As originally released on LinkedIn and updated for 2025 best digital editions, I’ve re-posted.
Today I read another article about apps as the future of magazines. And despite the unique and visually enhanced iterations we see with each new app progression we must remember audience behavior determines our success.
Audiences want the type of simplicity & uncluttered expereince our best longform web article features demonstrate today
I was pro app development when I started my magazine publisher digital media services company 7 years ago. I had just left as a co-owner of a flip-editions magazine platform that already showed me the weakness of flipping pages online as a digital delivery format.
Sidenote: Thank you to all those connections who congratulated me last week on my work milestone anniversary for Advontemedia!
I became an ultimate app consumer and tried every new magazine app I could find. It also made for a great reason to own ever type of new phone and device to test the ux. Today, I still carry both and the Apple iPhone and Google Pixel as I can’t let go of features on both sides of the iOS and Android platforms I love.
I concluded apps were not the best way to read magazines for several reasons despite the great convenience of having content anywhere you want it.
1) It’s more work – I knew the UX and experience control capabilities of the app were beautiful for the interactive and engaging display of content even if the app had to build in several on-boarding panels of the digital magazine to describe the user interface touch features and how to work the neat screen tricks for the content treasure hunt. Ultimately, I found the experience was more work than reading a print magazine.
2) App Overhead – There’s no limit to the app types and parent platform or issue delivery structures. The platform newsstands and many 3rd party apps cluttered my devices. I was ultimately after the content but these icons with an expanding notification count of the number of messages or new updates intimidated me to even click the apps.
3) The Issue – Destruction of the Issue from a la carte single story selection features emerged as a method to keep users engaged short term skipping over the pages between stories. The iconic linear presentation and editorial design are being destroyed in exchange for incremental app engagement time. That’s fine for a content discovery presentation. But when your core readership can more easily pick out the 3 stories they wish to read over moving through the entire magazine issue, you’ve lost the opportunity to sell advertising, brand build, and provide all the entertaining content and ancillary communication that’s part of the well-constructed issue.
For the last 5 years I experimented with digital magazine formats and display structures in a browser for the purpose of delivering an app-like experience.
In the past 3 years, responsive web design was key to complete device independence for the content delivery structure. And in those same years audience utilization of the devices for content consumption has now made mobile the focus for publishers. (Except those few publishers that will keep saying print isn’t dead by ignoring that it will level off a low fraction of the readership mix for future audiences.) Not only was the content experience a scrolling interface, but the mobile devices were obviously how people in the near future will get their content.
Our VERTIQUL platform holds the future for magazine publishing for the next decade before augmented reality and artificial intelligence transition consumers to a completely different content experience environment.
It’s a digital edition of a magazine in the scrollable format that can be viewed on any device without instructions (work), without apps (overhead), and it preserves the publishing business model of delivering a linear content experience. There will be others that move to construct platforms similar to ours as it’s clearly the direction for digital publications that will remain a magazine and not a news website.
We are open to customization for every issue we create from the magazine publisher’s existing Indesign issue master files. So we’re encouraging publishers to ask, “Can it do this.. or that…?” https://vertiqul.com