Magazines

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you.

Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers going to monetize their content and audiences, as those audiences move dramatically from newspaper, magazine and broadcast to the tablet? A Pew data point: “A majority, say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59 percent) or as a substitute for television news (57 percent).” (See “The Newsonomics of the Missing Link,”) So let’s look at the Newsonomics of Livestand.

Far more important for Apple to maintain the iPad as the best, most complete way to do our digital reading. Readers don’t care about the tiffs between Apple and publishers; we all just want everything in one orderly place (nothing hursts like an incomplete Newsstand). Yes, Apple will go some potential revenue, by giving up the attempt to choke off 30% of publisher sub revenue ’til the end of time. Its gains, though, may be impressive.

Inevitably, many consumers will buy subscriptions through Apple. That’s a good thing – and a lead list for newspaper companies. Let Apple sign up new subscribers, happily providing the 30% commission. Even if the publisher doesn’t get much customer data (about 50% are withholding it, given the Apple-offered opportunity to opt out), the publisher retains an enviable relationship to that reader. It’s called the daily product. Each day, readers get the news products, and they can receive “all-access” offers. To Rob Grimshaw’s point, these offers don’t need to be seen as anti-Apple offers. They simply offer readers more choice, and who could argue with that?

Treat News ADD: In a world of plenty, really infinities of news, opinion and information, it’s not how much content you can push to the market, it’s how much reader attention you can earn and depend on. In describing Domino, Godin says, “The only asset we care about is attention.” You’ve got to ask, he says, “What are you doing with the attention you have.” That’s a highly relevant question. In print, news publishers used to engage lots of reader attention, gaining four hours or more per month of attention (reading time) of 40%-plus of the households in their markets. Online, most news sites have gotten 10-15 minutes per month of reader engagement, reader attention. The tablet, and e-readers, offer new opportunities in treating this attention deficit disorder, with the early signs showing more attention spent. Innovative approaches to publishing — what you offer, how you offer, how you package, how you engage readers — can be the best medicine. “It’s a huge opportunity for journalists. They can be the concierge of attention,” he says, as editors pointing to best, most useful content, their own or others.

Digital circulation money, though it may the highest profile part of this story, isn’t the most curious issue involved here. There are at least three big issues for media companies — and you can put Netflix, Hulu and Rhapsody in the mix here — surfacing here:

Selling a customer across all media types, including print, with the new all-access media consumer promise — a cornerstone of many next-generation business models.
Unifying the customer experience as we digidextrous readers (and listeners and watchers) move from desktop to smartphone to tablet and back and forth over the course of our days.
Sophisticated ad targeting. Yes, new digital circulation money — has it finally arrived? — seems like a godsend, but it’s a small godsend compared to the amount of digital advertising spending to be available to media over the next five years.

The desktop web has been the ultimate YellowPages/weather update/news check-in/bar bet paradise. Remember back to the ’90s, when we discovered we could go anywhere. It was liberating and mind-blowing. Now, perhaps comforted that the short-read, information-access medium will always be there (and on and through the tablet as well), we’re taking to a new opportunity, the opportunity to read digitally, in ways we find lean-back pleasurable.

Put these three phenomena together — a multi-platform world in which the tablet becomes a prime part of daily news reading, reading that will be partly charged for — and you have the shiny new business model of 2011: all-access. I’ve written about all-access and exhorted those publishers with high-quality, differentiated news products to embrace it (see The Newsonomics of the fading 80/20 rule, on Time Warner moves). Now, the forces of the times seem to have conspired to bring it forward and make it dominant.

Google atomized content in one way, blowing up the newspaper (and magazine) package, and presented it in bits. Now we’re starting to see ways — Kindle Singles, I think, is best vision of what can now be done (“The Newsonomics of Kindle Singles”) — to reassemble those bits every which way in ways that make consumer sense. Moreover, they may well offer new consumer propositions and business models as well.

So let’s look broadly at those numbers. Count them all up — and undoubtedly, numerous ones are missing — and you’ve got something more than 65,000 journalists, working for brands of one kind or another.

3.6% That’s the growth in magazine ad pages in 3Q, 2010 in the U.S. The number is up from .8% in 2Q, which was the first period showing an increase since late 2007. Now, will newspaper ad growth finally turn positive?