Apple To Keep 30% of Magazine Subscription Revenue

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Guardian reports that Apple has launched a new subscription service for magazines, newspapers and music bought through its App Store, expanding the model developed for Rupert Murdoch's iPad newspaper and will keep 30% of the revenue from subscriptions if the subscription is purchased through Apple. 'Our philosophy is simple – when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing,' says Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, who is presently taking a medical leave of absence from the company. 'All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same – or better – offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one click right in the app.' Apple's control over its App Store payments plan has long been a cause for concern for content companies. Publishers want to have access to subscriber data which can provide lucrative demographics on which to base advertising campaigns and targeted reader offers. Apple says customers purchasing a subscription through its App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their names, email addresses and zip codes. The use of such information will be governed by the publisher's privacy policy rather than Apple's."

Re:But Worse Than Distributing on Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Apple does a much better job about delivering a large set of eyeballs attached to people who are already trained to pay out money for cool shiny things. Apple is primarilly a marketing company and they are damn good at it. I am not in their target demographic: young, trendy, willing to spend money for the cool factor. So Apple delivers the right audience for online magazines.

I suspect most droid users would say "fuck it... I can get the same info for free if I just spend 10 seconds and Google it".

Apple is primarily a marketing company?

Then why do they have what many in the industry consider to be the best OS, running on the best-manufactured hardware? Some consider Apple behind on tech; but I think the real answer is that they don't simply jump at every new buzzword the electronic salespeople try to sell them. Their products ALL have a fantastic build quality, and their notebooks generally last far longer than the equivalent plastic pieces of crap that pretty much everyone else foists on the buying public.

That isn't marketing: It's Product Engineering. And Apple pretty much owns the industry in that regard.