Let's Say the 'New Yorker' iPad Publication Makes $58K a Week

The data we’re allowed to have from places like Conde Nast makes it a little difficult to parse, but this helps: “between its eight magazines with tablet editions, the company has 242,000 digital customers.” Good night, nurse! Your revolution is… maybe next year? (That being said, I’d love to see income numbers from that. It’s gotta be somewhere from $1.2 million to $2.6 million, I figure? The problem is counting people who get iPad access “bundled” with magazine subscriptions; where people get counted is important!) And language is tricky!

But here’s what we can figure out. The New Yorker “served” 89,684 iPad copies for an issue in June. That number is obscured by “served” and doesn’t count people like me, who subscribe to the magazine but wouldn’t ever be bothered to crack it open on an iPad, but it does count… people who subscribe to the mag and then realize “Oh hey I can also get this on this pad-thing.” And it counts some number of people who just straight up buy it for the iPad — about 20,000 people, according to this typically listless bit of reporting — which, in some sense, is nice free money!

So by my very slightly charitable calculations (20,000 people at $59.99 a year, then 5000 people buying weekly issues), the New Yorker iPad publication brings in $58,073 a week. (That’s about $3 million a year. You could probably say it turns a profit!)