Maggwire: A Remarkable Reinvention of a 1980s Database
December 7, 2009
I saw a reference to the “iTunes of magazines.” I took a few minutes to track down this reference. I located what may be the ur-reference, an interview with Ryan Klenovich and Steve DeWald, two former investment bankers with Deutsche Bank. You can find the full text of the interview in which this phrase appears in Mr. Magazine’s Web log article “Magazine Innovation in Practice: Maggwire, the iTunes for magazines?” Several points in the interview made it into my paper notebook via a goose quill pen. For more insights about this “iTunes for magazines”, read the article and watch the video.
- “We’re trying to become an online destination for reading magazines, similar to YouTube where users associate YouTube as the online destination for viewing videos.”
- “Initially, the excitement is going to come from the added traffic.”
- “You can call us the Google of magazines, where we crawl the web for these great magazine articles, the users go on there to read and rate the articles, and the idea is that the best ones will come to the top.”
- “The ideality is to create this marketplace using one ID.”
- “Like I said, we’re not going to replace print, what we’re trying to do is compliment the print magazine.”
- “Another thing that we have thought about is, after we do reach a certain critical mass, we believe people will be willing to pay a nominal subscription for our service especially as the publishers continue to expand their offerings and partner up with us and our site will just get better and better and better.”
- “I think now we’re really in an interesting phase where you have these e-ink devices and iTablets coming out so the hardware will be there, so you need some kind of central destination to back that up.”
Interesting premise.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2009
Oyez, oyez. A freebie. I wonder to whom I report this fact. Perhaps to the iTunes of the US government, the National Archives, maybe?
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