[Graham]

Here's a very interesting interview with the marketing director of Popular Science, the first magazine to sign up for the new Apple subscription service. It goes into a lot of detail about how this is going to work from the content provider's perspective.

I'd say that he's cautiously optimistic, stressing that they want to be on as many platforms as possible, but forgive me for highlighting a couple of negatives:

The challenge with Apple is going to be how do you integrate publisher-sold subscriptions in the iTunes store. When somebody clicks on the "subscribe" button ... a non-descript window comes up that says ‘May we share your e-mail address with the publisher for their marketing purposes.'

I'm sure the publishers would hope that that was changed to something more attractive; I can't imagine any new subscriber clicking 'yes' to that!

Apple charges it upfront to the consumer's credit card and there are no cancellations, no refunds.

I hereby take back 90% of everything I said above about providing value!

If Apple are not going to be handling cancellations and refunds, and the support that entails, then they are simply processing the credit card fee, triggering renewals, and hanging onto the subscriber data for their own marketing purposes. Their charge should be 2% at most, and arguably the subscriber data is worth more to them than their costs.

Graham