Magazine publisher Future says its tablet magazines are earning it $1 million per month in gross revenue.
It is now selling 239,000 tablet magazines per month, led by T3 in the UK (30,000) and MacLife in the States (65,000), plus dozens of other mostly replica editions amongst its more than 100 tablet titles.
CEO Mark Wood says (via announcement):
“Around 90 percent of our digital edition sales are to new customers and 40 percent are outside our core UK and US markets.
More than 60 percent of new customers sign up for subscriptions and the renewal rate is running at over 60 percent.”
The publisher rushed over 60 replicas on to iTunes Newsstand when it launched in October 2011 and is slowly re-tooling more as native interactive editions.
Future digital revenue grew 30 percent in the last year to £20.6 million, 18 percent of the total, which nevertheless declined by three percent. Cost savings and this digital growth have helped return the publisher from an £18 million annual loss to a £1 million profit.
The publisher says it has signed up to produce 60 titles for publishers in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Taiwan using the FutureFolio tablet magazine production software it has built in-house.
As we recently reported it would, Future yesterday launched a new weekly tablet technology magazine, “tech.“, sitting between its monthly T3 magazine and rolling TechRadar website schedules.
Digital growth comes as print magazine sales dipped by 12.5 percent to 2.1 million and print subscriptions shrunk by 16 percent in the last year, while print advertising declined by 13 percent.
For some comparison on Future’s figures — rival publisher Dennis clocked 2.4 million issue downloads for its The Week tablet edition in its first year in the U.K. and U.S..
Future’s doing some good numbers. 239k tablet issues per month (2.8 million/ year). Mind you, we did that just with The Week :p
— Alex Watson (@Sifter) November 23, 2012