(2012-11-22) Craig Mod Subcompact Disruptive Innovation Magazine Publishing

Craig Mod wonders what the "Subcompact" (Worse Is Better) Disruptive Innovation to Magazine Publishing will be. Apple's NewsStand is RSS you can charge for. He thinks Marco Arment's "The Magazine" hits a pretty sweet spot. I think the concept of "issues" is pretty weird, you could just have a single per-title app that sucks down new individual articles as they are posted (plus you could separately send email notification.)

Nice timing coming just before The Daily got axed.

Dec07 update: Craig assembles lots of reactive linkage.

Dec24: imagine if Google had made it easy to charge readers for your Blogger blog (Metered Pay Wall), and made it easy for Google Reader to pay for a subscription.

Jan17'2013: Ben Brown seems like he's heading in similar-but-not-identical directions. The market for CPM based ad sales and display Advertising is suffering like never before. Publishers and marketers now want engagement, integration into content, and to build a direct and lasting relationship with their customers. Page views alone are no longer enough. Where does this leave publishers who have invested in web publishing / blogging ecosystem?... Where they’ve fallen behind is in producing the kind of premium, reader-friendly end product we need today to stock the virtual shelves of the AppStore-s and EBook stores. Also reminds me of Press Books, and my Book Server idea.

Jun'2013: Hamish Mc Kenzie notes a number of players in this tool/publishing space. Last week, Marco Arment announced that he has sold The Magazine to the minimalist iOS publication’s executive editor, Glenn Fleishman. Arment said he had accidentally built a business he was ill-suited to running. “Glenn’s doing almost everything already, so I’m effectively a figurehead,” he said. It might also have been the case, however, that Arment saw that a wider trend was on its way, one that would see The Magazine as just one among thousands of titles available through the AppStore... The options available to independent publishers have never been better, but it’s also likely that this space is going to get saturated quickly.