Magazines, Subscription | featured news

Newsstand sales of consumer magazines dropped 8.2% in the second half of 2012 from a year earlier, while paid subscriptions saw modest growth of 0.7%. Digital editions expanded their presence.

At the moment, one of the chief unmet needs is simplicity, says Guenther, who was president of TiVo before joining NIM. While iPad users, for instance, can find most of the magazines they might want to buy in Apple‘s Newsstand app, they still have to download each magazine’s reader app individually and manage their subscriptions separately. NIM’s answer, which it’s unveiling Wednesday, is a unified tablet newsstand in which users can jump between dozens of different titles. At launch, it will be available on Android tablets running the Honeycomb operating system or higher, but Morgan says the company plans to submit its iOS app to Apple for approval in the next few weeks.

Apple appears to have reversed its guidelines for magazine and newspaper subscriptions purchased in its App Store, in a big victory for publishers who blanched at the original terms.

According to a new Forrester survey, almost 80% of Internet users in the US and Canada would not pay for access to newspaper and magazine websites. Those users who would consider paying for content are mostly interested in subscriptions. Only a very small number of consumers is interested in making micropayments (3%).