Popular Science: only 10,000 subscriptions on iPad

4th April, 2011 by adina
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The Popular Science version for iPad has only reached 10,000 subscriptions so far, says publisher Bonnier Technology Group. The milestone has been reached in a timeframe of only six weeks after the adoption by Apple of a new in-application subscription model and therefore the company is very excited about it. Details on iPad performance have been released only by few publishers.

The number of subscriptions for the iPad version of Popular Science is still lower than print numbers, which hits 1.2 million. Bonnier has equally sold about 2,500 individual copies of the iPad issue for March. Gregg Hano, VP-group publisher said that the magazine has been selling an average of 10,000 to 12,000 iPad copies per month, a level finally passed in March. Popular Science had about 1.3 million subscriptions overall in the second half of last year.

Hano recognizes that Apple policies prevented Bonnier from knowing details about iPad subscribers. He admitted that the group had no information on the locations subscribers were coming from or whether they were or were not print subscribers. The number of people willing to share data with Bonnier is also unknown.

Publishers usually have been reluctant to adopt in-application subscriptions. Apple allows publishers to claim the whole revenue from application subscriptions that were processed outside of a title, but also asks for equivalent in-application options and it takes 30 percent revenue cut. In-application prices have to be equal to that web portals offer, or even smaller.


     

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