Digital kiosks: What's the split?

Posted by Jennifer Lush on October 7, 2009 at 1:10 PM

Reporting by Cecilia Campbell

HDS Digital runs Relay.com, a French digital kiosk for buying online versions of magazines. Ameyric Bauguin spoke at the second WAN-IFRA conference on e-reading in Paris last week, about how the press product and book distribution specialists were positioning themselves in the current market.

Bauguin emphasised the difference between selling in the 'real world' and selling on the Internet saying that it was much more difficult to manage the latter. Magazines - generally cheap, relaxing reading material - were not something that people would necessarily be immediately enthusiastic about purchasing over the Internet to read on computers. "We knew we had to make the offer very attractive, in order to be able to sell," he said.

HDS Digital decided on a fixed price of €17.90 a month, which enabled subscribers to download an unlimited amount of material, from a range of 200 different publishers and 500 different titles. The price seems to be right, with some 250,000 users in the Relay.com database (on free trials for example), 100,000 buyers in a year, and about 1000 active subscribers every month.

Bauguin went through the results of a recent customer survey which found that: 75% of the magazines bought online would not have been bought in their respective paper versions, 40% of users had never bought their particular magazine in paper before and 20% of users said that they would buy the paper version later.

But come Q&A time the big question on every publisher's lips was voiced: What's the split?

Each publisher receives a certain amount based on a combination of their current market share and the amount of downloads they received, said Bauguin. However, the actual split between HDS Digital and publishers is "more or less 50-50," said Bauguin, "but it depends on the publisher" and this may vary.

For more information on the 2nd WAN-IFRA e-readering conference, click here.