Reports on the Death of Magazines on iPads are Greatly Exaggerated

So say the Los Angeles Times.

From the piece...

Today's Audit Bureau of Circulations report's numbers, along with a post at WWD crunching some numbers, show that major magazines, including Vanity Fair and GQ, had declining iPad sales in November.

But the slide off from Wired's initial gangbuster sales is nothing new. In October, Ad Agelooked at how major magazine apps were doing on the iPad, noting that since Wired's first iPad issue, its sales had consistently been around 30,000. And while that number is certainly no 100,000, Wired -- one of the earliest well-known magazines to debut an iPad app -- has been holding onto a major market share. In contrast, Ad Age found that Popular Science, Vanity Fair, GQ and People regularly sell significantly fewer copies: 10,000 to 15,000 per issue (for People, that's weekly).

And those hard numbers mean different things to different publications. Vanity Fair's summer iPad sales, averaging slightly under 10,000 per month, were just 2% of its newsstand sales, while Wired's 32,000 September iPad sales were 37% of its newsstand sales. That's a huge distinction. It's easy to see why Wired might look to the iPad as a revenue source and as a way of deepening its connection with readers. Vanity Fair? Maybe not so much.