The Hearst Magazine Publishing division has seen rapid growth on tablets since the company formed a strategic relationship with Apple. In January, the two sides announced a new partnership with the Apple Newsstand that delivers the Digital Editions of its entire catalog days before print and and other sources. This means if you are a fan of Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Seventeen, and Harper’s Bazaar among many others, you will get them on Newsstand days before anywhere else. When this first went down, Hearst had only 800,000 subscribers and in a few short months it has hit the magical one million.
Hearst claims its digital division subscriber base is jumping up by 10% each month. This is mostly due to the iPad, whose customers are often spending $70,000 per day on digital magazines. Although, the magazines are found via dedicated apps on the Kindle Fire, Google, and Barnes and Noble. Still, if you want to get your news ahead of everyone else, the iOS ecosystem is the place to be.
Hearst had planned to hit the million subscriber milestone by the end of 2012, but the publisher missed its goal by 90 days, Hearst chief David Carey told AllThingsD. Carey expects that the magazine will have about three million digital subscribers by 2016, about 10 % of Hearst’s entire base.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.