Magazines aspire to the screen – Newspaper Kommersant No. 194 (7395) of 10/19/2022

Russian Post, which delivers printed versions of newspapers and magazines, is testing a new type of subscription in electronic form through a mobile application. At the initial stage, the post office does not sign direct contracts with publishers and has included in the catalog only 110 publications out of 6,000 distributed by subscription, but plans to scale up the direction. Due to rising costs, traditional subscriptions are stagnating, publishers say. According to them, there is a demand for electronic versions, but delivery through the application may not be suitable for everyone: children’s magazines, for example, are traditionally read in paper form.

Russian Post has launched a mobile application for reading electronic newspapers and magazines Pochta Podpiska, Kommersant was told in the company. It allows you to subscribe to digitized versions of newspapers and magazines and read them from your phone or tablet. At the pilot stage, the catalog will include 110 publications, including highly specialized ones. Now the application allows you to subscribe to the magazines “Amateur”, “Science and Life”, “Expert”, “Interlocutor”, the newspapers “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”, “Kommersant”, publications about gardening and cooking, children’s magazines, etc. At the same time, subscribe to the publication you can’t directly in the application: to start using it, you need to subscribe to electronic publications on the Russian Post website, and then log in to the application.

Scaling, expanding the functionality and the number of available publications is planned for 2023, said Maria Ogay, head of the Russian Post Subscription business development directorate, to Kommersant: “We launched an application with minimal functionality to study user behavior. We want to understand which publications and with what frequency are in demand.” At the initial stage, Russian Post does not enter into direct licensing agreements with publishers-clients of the Russian Post Subscription Agency (PAPR), receiving digitized versions through Kniga-Service Agency LLC, Maria Ogay clarified: “The pilot should not be compared with traditional print media subscription service, because now there are more than 6,000 indexes in PAPR.”

Russia already has services for reading newspapers and magazines, among the main ones are Pressa.ru and RBC-owned Public.ru (JSC Public Library). Mobile operators MTS, VimpelCom, MegaFon, Tele2 and Yota also have such sites and applications, the service provider for most of them is Kiozk (Mobile Periodicals LLC). Services aimed at individuals operate on a subscription model, often with the ability to purchase individual editions of publications and with access to book catalogs.

Russian newspapers were also published on the international platform PressReader, but after July 1, the numbers are not updated. R Story, which supplied digital copies of newspapers to PressReader, has stopped working in the Russian Federation, Alfred Khakimov, director of distribution and logistics at Kommersant Publishing House, said, adding that the publication expects to resume work with PressReader in the near future through another intermediary. “R Story” is wholly owned by the IBS holding, in May 2022 a liquidator was appointed in the company, follows from the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.

In general, the Russian audience has a demand for electronic versions, Alfred Khakimov believes: “In our case, the share of subscription to the electronic version in total subscription revenue is about 20%, and this figure is growing year by year.” At the same time, subscription to print versions, according to him, is stagnating in the market as a whole, the marginality of the direction is decreasing, including due to the increase in production costs against the backdrop of sanctions.

However, the sale of electronic versions is more relevant for daily publications and socio-political magazines and newspapers, says the distribution director of one of the major publishing houses. According to him, sales of PDF versions of weekly magazines, which were already being tested by publishers, “never took off.”

Children’s magazine publishers are also leaning towards traditional distribution. “We don’t have high expectations from the sale of digital copies of our magazines, after all, children’s publications primarily mean consumption in paper form,” the press service of the Lev Publishing House says, adding that the Publishing House has seen an increase in the traditional subscriptions.

Valeria Lebedeva, Yuri Litvinenko