There is good news and bad news for Hearst magazines. The good news is that digital single copy sales for 2014 are up by more than 100,000. The bad news is that Hearst’s top magazines – Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, O, the Oprah Magazine, Woman’s Day, Redbook and Seventeen – lost more than 100,000 digital subscriptions as of December 2014. Cosmopolitan, the biggest earner in the bunch, accounts for the majority of that loss, down more than 95,000 from December 2013.
Who or what is to blame for the changes? It depends on who you ask. Talking New Media has some ideas:
- Print subscribers have to pay a separate subscription price for digital subscriptions, a move criticized by readers.
- O, The Oprah Magazine and Cosmopolitan have had problems with the magazine’s apps, including download problems and app crashes.
- Apple hasn’t maintained the Newsstand inside the App Store.
Insider Take:
It seems that Hearst is OK with segregating its print audience from its digital one, though digital readership of the named magazines is a very small percentage of total readership – 2.64%. If Hearst truly wants to focus on digital subscribers as a consistent revenue stream, it better start catering to that audience’s needs which means maintaining or redesigning its apps to ensure they work properly.
While it would be frustrating for a single-copy buyer to have trouble downloading a single issue, imagine the frustration of a paying subscriber who consistently gets booted out of a magazine app! At a certain point, the subscriber is likely to cancel his or her subscription and go elsewhere for the desired content – looking for it online or maybe even buying a copy of the print magazine if there is a particular feature or article he or she wants to read.
Regardless of the subscription product or service being offered, customers want to get what they pay for, and when there’s a problem, they want it resolved quickly. While digital single-copy sales may be up, it sounds like Hearst needs better quality control and could benefit from really listening to its customers. Until they make these changes, we expect Hearst’s numbers to keep dropping.
