In the case of the Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, the companies are borrowing the language of the TV industry and inviting advertisers to sponsor “documentaries,” “shows” and “original programming slates.” The actual content, however, is typically a collection of 2-4 minute web clips and the marketing pitch often invites a single brand to slap their name on the entire package.

Will it work? Both the Journal and Conde Nast are relying on their historic brand power to attract video sponsors and, like everyone in media, are serving up their wares on all screens. But the two companies are also taking different approaches to scale and strategy. Here’s a look at their offerings, and how the companies are framing their new video identities.

A video start-up inside 100-year-old magazines

Conde Nast wields considerable cultural and political power through titles like Vogue and Vanity Fair and GQ — but that doesn’t mean the company and its famous editors Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter, who were on an hand at Conde’s ad event, know much about making video. Many readers, meanwhile, may not even know the videos exist.

Appearing to recognize that print prowess doesn’t automatically transfer to video, Conde Nast went on a hiring spree, bringing in “video natives” from companies like the Huffington Post and CW Networks, and giving them rein to create content in a hands-off environment. The “start-up” (that’s Conde Nast’s word for the venture) is known as CN Entertainment and is also working with TV veterans who produced fare like Mad Men and Project Runway.

CN Entertainment’s output has been trickling out for a while, and includes video series like GQ‘s “10 Essentials” and Glamour’s “Elevator Runway.” On Wednesday, the company announced over 30 new “original programming slates” that include Wired’s “Angry Nerd” and programs tied to titles like Teen Vogue, Epicurious and Vanity Fair.

The new offerings represent a big expansion for Conde Nast’s video efforts. But they but also come at a time that other companies are rushing to offer original programming too — AOL, Yahoo and the Weather Company were just some of sites who made similar announcements this week.

To avoid being over looked in this flood of content, Conde Nast is relying on syndication deals with sites like Twitter and YouTube. The company is also promising to spend heavily on marketing in order to assure advertisers that someone will actually watch the videos.

“It’s on us to make people know the brands are in the business to create video. A lot of people fall down with the philosophy of ‘build it and they will come’” Fred Santarpia, Chief Digital of CN Entertainment, told me at the event. He said the company might, for instance target GQ magazine readers with Facebook ads to make sure they’re aware of the brand’s videos.

Santarpia said he could not disclose revenue figures, only saying they were “healthy.”

Not your father’s Wall Street Journal

For the last year, the Wall Street Journal has been pursuing its “WSJ Everywhere” strategy that involves producing a lot of content and putting it in as many places as possible — from the iPhone to the X-box and more.

Unlike Conde Nast, the Journal has been relying heavily on its existing print teams to crank out the content. This typically means pulling reporters before a makeshift studio in the Journal offices or even recording them via Skype from their homes and hotel rooms. The result has been plenty of video but a mixed bag in terms of quality.

Now, the Journal appears to be increasing its efforts to pluck out the best stuff and package it as discrete channels. At a splashy event on Monday morning, executives touted the Journal’s proximity to power brokers and invited advertisers to become exclusive sponsors of fare like “Seib & Wessel,” a senior journalist chat fest.

“This isn’t your father’s Wall Street Journal,” war reporter Michael Phillips told the crowd. Perhaps to drive home the point, the event also featured appearances by rapper MC Hammer and a Bloody Mary stand to help ad and media executives start the week off right.

The Journal also announced a new documentary series “WSJ Startup of the Year,” sponsored by the NYSE, that will feature famous entrepreneurs like Richard Branson kicking the tires of upcoming companies. The paper is also betting on lifestyle video content like “WSJ Cafe” and clips from popular sports writer Jason Gay.

According to Chief Revenue Officer, Michael Rooney, people are watching the videos because they are attached not just to the paper but to the Journal name.

“They want to follow this brand anywhere and anyhow they can get the content,” Rooney told me at the event, adding that advertisers understand the viewers are high income people and will pay top dollar to reach them. WSJ is now streaming 20-25 million videos a month with premium cost-per-thousand view rates coming in at $40-$60 a month.

Early innings for old brands and new video tricks

This week’s ad outreach by Conde Nast and the Journal comes at a time when digital display dollars are proving insufficient to offset the inexorable decline of their legacy print products. The turn to video promises higher ad income as online viewing takes off, and big brands contemplate moving more of their TV budgets to the web.

The video strategy seems obvious but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. To actually pull this off, the print companies will have to persuade advertisers that their videos can reach a wide enough audience to be worth their time (this is likely the reason the New York Times pulled down its paywall for online video last week).

At the same time, they will have to compete with a host of other media outlets suddenly jostling for video dollars too, as well as newer outfits like PopSugar and Break Media who have already figured out how to produce compelling videos on the cheap.

This flood of content from all corners could also depress the high rates that are attracting brands like Conde and the Journal to video in the first place. And while a tilt of ad dollars from cable to online video seems inevitable, no one knows when this will actually occur.

“The market is growing. Everything points to more money moving into space,” said CN Entertainment’s Santarpia. ”It’s early —  only time will tell.”

Asked to frame it in baseball terms, Santarpia said it’s only the second inning for the online video industry — and the first for companies like Conde Nast.

(Image by Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock)

The service offers unlimited access to over 80 magazines on iPad, up from 39 at launch. Users can choose between an “unlimited basic” subscription, which offers access to monthly magazines like Glamour, Wired and Food & Wine for $9.99 per month, and an “unlimited premium” subscription, for $14.99 per month, that also includes weekly titles like People, New York, New Yorker and Sports Illustrated.

Next Issue Media, which started out in 2009 as a joint venture of Condé Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., News Corp and Meredith, was initially only available for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets before expanding to iPad — and, potentially, a wider audience — last July.

The Windows 8 launch is “the first time we’ve worked closely with a platform partner,” CEO Morgan Guenther told me. The app integrates features like “snap view” and multitasking from Microsoft’s interface; the software giant is also providing marketing and will feature the app in the Windows App store. “We saw the importance of moving beyond the tablet,” Guenther said, and Microsoft was a “motivated partner.”

Next Issue hopes that users will use the platform across devices. A single subscription can be authenticated on up to five devices. “With greater choice as to where, when and how they access their magazines, users can seamlessly switch from their tablet at home, to their Ultrabook on the road, to their company PC,” John Richards, senior director of Windows app marketing for Microsoft, said in a statement.

Less than half of Next Issue’s users pay

Discovery remains “an issue” on iPad, Guenther said, partly because the Next Issue iPad app isn’t available through Apple Newsstand. The company projects that by the end of this quarter, it will have about 120,000 total users — 50,000 of whom are actually paying for a subscription. Of that 50,000, about 60 percent have a premium subscription, Guenther said, and 40 percent have a basic subscription. The remaining 70,000 or so users are “authenticators” — users who already have a print subscription to a magazine and are accessing the print version through next Issue’s app.

In the next quarter, Next Issue plans to add Facebook integration and social sharing, followed by the integration of “clipping” technology that would let users virtually save individual articles or images from magazines. Guenther also says the library will expand to about 100 titles in the next couple of months.

Though Next Issue originally launched on Android, that platform hasn’t been much of a priority, Guenther said — to the extent that there are only 36 magazines available, less than half the number of titles available for iPad and Windows 8. In the next few months the company will “refresh” the experience on Android, Guenther said. It also plans to expand to Android smartphones and iPhones.

But while Reddit’s influence in politics may be growing, and its role in shaping internet culture is already significant, there’s another area of life that also relies heavily on the site: journalism.

It’s not news that journalists love to get linked by Reddit, which can drive huge amounts of traffic to a site — so much that some even try to game the system. But what’s less widely acknowledged is how much it gets used as a source of stories.

Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of journalists, and heard of many more, for whom Reddit is a wellspring of ideas and inspiration. Sometimes they use it to spark new commissions, and sometimes they just rip it off, but the fact is that nearly every news organization is watching the site closely and using it in some way.

“Journalists everywhere are using it to get ideas for features,” Benji Lanyado, a freelance writer based in London, told me recently. “Stories appear on Reddit, then half a day later they’re on Buzzfeed and Gawker, then they’re on the Washington Post, The Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a pretty established pattern.”

Reddit as ‘inspiration’

In fact, calling it a pattern is an understatement: it’s more like a routine. These days Reddit is probably the meme factory that’s most heavily used by news professionals to generate material, even though they rarely like to admit it.

Much of the “inspiration” is simple: journalists trawling Reddit and simply lifting ideas, photos or quotes: sometimes with credit, oftentimes without.

Buzzfeed, for example, happily republishes pictures with even less context than the original posts, while Britain’s Daily Mail — the biggest online newspaper in the world — regularly churns out Reddit-inspired stories.

But it’s more than just a source of material for aggregators, copycats and rip-off artists. Look a little deeper and Reddit’s news filter is also influential in other, less visible ways.

The site’s huge traffic (now more than three billion page views a month) means that it pushes through a lot of attention. Stories that rise to the top of the site can suddenly get propelled into the stratosphere — meaning that other media outlets, including TV news, have a greater chance of spotting them. The voracious, skeptical approach of many redditors also acts as a sort of built-in fact checking service for journalists too lazy or time-poor to do the legwork themselves:

And then there’s the site’s original content — things like the AMA sub-section, which has turned into an interview slot and confessional all in one. These real-life stories have helped turn Reddit from a simple link machine into something that creates its own stories, with the result that it’s constantly driving headlines.

Reddit for the rest of us

The utility of Reddit for journalists is such that Lanyado has decided to build The Reddit Edit, a skinned version of the site. It’s aimed, at least in part, at that diminishing cadre of media workers who still shy away from the site. It looks more presentable than its parent, and puts forward only the hottest stories across a variety of topics: if Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, then The Reddit Edit would be the 60 second news bulletin.

Launched in July as a teach-yourself-coding project, traffic on the site is modest, but it has fans — not least because Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian gave it the seal of approval back in July.

Lanyado’s inspiration came when he realized that Reddit was, effectively, a news service in and of itself. Much like other small projects like Evening Edition, he decided a little bit of aggregation could go a long way.

“I was using the iReddit app and I suddenly had the idea that this was really a newspaper feature section,” says Lanyado. “I want to show off Reddit and how fascinating, fucked up and amazing it is.”

Washington’s seal of approval

And it’s no surprise that the Reddit Edit appears at a time when journalism’s relationship with the site is shifting.

One of the most peculiar things about Reddit has always been the love-hate relationship. While newsrooms are regularly using it to boost their own output and traffic, much of the direct attention the media has given the site over the years has been pretty negative.

Think of Anderson Cooper’s angry expose of the /jailbait sub-reddit, or claims that the site is sensationalist or misogynistic.

These criticisms are not untrue, but they represent only a small section of the site: like any large community, it has unsavory elements. It’s hard to imagine that the perceived threat that some newsrooms feel from services like this has not played a part in this negative coverage (indeed, it’s reminiscent of Craigslist’s negative press over the years).

Truth is, there’s nothing shameful in journalists using Reddit as a source of ideas — after all, the site is really just a machine that links to stories elsewhere anyway. But it’s only now, thanks to Obama, that the mainstream media is starting to realize it doesn’t have to be their dirty little secret any more.

Print:

• Paid subscriptions (up 1.1 percent) and total paid and verified circulation (down 0.1 percent) are basically unchanged since the first half of 2011.
• But single-copy sales are down 9.6 percent.

Digital:

• Digital replicas (which essentially replicate the editorial and advertising content of the print edition — here are the guidelines) make up just 1.7 percent of total circulation. That’s up from less than one percent last year.
• Readers are downloading more digital editions — half of audited titles (258) reported over 5.4 million digital replica editions sold in the first half of this year. Last year, 232 magazines had reported two million digital replica sales.

ABC spokeswoman Susan Kantor says magazines won’t report non-replica digital editions (ie. apps) for another couple of weeks, but those are unlikely to move the needle:

“In the last period, only a handful of publications reported non-replica, so we’d estimate the figures wouldn’t vary that much.”

Top 15 magazines by digital replica circulation

1. Game Informer Magazine (GameStop): 1,218,634
2. Maxim (Dennis Alpha Media Group) 284,824
3. Cosmopolitan (Hearst): 185,673
4. Poder Hispanic (Televisa Publishing): 170,868
5. National Geographic (National Geographic): 134,656
6. Popular Science (Bonnier): 93,037
7. O, the Oprah Magazine (Hearst): 81,259
8. ESPN the Magazine (ESPN): 76,600
9. Nylon (Jaclynn B. Jarrett): 75,600
10. Parenting (Time Inc. Bonnier): 74,790
11. Wired (Condé Nast): 68,776
12. GQ (Condé Nast): 60,031
13. Men’s Health (Rodale): 59,536
14. Women’s Health (Rodale) :51,403
15. Electronic House (EH Publishing): 50,098

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Next Issue’s expansion to iPad is its first real chance at widespread adoption. The company started up back in 2009, when Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. teamed up to create a cross-platform digital newsstand — but there were no visible results until the launch of a digital storefront “preview” on the Samsung Galaxy tablet in May 2011. The launch for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and above in April 2012 was a small step forward, but few people owned the right tablet.

With Next Issue’s launch on iPad, there’s a better opportunity to see whether readers are interested in all-you-can-read tablet magazines for a flat monthly fee. Thirty-nine popular titles are available now (full list below), with more expected later this year. Subscribers can choose an “unlimited basic” subscription for $9.99 per month, which gives them access to all monthly and biweekly titles, or an “unlimited premium” subscription for $14.99 per month, which adds weeklies like Time and the New Yorker to the mix. They can also purchase individual magazine subscriptions, ranging in price from $1.99 to $5.99 per month, and individual magazine issues, ranging in price from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue. There are free 30-day trials for both unlimited basic and premium subscriptions.

If a user already subscribes to a certain title, he or she can read that digital edition from within the app for free “or a nominal cost,” depending on whether the publisher bundles print and digital editions (as Time Inc., Condé Nast and Meredith do) or charges separately for digital editions (as Hearst does).

“GQ” magazine in carousel view

Is it a good deal?

Next Issue’s app looks great on both Android and iPad, and its availability on iPad opens it up to many more magazine lovers. But will they find unlimited subscriptions worth the fee? It probably depends on how much they’re paying for magazine subscriptions now, whether they’re willing to shift the money they’re paying from print to digital, how much they value a print subscription, how much they want to read popular magazines in general versus specific titles, and whether Next Issue has the titles they want. (As my colleague Mathew Ingram notes, this is also not the platform for people who prefer a Flipboard-style, social-based method of reading content.)

A personal example: My household subscribes to the print versions of New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist. The total annual cost we pay for those magazines (using the prices listed on the magazine website, and assuming no discounts for multi-year subscriptions or other special offers) is $256.98, or about $21 a month. So an “unlimited premium” Next Issue Media subscription should be a bargain for us at $14.99 a month — except it doesn’t include print issues and two of the magazines we subscribe to, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist, aren’t available, at least for now.

As Next Issue adds more magazines, though — CEO Morgan Guenther tells me that the company plans to double the number of titles it offers this year — it becomes a better deal, and dropping print subscriptions becomes more enticing. In 2013, Next Issue will add its first “outside publisher” titles — i.e., magazines not published by the five companies already participating in the JV — in “key segments.” (That could include magazines like The Economist and Consumer Reports.) The company also plans to expand to some international markets, add search and social features, add some advertising and expand to newspapers (at which point titles from News Corp, the fifth partner in the JV, will become available).

The list of magazines available now, by publisher

*=weekly magazine only included in premium subscription package

Condé Nast

• Allure
• Bon Appétit
• Brides
• Condé Nast Traveler
• Glamour
• Golf Digest
• GQ
• The New Yorker*
• Self
• Vanity Fair
• Vogue
• Wired

Hearst

• Car and Driver
• Elle
• Esquire
• Popular Mechanics

Meredith

• Better Homes and Gardens
• Fitness
• Parents

Time

• All You
• Coastal Living
• Cooking Light
• Entertainment Weekly
• Essence
• Fortune
• Golf
• Health
• InStyle
• Money
• People*
• People en Español
• People StyleWatch
• Real Simple
• Southern Living
• Sports Illustrated*
• Sports Illustrated Kids
• Sunset
• This Old House
• Time*

• On Friday, Facebook is set to flip the switch from years of hyped speculation to the reality of a mega-hyped IPO. It’s waiting for regulatory approval to spend $1 billion on Instagram. As I write this, the news is breaking that Pinterest is about raise a round that will follow it at $1.5 billion. A quick scan of our own news pages shows hundreds of millions being invested in the digital content ecosystem — often with a firm belief that there is revenue somewhere to justify those investments, but without any real sense of where it will come from. We’ll ask John Borthwick and Fred Wilson, among others, where they are investing and why.
• Cable and broadcast networks have been unveiling new programming slates into a more fragmented video universe than ever before. Discovery Communications bought Revision 3 for $30 million, Turner Broadcasting invested in Funny or Die. At the same time, YouTube’s $100 million investment in original programming is rolling out channel by channel, AOL is finally moving ahead with its major video plans, Yahoo is investing in original programs with Tom Hanks, Katie Couric and others — and so are Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. Brian Bedol, who is trying to replicate his success as a cable network founder with YouTube channels and other efforts; Lisa Gersh, president and COO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, will take us inside their thinking as they make their way through The Video Boom.
• Just this week, one of our moderators turned from board member and adjunct professor to active exec again. That means Larry Kramer will be sitting down as president and publisher of USA Today with John Paton and Jim Bankoff to talk about what it takes to lead and innovate, to be a “new publisher.” Since paidContent 2011, Bankoff taken SB Nation, a network of sports sites, to Vox Media and added a tech vertical with The Verge and has a gaming vertical on the way. Paton, meanwhile, has added MediaNews to his Journal Register portfolio, and is now the the CEO of the much-larger DigitalFirst.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms.

We’ll be covering the topics that matter to you in our signature one-day, single-stage, 360-degree style. We have a stellar roster of speakers and moderators who are more than up for the task, including:

• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast
• Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Josh Marshall, Editor & Publisher, TalkingPointsMemo.com
• Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite
• Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, WordPress and Founder, Automattic

The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Just as important as the speakers, though, is the fact that we have great attendees with a lot to add to the discussion.

But space is limited and tickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of this jam-packed agenda and the opportunities that come with networking throughout the day from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. joined to launch Next Issue Media back in 2009 to sell digital magazines and other content from one cross-platform digital newsstand. But rollout has been slow, with little visible action since the company launched a digital storefront “preview” on the Samsung Galaxy tablet last May.

Now Next Issue Media launches for Android 3.0 and above with 32 popular magazines available. The company expects to add more later this year, eventually getting up to about 75 titles. The titles available are “premium, mass-market titles,” CEO Morgan Guenther told paidContent. “We’re taking a big, fat, short-tail content approach to this and going where the readers are.” Instead of downloading separate magazine apps, users download the Next Issue Media app and can read all the magazines within it.

The most innovative part of the launch is the “all-you-can-read” plan. Users can pay $9.99 per month for unlimited access to monthly and bi-weekly magazines, or $14.99 per month for monthlies and weeklies. Those prices include access to back issues — but the back catalog starts from January 1, 2012, so readers won’t see content from before that.

But will you be able to use it?

The cloud-based app only works with an Internet connection, though users can save individual issues to their device to read them offline. There are no social networking or sharing features yet, though Guenther said those are planned.

For now the biggest limitation is platform. Guenther said Next Issue will submit an iPad app to Apple “within an eight-week window” but it’s unclear how long the approval process will take. And because Kindle Fire runs a forked version of Android 2.3, it isn’t compatible with the Next Issue app.

Hearst, which charges separately for its magazines’ digital editions instead of bundling them with print subscriptions, will immediately begin disclosing to advertisers the total number of paid iPad editions sold each month. “As soon as possible,” it will share further data about “total time spent per reader per issue and average number of sessions per issue.”

For now, Hearst is only releasing digital data about the iPad editions of its magazines, not about other digital editions sold on platforms like Kindle and Nook. Meanwhile, Condé Nast is providing advertisers with data for iPad, Kindle and Nook editions.

In a separate announcement today, the Association of Magazine Media (MPA) released a new set of “voluntary guidelines to drive growth of advertising on tablets.” To start, the MPA recommends that magazine publishers release five metrics:

1. Total consumer paid digital issues
2. The total number of tablet readers per issue
3. The total number of sessions per issue
4. The total time spent per reader per issue
5. The average number of sessions per reader per issue

The MPA recommends that those metrics be released 10 weeks after the newsstand on-sale date for monthlies and seven weeks for weeklies. “Our research tells us that magazine readers continue to engage with their tablet issues as long as a month or more after the on-sale date of the publication and we need data that reflect this engagement,” said MPA president Nina Link.

Hearst, Condé Nast and the MPA’s moves come ahead of expected changes to the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ reporting format for digital editions. If the new standards are approved in a vote this summer, large consumer magazine publishers will be required to break down digital magazine subscriptions and single-copy sales by platform starting in July 2013.