Marco: What Matters Most in Online Publishing

Marco Arment:

“The app is secondary — it’s just a container. I’m not going to get a meaningful number of new subscribers because I add a new setting or theme. This is why publishers like Condé Nast can have such mediocre, reader-hostile apps: the apps don’t matter as much as we like to think. The content and the audience matter much more than what color your links are.”

Wired Magazine has one of those reader-hostile apps. Massive, slow downloads of content, app crashes on older, slower iPads and content that cannot be copied or linked-to are the order of the day. Yet I continue to subscribe to the digital edition, and for the same reason I’ve subscribed to the magazine since issue number one: great articles, delivered monthly.