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Reading app aggregator Pulse has boosted its content by making a deal with magazine publisher Bonnier, TechCrunch revealed. Bonnier will let Pulse app users access 20 of its special-interest magazines, including Scuba Diving, Parenting, Sound + Vision, and others. While Pulse has some 300 content partners in place right now, this deal is said to be its biggest to date.
Bonnier's tablet-focused spinoff Mag+ has provided an update showing more concrete signs of the iOS 5 Newsstand effect on tablet magazine adoption. Data handed to AllThingsD revealed that, as soon as iOS 5 was released, Popular Science added over 4,000 new subscribers. Growth in the weeks since has also been much faster, taking it from nearly 28,300 readers to over 40,700.
The iPad version of Popular Science has accumulated over 10,000 subscriptions as of Sunday, according to publisher Bonnier Technology Group. The company claims to be "very excited" about the milestone, which was reached only six weeks after Apple switched to a new in-app subscription model. Very few publishers have released details on their iPad performance.
Only a relative handful of magazines are so far adopting Apple's in-app subscription scheme, an Advertising Age report claims. The major obstacle is said to be demographic data, which publishers normally use to sell advertising space. Because turning over the data is strictly voluntary in iOS apps, magazines are thought to be resistant. "Without the demographics, which iTunes [Apple] won't release, the print world is castrated," says Gary Armstrong, a consultant on branded content and a former Wenner Media executive.
The iPad has already been very successful for the Wall Street Journal as an e-reader, News Corp's chief Rupert Murdoch said during a call discussing his company's latest results. About 64,000 are subscribing to the newspaper in just the first month; it's also significantly more profitable than the same subscription on the Kindle, he said. Unlike Amazon's insistence on a revenue split, the WSJ keeps all of the nearly $18 it costs for a month of reading.
Bonnier today made good on its promise to deliver the Mag+ magazine format to tablets by launching
Popular Science publisher Bonnier and the design group Berg today showed Mag+, a new magazine concept designed for an expected wave of tablets from Apple and others (video below). The approach would take advantage of both a touchscreen and an Internet connection to provide a more modern experience: articles would be continuous scrolls rather than pages and would need only a swipe to one side to change articles entirely.
