Vision for a Future Online Magazine Reading Experience and Social Distribution System

Hamish McKenzie, on PandoDaily, paints a possible future for “an end-to-end reader experience that centralizes, simplifies, and at the same time diversifies the consumption of longform journalism, while offering deep social features that increase readership and bring magazines up to speed with the digital era.”

From the original article: “The first problem is that there is an app for each magazine.

To subscribe to the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Atlantic, Details, New York, and Time, you’ve got to have seven different apps, many of which are bloated. Some issues of Wired, for example, have weighed in at 500MB each. And what do you get inside? Aside from the occasional animation, or supplementary audio and video, they’re basically just digital facsimiles of the paper product. Worse – you can only get the stories if you get the whole magazine.

So here’s an idea for how to do it better and make money from it.

Break up the bundle.

Present stories on an individual basis. Do to the magazine what iTunes did to the album, but do it with a Spotify model. And put it all into one app.

In short: build a platform not for magazines, but for magazine stories.

Here’s how it works. You have an app called something like Mag Reader. When you open Mag Reader, it shows you a list of the latest works from your favorite publications, as well as ones that align with your interests, or the stories currently most talked about on social media.”

Unbundling content is very likely the way of the future.

Vauable analysis. Interesting vision. 7/10

Full article: http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/26/the-future-of-magazines-should-look-a-lot-like-spotify/