going to be all free, for anybody who buys the magazine. And if some tech company stands between you and that experience, they should answer to you.

In fact, it’s worth watching Bewkes deliver this speech in real time, and it’s a hoot to watch him onstage with Carr. If you’re in a rush, the magazine/tablet stuff kicks in around the 26-minute mark.

paleycenter on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101118/sports-illustrated-lets-its-ipad-app-stand-up-again/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101111/hulu-for-magazines-launching-early-2011-but-only-for-android/ http://allthingsd.com/20101111/hulu-for-magazines-launching-early-2011-but-only-for-android/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:30:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25737 Next Issue Media, the “Hulu for Magazines” joint venture, plans to have its digital storefront open early next year. But you won’t be able to shop there if you’ve got an iPad.

Next Issue‘s initial incarnation will only work for devices running Google’s Android software, CEO Morgan Guenther tells me.

It’s not a technical issue, Guenther says, because “we’re ready to support Apple as well,” and he says he’s confident that will happen. But “Android is a very important tablet platform, and a very important platform for smartphones.” (Read Walt Mossberg’s review of Samsung’s Android-powered Galaxy Tab.)

Guenther wouldn’t disclose other details about his launch, but you don’t have to squint to read between the lines here. The takeaway is that Google has been flexible on the business issues that are important to the publishers that own his company. And that Apple’s not there yet.

The key split, still: Publishers want the ability to sell their tablet magazines directly to consumers, or at least to be able to access the data that iTunes collects when it sells them.

Some publishers tell me that Apple’s stance has softened somewhat since this summer, when the company refused to let Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated sell subscriptions for its app. But that hasn’t led to any real concessions so far.

If you buy a subscription to Newsweek’s iPad app, for instance, the publisher has no idea who you are or how to reach you: Apple keeps all the data, as well as 30 percent of every dollar.

Presumably Guenther and his publishers are hoping sales of their magazines take off on Android tablets and phones, giving them leverage in discussions with Apple. And that seems to be what Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes was getting at it with his oblique but pointed comments last week.

But all of this wrangling may be non-issues if publishers can’t figure out how to come up with digital magazines that people are interested in, at a price they’ll pay. Aside from a few outliers like Condé Nast’s Wired, early sales numbers from iPad magazines haven’t blown anyone away.

[Image credit: Hard seat sleeper]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101111/hulu-for-magazines-launching-early-2011-but-only-for-android/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20101027/how-to-find-the-google-chrome-app-store-wait-till-december/ http://allthingsd.com/20101027/how-to-find-the-google-chrome-app-store-wait-till-december/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:53:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25145 You probably haven’t heard of it, and you’re very unlikely to be looking for it. But if you are wondering when you might see the Chrome app store Google is working on, here’s the answer: December. Probably.

That’s the word from developers who are building apps for Google’s new store-to-be, which is supposed to work like iTunes, but for Web-based applications instead of ones designed for mobile handsets.

Then again, Chrome app developers I’ve talked to don’t feel confident about any date they’re hearing from Google at this point. That’s because the store, which Google previewed back in May, has missed several launch dates already.

But for now, at least, most developers expect to see a public beta launch on the week of December 6, though a few are holding out hope for a mid-November launch.

Google, for its part, will say only that it promised to have the app store up by the end of the year, and that it’s still on schedule.

Why should you care? If you’re an average consumer, you probably won’t: The app store will work on any Web browser, but it is optimized for Google’s Chrome browser, which has a relatively small market share. But the bigger issue is convincing consumers  to purchase a Web-based app, period.

But the notion of a browser-based store does appeal to some developers, who are interested in melding the performance of mobile phone apps with the connected nature and flexibility of the Web. And some content companies are interested in the idea of selling their stuff in a store that everyone can access, but which isn’t controlled by Apple.

Which is the pitch that Google is making as it reaches out to TV networks and big magazine and newspaper publishers, and tries to persuade them to build for the store. It’s saying, for instance, that it got Time Warner’s Sports Illustrated to demo a version of its magazine when it previewed the app store last spring.

In some cases, I’m told, Google is offering up substantial technical resources to help content makers get apps ready for a launch. And I know that some small developers have received cash, as well–one developer I talked to cashed a $15,000 check–to persuade them to build apps. Should be interesting to see who has built what when the store finally opens.

Here’s that SI demo, with a voiceover from editor Terry McDonell:

And here’s Google’s general introduction to the app store concept:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101027/how-to-find-the-google-chrome-app-store-wait-till-december/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-media-non-move-espn-com-star-bill-simmons-stays-put/ http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-media-non-move-espn-com-star-bill-simmons-stays-put/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:19:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24378 Here’s a variation on the “old media star bails for new media outlet” story–a new media big shot staying put at the place that made him famous.

ESPN.com is hanging on to star columnist Bill Simmons, whose contract was set to expire this year. Disney’s sports site has yet to announce the deal, but sources tell me it was finalized more than a month ago–but not as far back as May 15, when Deadspin reported that a deal was essentially done.

How’s that for precision?

In that same vein, you can hear Simmons acknowledge the new deal, tacitly, in his pal Adam Carolla’s podcast today. During the show, taped yesterday, Carolla tells Simmons that “I know you signed a new contract with ESPN,” and then the two go on to talk about future podcast plans, including the potential for video podcasts (this kicks in around the 17:30 mark, if you’ve got the time).

Simmons more or less grew up on the Web, and while Disney’s (DIS) sports unit gives him an opportunity to do things off the Internet, he’s best known for his Sports Guy columns and podcasts on ESPN’s very big site.

Deadspin says Simmons is now working on a “top secret” project for ESPN; rival sports gossip blog The Big Lead says he’ll be building a new standalone site under the ESPN.com umbrella.

No word on length of the new deal, or its value, though I’m hoping it’s for a boatload of money.

That’s what Simmons’s colleague Rick Reilly got when he came aboard from Time Warner’s (TWX) Sports Illustrated back in 2007–a 5-year, $17 million deal, I’m told–and even though Reilly’s deal was done before the economy tanked, it’d be nice to think a Web wonder can command the same kind of cash in 2010.

Even something in the same ballpark would be nice. Right?

ESPN declined to comment; I’m waiting to hear back from Simmons.

[Image credit: Steven Barry via ESPN Books]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-media-non-move-espn-com-star-bill-simmons-stays-put/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101008/hearst-makes-its-ipad-debut-with-esquire-full-price-no-subscriptions-pretty-good/ http://allthingsd.com/20101008/hearst-makes-its-ipad-debut-with-esquire-full-price-no-subscriptions-pretty-good/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:00:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24272

Hearst is the latest publisher to show up on the iPad, with a tabletized version of Esquire.* As always, you’re better off checking it out yourself then reading about it.

Still here? Okay:

• As promised, Hearst is selling the app at the same price as the paper-and-ink version: $4.99. Squawk all you want, but “we have to reshape expectations” for digital pricing, says Esquire publisher Kevin O’Malley.
• Hearst has talked about offering subscriptions to its iPad titles, but you can’t get one right now. And O’Malley doesn’t sound hopeful that he’ll be offering one through Apple’s (AAPL) store anytime soon. Join the club.
• Like every one of its peers, Esquire on the iPad looks like the print magazine, with some multimedia bells and whistles. Unlike many apps, Esquire doesn’t provide a literal translation of the print copy. So it can’t count app sales as newsstand sales, but O’Malley seems fine with that. The upside for the reader is that Esquire doesn’t need to include every ad from the print edition, and instead features just two ads from a single sponsor–Lexus.
• Many of the multimedia features are low-key grace notes, but that’s okay: You buy Esquire on the iPad because you want to read Esquire on the iPad, right?
• But there are plenty of clever touches, like animated illustrations and a clip of Javier Bardem reciting poetry in Spanish. And, pretty much for giggles, a copy of Ivan Turgenev’s “First Love,” a 76,000-word novella published in 1860 (I didn’t know, either).
• Some apps let you read their magazine in horizontal and vertical modes, while Time Warner’s (TWX) Sports Illustrated only works in horizontal mode (for now). But Esquire only works in vertical mode, and that feels just fine.

*This is Hearst’s first full-fledged iPad magazine, but if you want to be a stickler you can: The publisher has some of its titles available through Zinio’s PDF-reader service, and earlier this year it put out a partial version of a Popular Mechanics issue.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101008/hearst-makes-its-ipad-debut-with-esquire-full-price-no-subscriptions-pretty-good/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100907/ipad-magazine-subscriptions-with-a-catch-zinio-launches-apps-for-sporting-news-national-geographic/ http://allthingsd.com/20100907/ipad-magazine-subscriptions-with-a-catch-zinio-launches-apps-for-sporting-news-national-geographic/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:47:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23157 Another day, another new iPad magazine app. But the latest entry, from Sporting News, is worth mentioning, at least for its subscription model.

That is: Unlike much bigger rival Sports Illustrated, and almost all of the other big magazine titles that have moved to the iPad so far, Sporting News has a subscription model.

The app itself, which limited dollop of preview content, is free. But if you want to read the sports tabloid, you can pay $0.99 for a single issue or $2.99 to get an update sent to your app every day of the month.

How’d they do that when the big guys couldn’t? By letting digital newsstand operator Zinio handle the transaction.

The magazine industry is currently in an uneasy standoff with Steve Jobs and Apple (AAPL): Publishers like Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. want to sell iPad subscriptions through their apps, and keep the money and consumer data the transaction generates. Apple, for the time being, won’t let that happen.

The apparent loophole: Publishers with existing digital e-commerce options, like Amazon (AMZN) and the Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp., as is this Web site), have been allowed to sell app subscriptions without going through Apple.

And Zinio, which ran a digital “newsstand” prior to the iPad’s launch, has also been selling subscriptions to magazines like Sporting News, Esquire and Cosmopolitan from its iPad reader for months.

But not many Cosmopolitan readers–or anyone else–would know to search for “Zinio” in iTunes to get their favorite magazine, so Zinio is launching a line of magazine-branded apps. Today you can get subscriptions to Sporting News and National Geographic apps, and more are on the way.

The caveat: If you’re one of those people who complain that most iPad magazine apps are simply replicas of their print editions, then you’re going to really grumble about Sporting News, and presumably most of the other Zinio-powered apps as well.

Zinio started out publishing digital magazines via PDF files, and that’s more or less what its iPad titles look like today, brightened up with a video here and there and an injection of updated news. That’s presumably why some of the publishers that sell digital magazines through Zinio will end up putting out their own apps, as Hearst plans to do with Esquire.

But for smaller outfits like Sporting News (which is actually owned by American City Business Journals, which in turn is owned by Condé Nast owner Advance Publications), a no-frills app is better than none–especially if they can convince you to pay for it on a monthly basis. Anyone interested?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100907/ipad-magazine-subscriptions-with-a-catch-zinio-launches-apps-for-sporting-news-national-geographic/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20100714/steinbrenners-death-gives-sports-illustrated-a-chance-to-flex-an-ipad-muscle/ http://allthingsd.com/20100714/steinbrenners-death-gives-sports-illustrated-a-chance-to-flex-an-ipad-muscle/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:42:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21493 So far, most magazine publishers have tried hard to make their iPad editions a faithful translation of their paper-and-ink copies: What you pay for at the newsstand is the same thing you get from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store, with some added bells and whistles.

But they don’t have to be that way. Case in point: The newest edition of Sports Illustrated. Print readers get a cover featuring LeBron James and his new teammates. But anyone who buys the iPad version will see a cover story on Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who died this week.

News of Steinbrenner’s death broke early Tuesday morning, a half-day after Sports Illustrated’s conventional issue had gone to the printers. After a relatively quick conversation, says editor Terry McDonell, the magazine staff decided to give the iPad edition a new cover, along with a story by Tom Verducci.

“We all sort of looked at other, and said, ‘you know, this is an opportunity to do this,’ and why wouldn’t we?” McDonell says.

IPad owners will still get the LeBron story, and can even toggle back and forth between the two covers if they want. For the time being, the only place to get Verducci’s story is on the iPad, but McDonell says the magazine will put it up on its free SI.com site later this week, so that print buyers and subscribers won’t be disadvantaged.

If the update seems like a non-decision–flexibility being one of the chief advantages of a digital edition, after all–know that Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine doesn’t plan on making a habit out of it. If you want up-to-date sports news, SI doesn’t expect you to rely on the iPad, though it does provide a stream of SI.com stories within the app itself.

But for certain really big stories, it will try this out again, McDonell says.

“We thought, this is a chance for us to show off what we can do, and what is special abut the iPad in certain situations.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100714/steinbrenners-death-gives-sports-illustrated-a-chance-to-flex-an-ipad-muscle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained/ http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:32:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21357 Quick follow up to the Time magazine paywall story. Here’s Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges explaining the publisher’s policy–it will be title by title, but you’ll be seeing more walls in the future:

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

So there you go.

Two quick notes:

• For now, you can still get all of Sports Illustrated, Time Warner’s (TWX) other iPad title to date, for free on the Web. But you’re going to have to work very hard to find it. (Give up? Over here. UPDATE: Time Inc. folks tell me, through clenched teeth, that you weren’t supposed to get this week’s issue of SI on the Web for free yet. The publisher puts only back issues up on the Web, via SI’s “Vault” feature; someone put the wrong link up. They’ve since taken down the July 12 issue, and replaced it with an iTunes link to the SI app.
• As Apple (AAPL) notes, Time’s free Web site works really well on the iPad’s Safari browser. So do almost all print publisher’s sites. Which means getting consumers to shell out for a paid app instead of the free Web will require more than exclusive content–you’re going to have to offer them a radically different product. We’re not close yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained-2/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:32:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21357 Quick follow up to the Time magazine paywall story. Here’s Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges explaining the publisher’s policy–it will be title by title, but you’ll be seeing more walls in the future:

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

So there you go.

Two quick notes:

• For now, you can still get all of Sports Illustrated, Time Warner’s (TWX) other iPad title to date, for free on the Web. But you’re going to have to work very hard to find it. (Give up? Over here. UPDATE: Time Inc. folks tell me, through clenched teeth, that you weren’t supposed to get this week’s issue of SI on the Web for free yet. The publisher puts only back issues up on the Web, via SI’s “Vault” feature; someone put the wrong link up. They’ve since taken down the July 12 issue, and replaced it with an iTunes link to the SI app.
• As Apple (AAPL) notes, Time’s free Web site works really well on the iPad’s Safari browser. So do almost all print publisher’s sites. Which means getting consumers to shell out for a paid app instead of the free Web will require more than exclusive content–you’re going to have to offer them a radically different product. We’re not close yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100707/time-inc-s-web-paywall-explained-2/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:59:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20996 Sports Illustrated’s iPad app, which the company first started showing off in concept form last winter, is now in the iTunes store.

No point in going into detail about it when you can see it for yourself.

But it’s basically what editor Terry McDonell promised last fall and what the magazine’s peers are also delivering on Apple’s (AAPL) platform: All of the weekly magazine is there, plus some bells and whistles, like additional photos, an extra story and some videos. (The ads, though, are not the same as those in the magazine, which is different from rival Condé Nast’s strategy.)

In this case, the app it also looks and functions quite a bit like Time magazine’s iPad app, with good reason: Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. unit is using the same outside collaborators, The Wonder Factory and WoodWing Software, for all its magazine apps.

So if you liked the Time app, you may like this one. The price is the same, too: $4.99 an issue, though a subscription plan in the works will end up shaving the per-issue price down a bit.

But here’s the thing: The “magazine plus” app concept, which works nicely for titles like Wired, feels like a liability with Sports Illustrated. Because much of the magazine’s content is dated as soon as hits the page, and SI is happy to let it stay that way on the iPad.

Every mag app grapples with this, of course. And so far all of them are trying to steer away from the Web model, where they’re expected to provide timely updates, but don’t make much money doing so. Better to resell the magazine they’ve already made without having to create much in the way of new stuff.

When you hold a print version of SI, timeliness doesn’t feel like a problem. Presumably because you don’t have any other expectations. But when you’re reading it in digital form, on a device connected to the Web…

Case in point: Today’s issue has a feature story on the U.S. World Cup team’s exploits. But it was written before the thrilling Algeria game. So there’s no mention of that result.

And while the app does have some links into SI’s Web site and the ability to provide updated scores, it does so in a limited way: Right now, it’s only offering up baseball scores. So when the SI team was demoing the app for me this morning, I heard oohs and aahs from a nearby office, where people were watching the Italy-Slovakia game. But the app couldn’t give me the score of that match: If I had wanted to check it out, I’d have had to head out of the app and into Apple’s Safari browser.

The SI guys say this is a very deliberate design choice. McDonell says the app provides readers with a “curated experience” instead of the “firehose” of data flooding from the Web. I’d buy that for some titles, even for a news magazine like Time.

But not here: If Sports Illustrated really wants me to pay up for this one, it needs to plug in, too.

Chris Hercik, the SI creative director, who listened to all of my gripes yet remained good-natured about it, sat down for a quick interview this morning. Apologies for the poor lighting — one thing you get on the SI app that you don’t get here is video made by people who know what they’re doing:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/ http://allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 18:12:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19692 Sports Illustrated hasn’t come to Apple’s iPad yet, but the magazine is already showing off a new version of its future: A digital version designed with Google in mind.

This one, which Editor Terry McDonell showed off at Google’s I/O developer conference today, looks a whole lot like the one the publisher says it is bringing to Apple’s gadget soon. The real difference here is the way readers/buyers get their hands on the thing: Rather than buying it from Apple’s App Store and downloading it to your iPad, you would access it via your Web browser, after purchasing it from an app store Google manages.

For most users, this may not matter very much. Regardless of which store you buy it from, the magazine should function the same way. (Don’t get hung up on the fact that it’s a Web-based app.)

But for publishers like Time Inc., the Time Warner (TWX) unit that puts out Sports Illustrated and titles like Time and People, it’s potentially a big deal: It opens up a much wider audience for the company’s publications, since they should work on any device that supports Google’s Chrome browser. Just as important, it gives Time Inc. another vendor to work with, one that might be willing to grant it concessions Apple (AAPL) won’t–like control over subscriber information, perhaps.

But all of this is a little speculative, as neither Time Inc. nor Google (GOOG) has released concrete details about the app store or the magazine. But the hope is that both will be ready in the fall.

Meantime, here’s McDonell’s presentation. He’s introduced at the event by Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management.

And here’s cleaner version of a similar demo, which McDonell taped in advance:

This doesn’t look remarkably different from the tabletized magazine demos Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated have shown off before. That is, SI (and mag publishers in general) are still primarily concerned with porting their printed product to digital form, adding some audio and video, as well as selected links to the Web. This makes sense given that both demos were produced with the Wonder Factory design shop.

See for yourself: Compare and contrast today’s demo with the one SI showed off last fall:

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