Interesting Snippets

To commemorate its ninetieth birthday next year, classical music monthly Gramophone has digitised all 1,000 editions of its legacy, comprising 110,000 pages, for its app and web subscribers. More than just a technological feat, the resurrection and archival capabilities of digital copying and storage that have brought back value for music and video owners may also offer new long tail prospects for magazines. The consumer value benefits are intriguing. Gramophone only launched on iPad a year ago – now 1,000 copies are available in perpetuity to subscribers for the same £3.99-a-month (£39.99-a-year) price as the mere dozen-or-so it has published digitally since launch.

There are at least 61 publications currently active on Tumblr, including big names such as GQ, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, and The Economist. Vogue, the most followed magazine, racked up thousands of devotees in mere hours when it launched. Many brands see their posts reblogged by dozens and liked by hundreds.

When magazines fail to utilize the platform, it’s generally because they do not interact with the larger community. People’s initial Tumblr attempt was simply an RSS feed, which did not encourage interaction, and they have since stopped tumbling.

Editors say that while it is hard to gauge direct impact in terms of subscriptions and revenues, a successful Tumblr targets a community that might not be familiar with the print publication or its website.

National Readership Survey finds that Tesco Magazine reaches 6.4m Britons, suggesting each copy is read by three people. And with such huge circulations, the magazines have lots of affluent readers. Asda’s publication is read by 7.3% of all people belonging to social class A—handily beating upscale titles such as Country Living and Vogue.

Conde Nast reports users are spending more than two hours on average with its Vanity Fair and GQ apps — that’s double the average hour spent with print magazines. Interaction times are also growing with subsequent issues. Vanity Fair’s interaction times jumped more than an hour from June to July; GQ’s jump was much more modest at only few minutes

before launching Flipboard, he made his engineers hook up double the amount of servers they thought would be necessary. After the launch, Flipboard maxed out that server capacity in a shocking 20 minutes… “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We thought it would take a while for people to understand the concept and get used to it and download it. I didn’t realize that it would be explosive – that within seconds people would be downloading it by the thousands. The other thing I didn’t anticipate was the way that people used the product. They use it far more intensely than I thought they would. When people started downloading it they were flipping back to 2009 on their Facebook pages. It was crazy! They just sat there just flipping