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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Mags Are Ready to iPhone It In  ScrollMotion, which also created the new and very successful People magazine app. The company behind the Iceberg Reader for iPhone e-book versions of best-sellers such as Stephenie Meyer'sTwilight is exploring numerous distribution and revenue models with a range of magazines, newspapers and book publishers. The company counts Hearst, Condé Nast, The Slate Group and Time Inc. among its partners. After the newly released Apple iPhone 3G S sold over 1 million units last weekend, interest in the device as a platform for magazines is heating up all the more. “What we never had before was a good enough device that rivaled what it was like to read in the magazine space,” says ScrollMotion co-founder Josh Koppel. “The iPhone is a game changer, a whole new type of interaction. With touch screens it is a magic slate.” And a magic slate that may realize real money. People charges $1.99 for its app, and the new operating system for the iPhone allows for publishers to create subscription models as well. Koppel says that discussion of pricing models is ongoing and “fluid,” but he believes that mobile is shaping up to offer publishers an “appreciable revenue stream.” The iTunes model will do for print publishing what it has already done for music, he argues. “It is the digital gold standard for buying content. In the old days, five years ago, when people were making deals to put magazines on the decks of phones it was a different process. We were dealing with a crippled product, ASCII text, and none of the elegance we can bring to the space now.” Koppel says the company has learned already that having the content with you at all times is the key to mobilizing brands. Consumers want to be able to grab bits and pieces of the media throughout the day. “It is the interstitial moment. If I am reading a book I can return to it in a small, portable moment. That is the breakthrough in this space and why I think people are liking it so much. We have the ability to make that work across all the different content spaces.” For magazines, ScrollMotion envisions structures that allow for the user to flip and browse quickly and decide what item to drill into. “You have a different engagement model,” says Koppel. “You have to build in the page flip.” Most of the upcoming magazines will work as stand-alone apps that include static content a user can read without a connection and dynamic live content the phone can pull from the network. Many magazines also will be available in an Iceberg Reader app that will aggregate titles in a single app as well. Having titles exist in the App Store as stand-alone units that sell individually has been key to ScrollMotion’s success, Koppel insists. Other e-book providers have sold and distributed titles within the confines of their own dedicated reader, but this cuts Apple out of the sales and merchandising loop. “We made a conscious decision to have every single sale register with iTunes and with Apple,” Koppel says. "The others were circumventing the money to pay Apple. We wanted to be the best partner possible, and as a result we got their attention.” At the recent Worldwide Developers Conference, ScrollMotion was among a handful of developers invited on stage by Apple to demo their apps as part of the new phone and operating system rollouts. Koppel says ScrollMotion plans to bring its platform to other application stores such as BlackBerry App World and the Android Marketplace. Interested in the inevitable mobile future for magazines? Join us Wednesday, June 24, at 1:30 p.m. for the min Webinar “Positioning Your Brand for Mobile Revenues and New Audiences.” We will have the mobile gurus from HFMUS, AP News and Gannett drilling deeply into the models that are already working on mobile. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
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