Digital Newsstand Magzter Offers Unlimited Access to Pubs

Subscription-based app Magzter wants to become the Netflix of the magazine industry by offering customers unlimited access to nearly 2,000 titles. For $10 per month, subscribers can enjoy access to titles such as Maxim, ESPN and Fast Company among other popular publications. Magzter also plans to offer an alternative plan by which customers pay $5 per month to read any five titles on a monthly basis. The company is in competition with two other subscription magazine services: Readily and Next Issue.

The other services however, offer readers access to fewer titles, 800 and 140 respectively. What these rivals lack in volume they make up for in key publishing deals with big name companies such as Hearst and Conde Nast. While Magzter does not have such deals yet, CEO and co-founder Girish Ramdas is optimistic that the app will take off.

Magzter_Newsstand

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Magzter managed to draw 4 million monthly active users,” operating as a unified destination of about 5,000 magazine titles. Access to these titles however, required either a payment or subscription fee for every source.

Ramdas does not believe his company is at any disadvantage. He believes that Magzter’s existing business model is a major reason why the new service will work. “We think we can actually succeed in building a ‘Netflix for magazines’ because the others started off just trying to do this… They didn’t have an existing user base, they didn’t have the breadth of content we have.”

The Magzter app is currently available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire and Windows 8. Users have the option of choosing between the Magzter Gold plan (unlimited titles at $10 per month) or the Magzter Lite plan (5 titles at $5 per month).

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