From Tabloids to Tablets: Commercial Opportunities On Apple’s Newsstand

Before the Internet and personal computers, people relied on daily newspapers to stay up to date on current events. Seemingly overnight, the rise of the Internet put our paperboys out of work and crowned digital news king. People began using desktop or laptop computers to access news anytime, increasing the velocity of information in the news world. In the last five years, however, it’s the Web that’s been gathering dust. The rapid proliferation of smartphone devices has enabled audiences to consume news not only at any time, but also from any location and through apps that optimize the reading experience. In the past five years, Amazon and Apple in particular have built entire ecosystems from the ground up, and have turned on their heads the entire content distribution and monetization strategies of just about every major publisher in the world. Time Inc’s CEO Laura Lang echoes this wholesale change: “People love reading our digital magazines already on iPad and we are confident we can deliver an even greater consumer experience on Newsstand with digital subscriptions.” Whilst the printed newspaper was invented over four hundred years ago, it’s the last decade that has changed the face of the written word.

Tabloids to Tablets: we’ve come a long way.

So nearly a year after Apple launched Newsstand, and on the day that Amazon comes to the world with its rumored release of the newest Amazon Kindle device, App Annie wanted to provide some market insights to assess the opportunities that lie in mobile apps for news and magazine publishers.

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