According to Magzter, the online magazine store has a user base of 6 million and gets 35,000 downloads a day. The store started out in India and was founded by Vijaykumar Radhakrishman and Girish Ramdas. Now it has 1,500 magazines from India, Singapore, Dubai, Malaysia, the US, and the UK. It is hosted on the Amazon Cloud platform.
The CEO, Girish Ramdas, is a 12-time rifle-shooting champion and he founded Magzter in 2011. Magzter has a digitization program for publishers, which is free, but it charges a 50-50 revenue split on sales. Apps have been released for the iOS and for Android and Windows 8, but the iPad is the most popular platform. According to an article in techcircle.in, Magzter has received one round of venture capital funding and is now looking for a second round, hoping to raise $10-$15 million along with some international investors to boost its plans to go global. The company offers publishers self-service upload of digital content, instant availability of content to subscribers, compatibility across multiple platforms at no additional cost, the ability to embed multimedia content, real time sales tracking, custom search key words for each magazine, control over pricing and subscriptions, and the ability to sell past issues.
The idea for the site came from a project in 2008 in which the two partners developed a mobile app for the Indian magazine Galatta. From there came the genesis of Magzter, which was founded in the US. It began with the digitization of one weekly magazine and then was followed by 35 others when the app went live in June of 2011. Looking at the “Top Paid” magazines on the site, we find that some of the names are familiar, but also that some are surprising. They are Black Enterprise, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Pilates Style, Maxim USA, The Working Tools, Azimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Stick and String, The Pin Up, Poets & Writers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Retro Lovely Magazine, RUKUS, Dell Horoscope, and Natural Food Magazine.
Paul Biba is a retired corporate international lawyer who has worked in 53 countries. Since he is a very fast reader he came to ebooks out of self-defense in order to avoid carrying a suitcase of books on his travels around the world. An early ebook adopter, he has read on Palms, Pocket PCs and practically every device that has been out there. After being a frequent contributor to TeleRead.com, the oldest ebook/epublishing blog on the net, Paul became TeleRead's Editor-in-Chief, a position he recently resigned. Send Paul an email to paulkbiba@gmail.com
