Popular Science magazine has garnered more than 10,000 subscriptions for its iPad app, Bonnier Technology Group publisher Gregg Hano confirmed to Mashable Wednesday.
That might be only a sliver of the 1.2 million print subscriptionsPopular Science has maintained to date, but it’s a promising start.
Since its launch in April 2010, the magazine has been selling an average of 10,000 to 12,000 single issues per month at $4.99 apiece, the same as its basic newsstand cover price. Although the app itself has received largely positive reviews from press and consumers, the latter were frustrated by the price.
“The problem was that readers could subscribe to the print version ofPopular Science and get a discount, but they couldn’t on tablets,” Hano explains. “When Apple decided to offer up a subscription model, we [finally] found a way to give consumers what they want,” he adds.
Popular Science began offering subscriptions on February 16, just one day after Apple enabled publishers to do so. Subscriptions are priced at $14.99 per year, $2.00 more than the price of an annual print subscription. (Not incidentally, the extra $2.00 covers about half of Apple’s standard 30% cut.) Single copy iPad sales have since declined to a steady 2,500 per month, a spokesperson says.
It’s not yet clear, however, if iPad subscriptions are cannibalizing print sales, or if most of the 10,000 iPad readers are first-time subscribers to the magazine. To the chagrin of many publishers, Apple does not share subscriber data. However, Popular Science does give iPad subscribers the opportunity to share their information if they so choose, and will begin collecting subscriber data when it starts selling bundled print and digital subscriptions on its site in the near future.
Hano suggests that the bundles could include not only subscriptions to both the magazine’s print and iPad versions, but also to archival and breaking news content.
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