Wired is making the iPad edition of its May issue free to download for 30 days starting today, courtesy of a sponsorship from Adobe that the magazine hopes will help show off new sharing and shopping functions. It's the latest promotion in which marketers give consumers free access to content that's normally walled, metered or otherwise paid. All month, for example, Volvo is underwriting free access to baseball games streaming on Apple devices, while Lincoln recently offered free passes to 200,000 of the people most likely to encounter the New York Times' new digital paywall.
In some ways Wired is catching up. IPad app editions for magazines including Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Mechanics and ESPN the Magazine already allow sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Editorial e-commerce inside iPad editions, as opposed to functions that yank readers out of the app, is less common but still available from titles such as the Oprah Magazine.But Wired's iPad app has been particularly closely watched, largely because its editorial interests and its audience overlap so much with the early buyers for Apple's iPad. Its debut issue on the iPad sold more than 105,000 downloads, still perhaps the highest total, and certainly one of the highest, for any regularly priced magazine issue on the iPad.
The Wired app now lets readers post links to its articles on Facebook and Twitter, even if they haven't been posted on Wired's website yet or, in the case of app edition exclusives. The links lead back to specifically created web pages that will encourage consumers to download the issue.
SOURCE: adage.com
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