There has been a lot said about the iPad and tablets being the next wave in publishing and The New Yorker revealed that it has more than 100,000 iPad users and more than 20,000 people are paying about $60 a year for a subscription for its iPad app.
The New Yorker iPad app may not be the publication that you think would be very successful on the iPad, as other Conde Nast publications like Wired may seem more appealing to the tablet crowd. What interesting is that many say that digital magazines on tablets have to take full advantage of the capabilities of the platform in order to compete but The New Yorker doesn’t really have many tricks.
“That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading,” said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, in an interview with The New York Times. “There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go.”
One could easily infer that the demographics of The New Yorker and the iPad overlap and that may not be able to be replicated easily by other publications. Still, it does show that people are willing to pay for this type of content on a tablet, so it’s up to publisher’s to figure out what’s the best way to deliver that content.
[Via New York Times]