07Mar

Hearst Hits 100k Cosmo App Subscribers En Route To 1 Million Paying Digital Readers

FILED IN gadgets No Comments

Screen shot 2012-03-07 at 15.21.53

Another milestone for old-school print magazines moving into a digital future: Cosmopolitan says that it now has 100,000 people paying to read the digital edition of its monthly fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazine. That puts publisher, Hearst, one step closer to a target set by president David Carey last November to rack up one million paying subscribers across all of its non-print editions this year.

The 100,000 readers, Hearst says, come from its presence on a number of newsstands, including Apple, Zinio, Barnes & Noble and Amazon Kindle, where prices go from $1.99 for a one-month subscription to $19.99 for a full year of the magazine.

It’s not clear which of these newsstands is selling the most at the moment (we’ve asked). Zinio was the first of these launched by Hearst back in 2005, but the boom in digital reading, and specifically paying for the privilege, has really only taken off in the last couple of years with the rise of e-reading devices and tablets like the iPad and Kindle, and so these may be the storefronts doing the most business for Hearst at the moment.

Hearst says that now it has 500,000 paying readers across the whole of its digital magazine footprint. That means the publisher has added 100,000 subscribers since the end of November. That footprint also includes titles like Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar and O.

It looks like Cosmo — being the first to get the 100,000-subscriber-announcement treatment — may be the biggest of these at the moment. But they are all growing at a clip right now, it seems: back in November 2011, Carey noted that the subscriber base was growing at a rate of 10-15 percent per month.

But while Hearst’s big magazine brands may be carrying the day right now, the publisher is also banking on readers for digital-only spinoffs — products that in the heyday of printed magazines may have been physical editions in their own right, but today are made or broken by the amount of capital investment they would require to get off the ground. These “brand extensions” have included CFG: Cosmo for Guys on the iPad, but also one-off apps that riff on themes from the main magazine, such as Cosmopolitan’s Sex Position of the Day; more apparently are to come.

All this on top of the digital audience that Cosmo is attracting to its free online properties: Cosmopolitan.com, for example, currently has 7 million unique visitors per month, Hearst says.



View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile

, , , , , , , , ,

12Apr

Bing: Kim Kardashian upset over new Cosmo cover

FILED IN Fashion No Comments

View full post on

, , , , ,

04Feb

Gossip: Is Lea Michele’s Cosmo cover too revealing?

FILED IN Fashion No Comments

View full post on

, , , ,

19Aug

Cosmo Releases Sex Position of the Day App For Android, I Release Bile

FILED IN gadgets 12 Comments


Do you like sex with other people? Do you like Android? While it is my opinion that those two questions are mutually exclusive, someone, somewhere matches those two criteria. Thankfully, Cosmopolitan Magazine is there for them.

Basically, this is an app that shows sex positions, albeit in a cartoony way. Fair enough. Android is for pornographers, after all. And that’s basically the news, but I’d like to inject a little outrage into this otherwise mundane story.

First, let’s get the throat clearing out of the way. The app features:

- The Carnal Challenge Rating: the more flames a position displays, the greater the difficulty

- Erotic Instructions: hints to help you make the most of the position and what to look forward to

- Colorful Illustration: tasteful visuals that help you understand how the position works

Something so disgusting wouldn’t be available for iOS, would it? Right?

Wrong. It’s also available for the iPhone. Tasteful visuals. Ahem. Carnal Challenge? Erotic Descriptions? Sounds like porn to me. Now, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to blow up.

Android and sexytime I can understand. It’s an OS for the perverse and obscurely fetished, after all. But what the heck is going on here? If you’re Cosmopolitan magazine you can talk about making the nasty on the iPhone but if you’re some weirdo who wants to make a boob jiggling app for the iPhone you can’t? After all, the procreative act – heck, any bodily act – is incompatible with the iTunes Store mission, right?

I wouldn’t be so sure. Apparently Philip Shoemaker, director of applications technology at Apple, the man in charge of selecting apps for inclusion into the app store, is in fact the proud programmer of Graynoodle’s iWiz app, an application that allows you to simulate micturition. He also makes a number of fart apps and had these apps approved a few weeks after starting at the company. Basically if you’re on the inside, the approval process doesn’t apply to you.

Also, and sex app makers take note, if you’re a major woman’s magazine published by one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, you also get a pass. This actually fits into my worldview that the iTunes Store is like Disneyland: you can have adult beverages in the park, as long as its on Disney’s terms and at Disney’s prices. They don’t want you to come in roaring drunk and high on ether simply because it prevents them from selling you the ether.

You can’t have it both ways. Either sex is bad or sex is good. After all, think of the children. Cosmo shouldn’t get a get out of jail card because they’re a major publication and Shoemaker shouldn’t get a pass because, well, he works for Apple and controls the app approval process. All we are saying is give iOS sex apps a chance.



View full post on MobileCrunch

, , , , ,

19Aug

Cosmo Releases Sex Position of the Day App For Android Plus Bonus Outrage

FILED IN gadgets 2 Comments


Do you like sex with other people? Do you like Android? While it is my opinion that those two questions are mutually exclusive, someone, somewhere matches those two criteria. Thankfully, Cosmopolitan Magazine is there for them.

Basically, this is an app that shows sex positions, albeit in a cartoony way. Fair enough. Android is for pornographers, after all. And that’s basically the news, but I’d like to inject a little outrage into this otherwise mundane story.

First, let’s get the throat clearing out of the way. The app features:

- The Carnal Challenge Rating: the more flames a position displays, the greater the difficulty

- Erotic Instructions: hints to help you make the most of the position and what to look forward to

- Colorful Illustration: tasteful visuals that help you understand how the position works

Something so disgusting wouldn’t be available for iOS, would it? Right?

Wrong. It’s also available for the iPhone. Tasteful visuals. Ahem. Carnal Challenge? Erotic Descriptions? Sounds like porn to me. Now, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to blow up.

Android and sexytime I can understand. It’s an OS for the perverse and obscurely fetished, after all. But what the heck is going on here? If you’re Cosmopolitan magazine you can talk about making the nasty on the iPhone but if you’re some weirdo who wants to make a boob jiggling app for the iPhone you can’t? After all, the procreative act – heck, any bodily act – is incompatible with the iTunes Store mission, right?

I wouldn’t be so sure. Apparently Philip Shoemaker, director of applications technology at Apple, the man in charge of selecting apps for inclusion into the app store, is in fact the proud programmer of Graynoodle’s iWiz app, an application that allows you to simulate mincturation. He also makes a number of fart apps and had these apps approved a few weeks after starting at the company. Basically if you’re on the inside, the approval process doesn’t apply to you.

Also, and sex app makers take note, if you’re a major woman’s magazine published by one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, you also get a pass. This actually fits into my worldview that the iTunes Store is like Disneyland: you can have adult beverages in the park, as long as its on Disney’s terms and at Disney’s prices. They don’t want you to come in roaring drunk and high on ether simply because it prevents them from selling you the ether.

You can’t have it both ways. Either sex is bad or sex is good. After all, think of the children. Cosmo shouldn’t get a get out of jail card because they’re a major publication and Shoemaker shouldn’t get a pass because, well, he works for Apple and controls the app approval process. All we are saying is give iOS sex apps a chance.



View full post on MobileCrunch

, , , , , ,

TOP