Apple opens subscription sales for iOS publishers

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 February 2011 07:41

IT Industry - Strategy

Publishers have been waiting for the ability to sell subscriptions to their wares on the iPad and iPhone. Now it's here.

Subscriptions are finally open to the rank and file iOS developer. One of the barriers to the wider adoption of the platform by traditional publishers has been the inability to sell subscriptions rather than individual issues.

Publishers have also expressed concerns about the loss of a direct relationship with their subscribers when the App Store gets involved, but Apple has found a way around that. Publishers are free to sell subscriptions through channels other than the App Store, for example through their own web sites.

The deal is that Apple will take its usual 30% cut on App Store sales, but gets nothing when the publisher sells a subscription. "All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app," said Apple's CEO Steve Jobs.

This arrangement means that a newspaper publisher can choose to provide a digital subscription at no extra cost to subscribers to the print edition, answering the question "why should I pay twice for the same information?"

The snag for publishers is that if they want to sell subscriptions directly, they'll need to build an authentication process into their apps. And they won't be allowed to put links to external content or subscription sales in their apps.

But they do have a chance to obtain subscriber information via the App Store - see page 2.