By Paresh Dave

Los Angeles Times

(TNS)

The latest all-you-can-consume bundle for content comes from Magzter.

The app to read magazines online announced Monday that subscribers who pay $9.99 a month can read more than 2,000 magazines, including old issues. The titles include ESPN The Magazine, Maxim, PC Gamer and Fast Company.

For half the price, a subscriber can access five magazines of their choosing a month. But those magazines could be different ones each month, meaning someone could potentially access up to 60 different magazines a year for $60 a year.

Getting consumers who might subscribe to two or three magazines to spend more for more has proved challenging for the industry. Next Issue, a similar service backed by a consortium of top magazine publishers, has reached only a six-digit subscriber figure in nearly three years. Digital consumption of magazines remains under 4 percent of total U.S. circulation.

But Vijay Radhakrishnan, a Magzter co-founder, says the behavior of its 24 million existing users suggests they do want to read more magazines. The problem is when they subscribe to individual magazines, they forget to come back. The bundle should simplify the process. He also said magazines that make some content from an issue available for free online for a period need to start restricting that to entice more people to use services such as Magzter.

Magzter’s revenue split with publishers is based on how many pages are read, the price of a magazine and the time spent on pages.

A couple of magazines on Magzter’s platform have begun experimenting with article-based reading as opposed to traditional issue-based consumption. Meanwhile, more than 160 magazines are testing out another Magzter feature that allows them to offer “live” or “breaking news” content to readers in between issues.

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