Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Overview
- How it Works
- Target Markets
- Content
- User Experience
- Revenue
- Pricing
- Marketing
- Conversion and Retention
- About Blake Pollard
- Vendors and Technology
- Subscription Insider Analysis
Introduction
In 2012, entrepreneur Joel Wikkel took a chance on magazines, forming an all-star development team to create Readly, an all-you-can-read digital magazine app for iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices. Launching Readly first in Sweden, Wikkel had a global vision for his company, quickly expanding Readly’s operations to the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States.
As of June 1, 2015, Readly offered nearly 1,100 magazines and more than 17,000 issues in 49 countries, including current and back issues of popular U.S. titles like ESPN, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Adweek and the National Enquirer. For just $9.99 a month, subscribers can read their favorite magazines on their tablet or smartphone instantly or download them to read offline later. Though a relatively new company, Readly is carving out its niche in the Netflix-for-magazines market.
Overview
- Founded: 2012
- Company Type: The company is privately held and was privately funded until December of 2014 when it raised some investment capital to continue its expansion
- Employees: 50+ in four locations (U.S., England, Germany, Sweden)
- Business Model: Subscriptions only, no other revenue streams
- Location: Headquartered in Sweden. Based in New York City, Readly, LLC is the U.S. arm of the company.
- Website: http://readly.com
- Social Media: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Paying Subscribers: Wouldn’t disclose
- Subscription Pricing: $9.99/month for unlimited access, two-week free trial
How it Works
Magazine lovers have two options for trying Readly. They can sign up for a free two-week trial, or sign up for the premium service right away at $9.99 per month. There is no long-term commitment or contract to subscribe to Readly, but the subscription service does use auto-renewal. A credit card is not required to try Readly for 14 days.
Subscribers can download the Readly app from the App Store, Google Play, Windows Store, Windows Phone Store or Kindle Fire. Readly is testing a web version of the digital subscription service, but for now, using the app is the best way to use Readly.
To get started, readers must register with an email address or their Facebook log-in. To actually subscribe, readers must go to the Readly site – accessible via a browser or through the Readly app – to upgrade to the Premium subscription option. Currently, “in-app” purchases are not offered.
Once registered, subscribers can begin viewing magazines from one of three menus on the app’s home screen: Favorites, Start or Magazines. Favorites are magazines a subscriber has bookmarked, Start shows the most popular magazines, and Magazines includes All magazines and New Arrivals. Selections can be sorted by New Arrivals, Title (A-Z), Title (Z-A) and Recently Read. Not sure what to read? Use the search menu to look for specific keywords within the magazine text.
From the top menu bar, subscribers can also choose countries or languages or select magazines by category (see Content below for a complete list). Users can also create profiles, a particularly useful feature when members of a household share Readly. The app will accept up to five profiles, and Readly can be used on up to five devices simultaneously with the same log-in. Though most of the content would be considered SFW (safe for work), the app has parental controls.
Within a specific magazine, subscribers can zoom in, click on hyperlinks, bookmark articles, and share content with friends. Once a subscriber selects a magazine, they can read it online via the app or download it to read offline later.
This is one of our favorite features of Readly. Being able to read offline is particularly helpful for those who commute to work or who travel frequently. No need to save room in a briefcase or tote for reading material! Just download favorite magazines and save to read on a smartphone or tablet later.
Target Markets
Primary market: Readly’s primary target market is people who love magazines but who also have special interests (e.g., crafting, home and design, hunting and fishing, outdoor activities, cars and trucks, etc.). The goal with attracting niche readers is to be able to give them magazines they won’t be able to get elsewhere.
Secondary market: A secondary market for Readly is younger readers who wouldn’t think about reading print magazines but who are familiar with the magazine titles and brands and prefer to access their content on mobile devices. Readly is also targeting the Hispanic market in the U.S., offering brands licensed in the U.S. but that readers cannot get online otherwise.
Readly’s current customers are typically between 40 and 45 years of age with about a 50/50 split between males and females. Their readers have higher-than-average incomes and are comfortable with reading publications in a digital format. The average paid user reads between 10 and 15 issues or titles per month.
Content
While Readly doesn’t provide the content, it works with publishers who do. Essentially, the publishers provide their print magazines in a digital *.PDF format that is readable on smartphones and tablets. When new publishers are signed, Readly encourages publishers to upload six to 12 months of back issues along with their current issue. This helps publishers to get additional exposure for their material which makes their advertisers happy.
A relatively new feature of Readly’s is personalization, added in April. Called Most Relevant Content, or MRC, this feature makes content recommendations based on individual user profiles and detailed analysis of a user’s reading behavior. Readly’s MRC has three tiers of recommendations: new issues of titles the user has read before, titles the user has not read before but that match the user’s interests, and most popular titles that other users are reading.
“The user profiles and MRC system are very exciting additions to Readly’s functionality,” said Per Hellberg, CEO of Readly International, in a press release. “This intuitive new system makes Readly even more attuned to our customers’ reading habits and effectively does their browsing for them, making the service both simpler and more efficient to use.”
From its U.S. catalog, readers can access magazines in the following categories, many of which cater to niche markets:
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Within the professional publishing industry, Readly is a hit! In fact, in 2014, its app was named “Best App of the Year” by the PPA Digital Awards. To learn what subscribers think, we turned to the user comments and ratings in Google Play. The app’s highest rating is five stars from more than 1,400 users. Here is a sample of comments:
User Experience
From a UX standpoint, Readly is visually appealing and simple to use. We tried it on an Android smartphone and tablet, and didn’t have any difficulty navigating the menus or accessing magazines. It was easier to read the text on a tablet with a larger screen than it was a smartphone, but zooming options can help with that.
We could not make an “in app” purchase for Readly. Instead, we had to go online to upgrade to the premium version. The problem for Readly here is the cut the app stores want. If people buy through iTunes, the cut is 30%, where Google Play and Windows only want 10%.
From a consumer standpoint, this is a potential improvement to simplify the subscription process for end users. The more steps they have to take, the more likely they are to get lost or interrupted during one of the steps and give up. From a subscription company standpoint, this is a challenge for companies across the board, and for now, it is beyond their control.
The online customer support portal at Readly.com is well organized and seems simple enough – Getting Started, Payments & Accounts, Apps & Devices, Catalog & Subscriptions, Terms & Conditions, and FAQs. We emailed Customer Service with a question, and received a response within 48 hours. While this is a reasonable time frame, it would have been helpful if Readly had explained when we could expect a response.
Customer support is not available directly through the app, though there is a Contact Support Feature on the Settings menu. This just allowed us to send an email directly to Support. It would have been helpful to be directed to the Support Center or FAQs first. Not a deal breaker though.
Revenue
At this time, subscription revenue is the only revenue stream. Readly would not provide subscriber numbers, and the company is privately held so we don’t have access to financials to see how the company is doing so far. Once revenue gets to a certain base level, Pollard anticipates there will be opportunities to offer advertising or sponsorship arrangements and to do split revenue partnerships with publishers. For now, publishers who sign on have a revenue share agreement with Readly. They are paid based on a point system calculated on page reads. When people read their magazines, publishers share in the subscription revenue.
Pricing
Right now the price for a subscription is fixed at $9.99 per month for unlimited access, which was determined after much price testing. While there are no immediate plans to change this structure, Pollard said that the company might consider a lower price point with limited access to magazine titles.
For example, a lower price tier might be $4.99 or $5.99 a month to read a certain number of titles and the user would be notified when they get close to that maximum. The user can then choose to upgrade or pay for more access for that month.
“Today’s consumer wants things really simple and really clean, and they don’t want to have to go through a lot of steps and make a bunch of different decisions to be able to do that,” Pollard said.
From a consumer standpoint, any magazine reader who reads more than a few magazines a month will easily save money on an annual basis, whether they subscribe to the print editions of the magazines or buy them at the newsstand.
Marketing
Because the company is so young, the company has not yet nailed down its marketing strategy, and each of Readly’s four primary markets reaches out to prospects in different ways. In the U.S., for example, Readly has utilized social media to tell prospects about its service. At the beginning of June 2015, Readly, LLC, the U.S. division, had the following “likes,” fans and followers:
Facebook: 23,158 likes
Twitter: 1,260 followers
LinkedIn: 455 followers
In addition to its social media presence, Readly has tried a number of other marketing tactics including print advertising in the London tube system, partnerships with companies like Scandinavian Air who wants to eliminate magazines on its flights, digital loyalty programs, instant download campaigns on Facebook, email marketing, and special promotions that allow readers to sign up for the first month for just $0.99. Readly has also done a lot of price testing and customer surveys. Of particular interest are comments made by users who did not subscribe to Readly after the free trial expired.
“You always have to be testing and asking,” said Pollard.
Conversion and Retention
Readly said identifying a specific conversion rate is difficult, but he noted that credit card-required trials convert at a higher rate than no-commitment trials. Readly has done a lot of testing in this area and has learned that users who do a 30-day trial (at $0.99 per month) convert at a much higher rate than those who do the free trial without providing credit card information.
Because the U.S. version of the Readly app is so new, it is hard to cite meaningful retention data.
About Blake Pollard, president of Readly, LLC
Pollard joined Readly in March 2014 as the vice president of content to focus on content acquisition. He was promoted to president of Readly, LLC, in March 2015, to take a more active role in managing and growing the U.S. division of Readly.
In the 10 years prior to joining Readly, Pollard worked with leading magazine, newspaper and book publishers to help develop and deploy successful digital content initiatives. His background and passion are in both traditional and digital/online publishing. He spent 8 years at LibreDigital, formerly Newsstand, creating digital publishing solutions for the media industry.
Pollard was part of the team at Newsstand that launched the first online newsstand delivering digital editions of newspapers and magazines. More recently he launched LibreDigital’s digital periodical distribution program with Google (Play), Barnes & Noble (Nook), Amazon (Kindle) and other retailers/devices.
When asked what he’s learned since joining Readly, Pollard said the company is competing for people’s time.
“Normal people only have so much time and capacity in their lives, and we are competing with all of the other apps out there,” Pollard said. “We are competing for people’s time with Spotify, Pandora, HBO Now, Hulu, etc.”
Vendors and Technology
- Hosting – Amazon cloud
- Payment processing – World Pay (may be adding PayPal)
- Email management – For now, Readly is using a combination of systems. It will move to Exact Target for CRM. It is currently using Intercom.
- Web design – Done in-house
- Web development – Done in-house
- Content management – Done in-house
- Content creation-N/A (Magazines provide content in *.PDF format.)
- Creative/Editing- N/A
- Consultants/Freelancers – N/A
- Analytics – R.J. Metrics and Google Analytics
- Lead tracking – Salesforce
Subscription Insider Analysis
Though it is a relatively young company, Readly has a talented team of developers and executives leading it. As a result of their combined experience of more than 25 years, Readly is doing a lot of things right. From a content standpoint, while Readly doesn’t offer every U.S. magazine title, no company is likely to seal that deal, yet Readly has defined its sweet spot – niche publications. It has secured hundreds of niche magazines that appeal to a wide range of potential subscribers. It is also looking to the future for additional niches it can fill – the Hispanic market and local and regional publications.
In terms of marketing, Readly could benefit from nailing down a specific marketing strategy and plan. Thus far, it has seemed to be trial and error. While this may be working for them, a solid plan that is implemented and measured quarterly, or even monthly, might serve them well. Try something, see if it works, and make adjustments.
From the user experience standpoint, the company has made its app very easy to navigate and use, but Readly is clearly not content with “good enough.” It is continuously trying to improve its product by adding new features like MRC customization and developing a web-based version.
We see two specific improvements to the customer experience. One is to allow “in app” purchases to keep users from leaving the app to upgrade to the premium product. We aren’t sure how this can be accomplished without Apple and others taking too big of a share, but we believe conversion will be improved if “in app” purchases are made possible. Another potential change is to ensure that the customer service portal is working properly, including both static pages and timely customer service responses.
Overall, we think Readly is on the right track. It is innovative and forward thinking, and it isn’t afraid to take risks. The company recognizes that there is significant competition from similar services, but also from other subscription offerings like Netflix and Pandora that compete for money as well as time. If Readly continues to look ahead while making minor tweaks to its current product, we predict it will be successful. We’re eager to watch as the company continues to evolve, and as always, we’ll keep you posted on Readly’s progress!
