Magzter on its all-you-can-read subscription model
Magzter Gold is available for US$9.99 per-month or $4.99 per-month for Magzter Gold Lite, which gives unlimited access to any five titles per month. Magzter says the service is the first in a series of launches in 2015.
Titles read under Magzter Gold get counted towards the magazine’s advertising rate-base. In addition to magazine content, Magzter will also add digital books to its platform later this year.
The company has also unveiled a new user interface to better support content discovery. Magzter says a key feature of the interface is the ability to algorithmically tailor the reading experience for individual users based on their interests and interactions with in-app content.
Amy Duffin caught up with Magzter’s co-founder and president, Vijay Radhakrishnan (pictured left) and co-founder and CEO, Girish Ramdas (pictured right) and to ask them about the new subscription model:
Which publishers are already trying the Magzter Gold subscription model out on their brands?
Ramdas: We have more than 1,000 publishers who have signed up for Magzter Gold including Time Inc. UK, Future UK, DC Thomson UK, Dennis Publishing UK, ESPN USA, Mansueto USA, Maxim USA, Kiplinger’s USA, Universal Mags Australia, Forbes Africa, Editora Europa Brazil, Worldwide Media India, Outlook Group India, MediaCorp Singapore, Mag Editori Italy, Marumo Publishing Japan, Forbes Mexico, Pacific Media New Zealand, Grupo V Portugal, Hinge Enquirer Philippines, Edipresse Hong Kong, Axel Springer Espana, Globus Communications Spain, GyJ Espana, MC Ediciones Spain, Dogan Burda Turkey, CPI Media UAE, Motivate UAE and many more are in the process of signing up.
How will being able to identify user’s reading habits help develop the Magzter model? Do you think we’ll see different patters emerge from different countries/regions? If so, what are they likely to be?
Ramdas: We have very deep analytics of reader behaviour in this version of the app. We truly believe in localisation and based on what we already have we are seeing various trends on what time people read magazines, what magazines are read by different age groups, how long they read, what devices they read on, etc. Based on these we shall be fine turning our offering as well. In the latest 4.0 version of the Magzter app, we also ask for users’ interests which will further enable us to give the user what he/she wants to read in a more personalised manner.
You’re adding digital books to the Magzter platform later this year. Are you likely to offer combined book and magazine subscriptions at some point?
Ramdas: We are in talks with top book publishers to get them on board Magzter and we hope to soon have a combined plan for books and magazines.
A key issue with digital newsstands is discoverability. How does the Magzter store help publishers to get their titles found?
Radhakrishnan: We have launched a recommendation engine which can completely understand the user behaviour and can recommend titles based on their interests and reading habits. Initially when the users launch the app they can start choosing their interests and then magazines will be populated based on the interests and geographies with an option to edit the interests later. This will help discoverability along with an option to filter the magazines by language.
Also we have launched ‘Magzter Live’ with this version allowing publishers to integrate their live news feeds to the app and users can read the news at anytime without the need to pay any subscription money. This feature will make sure users are up-to-date with what’s going on and reading the news allows users to browse through the magazines owned by the publishers.
Magzter is a FIPP member company.
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