Virtual Pants

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, has been hinting at a new app project on his podcast over the past several weeks. Today it launched in the App Store. It’s called The Magazine.

What is it? Seems pretty obvious, right? Not so fast. The Magazine is a subscription-based app that provides four blog posts every two weeks. The blog posts may be old posts previously published on the web or future posts that will eventually appear on the web for free. In fact, the foreword, written by Arment himself, explains that The Magazine isn’t really a magazine at all. It’s an app blog. For $1.99 per month, you will receive eight curated blog posts, old or new. That’s it.

Recently on App.net, Arment stated that people who knew about The Magazine pre-launch were surprised nobody thought of the idea sooner. That led me to believe it was incredibly clever. Disappointingly, The Magazine is merely a new business model to generate revenue from old and new blog posts. Arment could have easily designed it as a website, but chose to use the App Store subscription model instead. That’s the novelty in The Magazine. Blogs have traditionally used ads, web-subscriptions, paywalls, and sponsorships to generate revenue. To my knowledge, no mainstream technololgy blogs have tried a mobile subscription model. The Magazine will surely be your first blog in the notoriously empty iOS Newsstand.

Now that we know what The Magazine actually is, should you subscribe? The Magazine is well-designed and focuses on great curated content. Arment is well-connected and should continue to provide blog posts from the best writers in the technology industry. For this reason, only someone like Arment could pull off such a project, which is probably why app blogs like this haven’t popped up before. I’ll be subscribing, and if you enjoy great technology writing, I think you should too.