Wired's Newest iPad Issue Boasts Its Best Feature Yet: Free
Remember when iPad magazine apps-and Wired's app in particular-were big news? That was a year ago. — Now Wired would like to remind you that it's still publishing on the iPad, and the Conde Nast title is offering a pretty …
Context & Ripple Effects
Wired's iPad app was the launch title of tablet publishing in 2010, built with Adobe after Conde Nast insisted Apple's new guidelines wouldn't stop it and shipped on Adobe technology that May. A year on, the story has inverted: WWD reported in December 2010 that iPad magazine sales were dropping, and TechCrunch argued in January that iPad magazines need a new blueprint entirely.
Giving the newest issue away free is Conde Nast's answer to that arc — a promotional reset meant to remind lapsed buyers that Wired still publishes on the iPad, one year after the app was itself the news.
First-order effects
- Every existing and prospective Wired iPad reader can download the newest issue at no cost, trading $4 of per-issue revenue for a shot at re-engaging an audience that stopped buying.
- The move puts a public price signal under Wired's own digital edition: the title is now worth more as a marketing vehicle than at its cover price.
Second-order effects
- Rival tablet publishers — Time Inc., which broke through Apple's subscription logjam last August, among them — face pressure to match the giveaway model rather than defend per-issue pricing that sales data already showed eroding.
- Apple's App Store becomes the arena where this pricing war plays out, since every publisher's discounting runs through Apple's storefront and its terms.
Third-order effects
- If free issues become the standard acquisition tactic, iPad magazines shift from selling individual issues to building subscriber relationships — the 'new blueprint' TechCrunch demanded — with the app store owners setting the rules of that economy.
- The launch-year hype cycle around tablet editions gives way to a consolidation phase where only titles that solve discovery and retention survive, thinning the field of premium-priced magazine apps.
The trend: Tablet magazine publishing is moving from paid-per-issue novelty to giveaway-and-subscription models as first-year sales enthusiasm fades.