a curious Yankee in Europe's court

In their urgent push to find a business model — in this case, embracing digital “apps” as the way to induce readers (or somebody) to pay for their content — magazine publishers are hoping their subscribers will forget something rather important, according to Mathew Ingram.

Writing last week for GigaOM, Ingram said (“Too Many Magazine Apps Are Still Walled Gardens” by Matthew Ingram, Oct. 9, 2010):

…one thing is becoming clear: publishers mostly just want you to look at their content, and are hoping that you will forget all about the Internet and social media and all of those irritating things that get in between you and the consumption of their wonderful content.

Ingram reviews in particular the new app for Esquire magazine that has just been introduced, pointing out some glitches in functioning that he dislikes (he also discusses Wired magazine’s digital app, introduced earlier this year).

And since a picture is worth a thousand… etc, in order to see what exactly Ingram is talking about, here are the intro videos the two magazines produced for their apps.

First Esquire:

And Wired:

Technologically speaking, this is exciting stuff for Internet users, seems to me.  But Ingram objects strongly that these apps at present signal their publishers’ desire to turn back the clock to a “walled garden” world. Meaning that not so long ago old place and time where providers were in control of everything and users were passive and powerless and paying.

Ingram writes:

Wired’s app provides a slick interface to the magazine, but no way of actually sharing it, or of linking it to related content somewhere else — not even to Wired’s own website. It’s like an interactive CD-ROM from the 1990s.

The new Esquire app also has plenty of “interactivity,” if by that you mean the ability to click and watch an ad for a new Lexus, or listen to cover boy Javier Bardem recite a Spanish poem, or swipe your finger and watch a timeline of the construction of the new World Trade Center. All of those are very cool — but if you are looking for the kind of interactivity that allows you to post a comment on a story, or to share a link via Twitter, or to post anything to a blog and then link back to the magazine, you are out of luck. In fact, if you like the app or any of the stories within it, your only option is to close the app completely and then email someone to tell them that you liked it…

Earning praise, in contrast, from Ingram is the app for Flipboard.  As you can see in the video below, Flipboard stresses interactivity and all the social media aspects (Facebook and Twitter, as examples) of the Internet that are so hugely popular. You can read Ingram’s full article here.

Here’s Flipboard‘s video introducing its app:

For now, though, according to Peter Kafka writing in his column MediaMemo at All Things Digital (WSJ), the new magazine apps may be paying off for their publishers (“Magazine Publishers Turn Back From the Abyss” Oct 11, 2010). Alluding to the “brutal beating” magazines have experienced in recent years, Kafka reports that in recent months ad sales for magazines in general have begun to climb. Wired, he reports, is leading the pack:

Worth noting that Condé Nast’s Wired, which may have the most successful iPad magazine app, saw ad pages jump 32.8 percent.