Steve Ely

Maghound

Rogier van Bakel, critical in the past of magazine subscription marketing, points to this news of an upcoming endeavor called Maghound.com from Time, Inc. to offer a sort of Netflix-style subscription management service for print magazines, allowing customers to subscribe to titles of their choosing, at discounted rates, for only the duration they want. It’s an intriguing plan.

From the Folio article:

Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships and can cancel whenever they wish…..The pricing for a membership is tiered—three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more.

This project has really exciting potential. Right now, the site isn’t showing more than 2 or 3 magazines they’ve got there that I’d consider subscribing to, but if they can get any 4 or 5 from a specific 20 or so additional titles, I’d probably sign up. Of course, I’m forced to judge their offerings from the web site as it stands in late June, two months before the launch. The article about it says it has 280 titles already on board and possibly 300 by the September launch and 400 by the end of the year. The Maghound site only currently shows 46 (if I count right) of those.

I would consider The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Wired, & Time. I’m not sure if those four would be enough to get me to sign on, though. I don’t know if I’d consistently want to stick with three of those four.

Titles not currently showing there that would interest me include:

The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, The Economist, The Believer, Business Week, Newsweek, Reason, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The American Conservative, The Freeman, American Heritage, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Scram, Washington Monthly, Newsweek, ESPN, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Walrus, Helix SF, Locus, and Subterranean.
[Later update] Also, The American Prospect, The Progressive, American History, Fortune, Farm Journal, New Statesman, Skeptical Inquirer, Scientific American, and U.S. News and World Report.

I’m eager to see what the full 300 titles they offer are in September.

Update: I just realized their pricing model doesn’t really make sense.  Wouldn’t you expect the price per title to go down as you increase the number of titles you’re subscribing to?  But with “three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, and seven titles for $9.95,” you’re looking at $1.31 per title if you subscribe to three, $1.59 each if you get five, and $1.42 for each if you get seven.  That’s just weird.  Maybe the idea is to really deter people from subscribing to five titles?    Really, why is there a penalty for a medium number of titles?