For magazine lovers, traveling used to mean loading up on print editions to read on the road, and then packing up exotic publications as souvenirs to bring home. Your location really mattered for magazine selections when print was the only way to get publications from specific places.
Today your location still matters — except when it doesn’t. New digital magazine apps let you unlock new magazine experiences by being in the right place at the right time, or subscribe to global publications without regard to national borders. These apps’ creators want to free magazine readers from geographic constraints, customize their reading experiences, and revitalize public reading with digital tools.
Foli: Magazines, Hyperlocal
A map of some of Foli’s locations in the Bay Area.
It’s one of the biggest cliches about reading magazines in public: that outdated, dull selection of magazines at the doctor’s office. Startup Foli wants to kill that cliche and reinvent the public magazine reading experience. Foli co-founder and CEO Henry He saw the growth of tablet devices as an opportunity.
“You have a stack of magazines there in the doctor’s office, the print Wall Street Journal in the hotel, the USA Today…All this market will sooner or later go away in paper format,” He said in an interview.
Foli, currently available only as an iPad app, enables visitors at participating businesses to open the app, view a custom newsstand, and read digital magazines selected by the business. These might be consumer magazines (largely PDF-style replicas), but businesses can also include their own publications.
Foli’s newsstand in trial mode, which allows for an hour of free reading anywhere.
For example, He said, a hotel could include its restaurant and bar menus, as well as its own magazine (as did the Four Seasons Silicon Valley). Content can be updated daily to display the business’s news and events, and can be customized for the business’s typical customers. Other businesses using Foli include coffee shops, hair salons and spas.
“We immediately focused on the hospitality sector because we believe that if people travel, they’re going to carry the iPad with them,” He said.
He says that people who read magazines using Foli average an hour of engagement with the app. And if you’ve ever been tempted to tear a page from a magazine at the salon, or frustrated that the doctor was ready to see you before you finished reading an article, Foli has a solution. You can add articles and multimedia from magazines accessed through Foli to your own in-app digital collection to read elsewhere later, using “credits” to save each piece.
“Our long-term goal is to be everywhere a paper book or magazine used to be,” He said, changing what it means to provide and read magazines in public places.
Magzter: Magazines, Global
Magzter’s iPad newsstand.
While location is everything for Foli users, location is increasingly irrelevant because of apps such as Magzter. Magzter, available for multiple platforms, offers 1,700 magazine titles to 8.5 million users, according to Vijay Radhakrishnan, co-founder and president of Magzter. He said these users are distributed widely, with 2 million in the U.S., 2 million in the U.K., 3 million from Asia and 1.5 million from the rest of the world.
Magzter’s biggest recent coup was announced in April: a deal with Hearst to offer Hearst magazines, including all of its U.S. editions and a selection of its international publications, through its service. Magzter takes a 50 percent revenue cut from publishers’ sales, significantly more than Apple’s 30 percent, but also can collect and share more valuable reader data with publishers than Apple does. Magzter offers mostly digital replicas through its service, though some magazines include interactive features.
“Many publishers sign up with us because we can bring consumers around the world,” Radhakrishnan said in an interview. “Niche titles like gardening or cooking, lifestyle, entertainment, all sell a lot outside their geographies.”
Some international readers are seeking out magazines from their home countries, in what Radhakrishnan calls a “diaspora effect” on readership. Others are just intrigued by international publications.
The Indian edition of Harper’s Bazaar is available through Magzter, along with many other international magazines.
“They’re curious people…Let’s say, a cooking magazine on Indian cuisine — it’s selling a lot outside India. It’s not a diaspora. It’s people who really want to get into Indian cuisine, maybe citizens of the U.K. who want to learn Indian cuisine,” he explained.
Magazines published in English can easily find interested readers around the globe. Some topics are relevant and universal for a global audience, and publishers using Magzter can access that worldwide readership. Radhakrishnan says “fewer than 10” of Magzter’s titles carry geographic restrictions on subscriptions.
As these apps show, magazine reading can now be more local, and more global, than in the print-only world. These new capabilities point to the growth possibilities for both custom digital publishing for businesses wanting to generate their own magazine-style content for apps such as Foli, and for universal, globally relevant magazines that can address a worldwide audience through apps such as Magzter. And magazine fans can get to know individual places and be global readers, without packing up a stack of paper magazines in their suitcases.
Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.
Considering many magazines are now maintaining a web presence, and how creative apps like Magzter are popping up, the digital realm is definitely opening publications up to a wider potential audience. With that said, it is interesting to consider what effect this will have on the type of content magazines will feature as their reading population grows to a more diverse status. In many ways even widely recognized magazines like Good Housekeeping tailor their stories, media, and advertisements to a specific group of people (namely, American women, or more specifically, U.S. mothers/housewives). I suppose with the technology available today it isn’t hard to create digital ads that vary depending on the viewer (clearly search engines like Google and Bing perform this action already). However, making sure the main features of a magazine appeal to a very broad spectrum of people (all with varying backgrounds, ages, geographic locations, cultures, and so on), would be a more challenging task.
To use the example of Good Housekeeping again, the magazine clearly spotlights popular North American styles and ideals; things which can be seen as out of the norm, irrelevant, or strange for European or South American readers. My guess is that while many magazines will continue to appeal to their original niche audiences, those that take advantage of the expanded market for viewership might actually fragment their publications. This would lead to more off-shoot publications like Good Housekeeping London, Good Housekeeping Paris, Good Housekeeping Rio, etc. Or, perhaps more simply, this could mean the expansion of perspectives expressed (in order to appeal to a greater audience), with the thoughtful categorization of digital material for easy location.
All I see is more people out of work because of the demise of print news and print journalism, and we will be more hollow by it’;s demise.