Despite the lukewarm reviews (see below), Wired's IPad app appears to be doing well:

Wired magazine sold 24,000 copies of its $4.99 app in the first 24 hours of its release, according to a tweet by John Abel, the mag’s NY bureau chief. With the 70 percent revenue split, that means that Conde Nast took away $83,832. It helps that Wired’s tech audience tends to be early adopters, so it remains to be seen if other Conde Nast titles will enjoy that same immediate sales jump.

Not surprising, the Wired app has already shot up to number one among the paid apps, way ahead of Vanity Fair, whose $4.99 app was released two weeks ago and is at number 90. The Wired app number is impressive, especially since Conde Nast has already counted about 63,000 paid app downloads across both the iPhone and iPad since November, all of which go toward its total circ, under the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The publisher is planning a few additions to drive paid downloads further.  For example, unlike Conde Nast’s GQ app, there’s no automatic subscription notice for the Wired app yet, but execs told paidContent earlier this week that this feature is coming soon.

From paidcontent.org. Full story here

By John Herrman

I'm Still Waiting for a Great iPad Magazine

With the new Wired app, Conde Nast has built, unequivocally, the best magazine for the iPad. And yet I find myself asking, is this it? And will it cost this much?

I love Wired. I love magazines. But with the launch of the magazine app, Wired's much-previewed, profoundly hyped and unexpectedly controversial claim on the future of the magazine, the uneasiness, and the pit in my stomach that I felt during the first wave of iPad magazines—dominated by PopSci's ambitious re-imagining of the title, but comprised mostly of blatant halfassery—has only grown deeper.

Consider the facts:

• Wired's app is $5. I could buy a subscription to the magazine, for a year, for around $10. A year of Wired purchased from the App Store would cost $60. Conde is apparently working on a unified pricing scheme across print and digital for the New Yorker, so maybe it'll filter over to Wired? Who knows. I know it must have cost a ton to develop this thing, but readers don't care about that: They care about the words. These words cost too much. (Also, it's not like this magazine doesn't have ads. It's got a fucking ton of ads.)

• It's over 500MB. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are lovely, and the videos look great. But in the time it took me to download and install this app on my iPad, I was able to walk to a bodega, take out cash at an ATM, get a cup of coffee, come home, and send a few emails. Hell, I could have picked up a copy of Wired while I was out; I spotted a few copies in a stand next to the counter. (Last month's issue, but still.)

• It's still quite obviously a magazine. It may seem like a fine distinction, but with this app Wired hasn't reinvented the magazine, they've just reinvented Wired. Wired's graphic design is legendary, and I'd hate to see it sacrificed for the iPad app. But some of these magazine conventions don't really work—in this app, I never feel like I've truly tucked into an article, as I do with the print edition, or even an Instapaper bookmark. PopSci had this problem, too, and it's worrying that none of the mag world's stars have figured out what to do with it. (Interestingly, the best handling of long-form writing I've seen in an iPad app came from Vanity Fair, which is published by the same company as Wired.)

• The little things! For example, you can't copy and paste, or share an article. (Some of this is coming in the future, apparently.)

And then, well, there's the experience, the look, the feel—there's the app itself. We saw the demos before launch, in Wired Reader, and we gushed. Rightfully! Even watching them now, I'm impressed. But in my hand, it's... emotionally underwhelming? Visually overwhelming? I don't know. It doesn't really click—the layout and design are to my eye impeccable, and the interactive infographics are objectively impressive, but I find myself wishing for a web page, some flat text, or something.

But man, those early demos! Magazines were going to be interactive, y'know? There was much talk of the future, of revolution. And following the buzz, there was execution. This is that app, minus about, dunno, 15 experiential percent?

The video, the diagrams, the interactivity—it's all here, but in my hands, it doesn't capture the magic it had before, on that video, and more importantly, in our eager imaginations. Wired didn't break their promise; we just bought too far into it.

Wired's app is a broad step toward the ideal of an interactive app. Sure, it's a pain to swipe through all those ads—I don't know why digital mags should adhere to the same ad conventions as paper ones—and there's still a lot of tuning to be done, but I guess I see what they're going for, vaguely. It's attractive and flashy, impressive, but expensive. It's aspirational.

The alternative ideal for digital magazines is a stripped-back approach—either scanned PDFs, or near-bare OCR scans of the current issues, more or less like web content. These cost very little to make, so—and this is why I call it an ideal—publishers could give readers their entire archives, on tap, for almost nothing. But that's only attractive for a certain category of readerly, word-heavy magazines, and again, it's unclear how you'd sell that, either: Is it a bonus to the regular mag? A separate subscription?

These aren't new questions—they're the same ones that more cynical observers have been asking since the first eruptions of iPad hype around the press. It's just that with Wired, the uber mag app, they still haven't been answered. [Wired]

From MIN Online. Full story here

Conde Nast continues its promised roll-out of print titles for the iPad. Vanity Fair was released late last week for both the iPhone and iPad at $4.99 an issue. The mobile iterations follow closely the model used in GQ. The full contents of the magazine can be thumbed in facsimile format when the iPad is in landscape mode. Facing pages appear on the screen and the usual multi-touch controls manage zooming. In portrait mode the current article’s text is rendered in a long scroll beneath the splash image, which can be zoomed to full screen or swiped to show any more images in the set. Text fonts in portrait mode can be enlarged.

Editorially, the mobile issues also add some extra content: video of the Hawaii shoot for the cast of Lost; an extended piece on the last season of the show, an extended profile of Emma Watson and an app-exclusive spotlight on illustrator Ed Sorel. On the advertising side several of the sponsors have video spots attached to the renderings of their print ads.

Vanity Fair for iPad follows a less radical approach to redesigning the magazine reading experience than Bonnier’s efforts with Popular Science’s iPad app. At the same time it accommodates the hardware more adroitly than Rodale’s Men’s Health, which adds more multimedia enhancement without altering the print format. Apparently recognizing recent complaints by iPad users that the single issue pricing of these apps is multiples higher than a subscription rate, Vanity Fair is giving a price break to customers. Once one buys the first iPad edition for $4.99, subsequent months will cost only $3.99.

This cuts especially deep, since Conde Nast is the smartest company being run by the smartest, best dressed people, or at least that is what they have always told me. 

This from paidcontent.org: 

"Working with McKinsey (the consultants), Townsend (Conde Nast CEO) and a Conde Nast team will “develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business, growing revenues, and enhancing our brand assets. All areas of Condé Nast will be included in the study.” Conde Naste has more than 30 brands between the consumer magazines, which include The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair, and the Fairchild Fashion Group"

Hopefully, McKinsey will take a look at not just personnel but the fundamental model of how Conde Nast goes about selling advertising. What would be great is if they could make the people at Conde Nast realize that they are not doing us all a favor just by allowing us to spend money with them. Not all Conde Nast titles are like this (Wired is an exception) but too many have an attitude that make the purchase of ad from them a very unpleasant experience.