My iPad Magazine Stand
Of course, small, nimble apps won't necessarily solve the long-term revenue problems of major magazines. So is there a bigger solution for magazines, one that will bring in significant revenue along the lines of what they saw in the pre-digital world?
This is an incredibly difficult question and I've stopped trying to pretend I have any response to it other than "I don't know," or, in less sanguine moments, "Probably not." There are no easy answers for content publishers right now, which is why in some ways they can hardly be blamed for their iPad enthusiasm a at the very least, they aren't ignoring the sea change that tablets represent. Perhaps like many of us, they need to fail their way to success. That's a legitimate strategy, and if they're nimble enough to recover from these wild miscalculations before it's too late, then I applaud them for it.
More likely, they will waste too many cycles on this chimerical vision of resuscitating lost glories. And as they do, the concept of a magazine will be replaced in the mind a and attention span a of consumers by something along the lines ofAFlipboard. If you ask me, the trajectory of content consumption favors apps like these that are more of a window to the world at large than a cul-de-sac of denial. Social media, if it's not already obvious to everyone, is going to continue to change everything a including publishing. And it's a no-brainer to me that content consumption is going to be intimately if not inextricably linked with your social graph. Combine Flipboard or whatever comes along and improves upon it with the real innovation in recommendation technology that we'll almost undoubtedly see in the next few years, and I can't see how the 20th Century concept of a magazine can survive, even if it does look great on a tablet.
Posted: October 28th, 2010
at 12:38pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: computers,web,design,et cetera,development
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