Every couple of days we publish three important news for mobile publishing industry. This week top three are:
1. New York Times disclosed the revenues of its digital business and it looks good!
Business Insider reporting on the story even draws an optimistic conclusion that “(…) Even if the New York Times’ print paper, which still generates most of the company’s overall revenue of about $2 billion a year, were to shut down tomorrow, the company would still be able to fund an excellent newsroom”.
At $360 million digital arm of New York Times is still significantly smaller than paper but with a healthy growth it paints quite a good looking picture for the future.
2. Guardian News & Media increased digital revenues by whooping 28.9% in last 12 months!
The publisher of the Guardian, Observer and guardian.co.uk website increased digital revenues from £43.4m to £55.9m. Interestingly increase in digital revenues are solely based on iPad sales (up to 22,900 from 17,000) when iPhone app users stand at 57,259, down from 82,000 a year ago.
3. Future shuts
iPad magazine Tech. after 7 months
Definitely not all good news. There is still place to improve and Future seems to understand that.
A spokesman at Future tells The Media Briefing: “tech. was a great product but wasn’t delivering in the way we anticipated it to, so we took the quick but difficult decision to close it at the end of last month. It’s part of our policy of active portfolio management”.
Reason behind Tech. failure may be due to the fact it… wasn’t Tech. after all.
tech. was unusual because instead of being a digital version of a print mag it was a spinoff from an online media brand, technology website TechRadar. That means no print legacy but also no print brand to build on.
Tech. owners call it experiment that hasn’t worked. We are yet to see if they relaunch in a different form or are done with digital publishing for now.