Apple’s Newsstand Is Already Booming For Some Magazine Publishers

Early indications are that Apple’s new iOS features for publishers have had an immediate beneficial impact.

• Exact Editions, which says it made about 10 percent of the Newsstand app titles on iTunes Store, says downloads of freemium sample editions jumped by 14x in just a few days, whilst some titles’ actual sales have more than doubled.
• Consumer magazine publisher Future says free container apps for its titles were downloaded two million times in three days and reports “consumer spending well in excess of normal monthly revenues”. “Future has sold more digital editions in the past four days through Apple’s Newsstand than in a normal month,” says UK CEO Mark Wood...

• “Apple seem to have got this just right,” says Exact Editions co-founder Daryl Rayner. “In July they introduced the new in-app purchasing and auto-renewal system. This has worked a treat with high renewals (over 80 percent). We saw sales more than doubling between June and August, and it looks as though Apple have now pushed the Newsstand into the foreground and this will provide further sales uplift.
  “Magazines with a strong visual impact are doing particularly well (The Wire, Selvedge) and, interestingly, the literary magazines are equally strong (The Spectator and Le Monde Diplomatique).
  “It’s all about the iPad. iPad owners are buying digital magazines (85-plus percent of our customers are buying titles for their iPad) and publishers need to get their magazines into the iTunes mix before the holiday season.”

  http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-apples-newsstand-is-already-booming-for-magazine-publishers/