With any Virgin launch, it is worth looking for the substance behind the hype guaranteed by Sir Richard Branson’s involvement. Tuesday’s unveiling of Project, billed as the first truly interactive magazine for the iPad age, was no exception.
Joined by Holly, his 29-year-old daughter who is leading the Project, er, project, the bearded balloonist happily played into the hands of reporters who have billed his pitch for Apple’s tablet as a battle of the billionaires with Rupert Murdoch, whose $30m iPad “newspaper”, The Daily, is expected early next year.
“This is not a battle. This is not a war. It’s about the future of publishing,” he said, before adding the jibe that 30 years of reading Mr Murdoch’s papers convinced him that his title would win “the battle of quality”.
But what does Project offer for what editor Anthony Noguera dubbed the most exciting thing in publishing since Caxton’s printing press? The launch issue, shown off with the usual wifi glitches in a New York hotel, features a flickering cover shot of Jeff Bridges, the Tron Legacy star, who strides on to the first page of an interview which offers more video and audio clips. Other features encourage interaction with the iPad’s touch screen, to colour in a blueprint of a new Jaguar or fly through the streets of Tokyo for a travel article.
For $2.99 or £1.79, readers will (after a 10-minute download wait “on a reasonable internet connection”) get “a monthly magazine that changes daily”, Branson said, highlighting its regularly updated blog and its desire to “crowdsource” comments, editorial ideas and other content. If that sounds like a mess waiting to happen, Noguera says these will be curated.
Project needs the crowd’s help, in part because it has just 20 people, only five of them in editorial roles. The Daily, by contrast, is hiring 100-150 people. “Virgin is a cheapskate,” Branson joked, shortly after dressing up as a mannequin for a photo opp outside an Apple store. Such stunts would encourage many people with iPads waiting under this year’s Christmas tree to buy the app in order to have something to show off what it can do, he predicted.
More revealingly, Noguera said this type of magazine was “far more expensive” to produce than a comparable print title. Forget all the talk about the benefits of not having unionised printers and delivery trucks – tablet-only titles still needed “extremely well-paid” developers and faced the tedious process of redesigning their products for each new device.
Project hopes that such costs will be offset by being charging advertisers such as Lexus and Panasonic a premium for interactive ads you can swipe, tilt and play with, and boasts that it will not carry a single inanimate PDF. “It’s going to make advertising a thousand times more effective than it is now,” Branson said.
But Project is a one-off app up against the likes of Condé Nast, Hearst and Time Inc which are busy translating their well-resourced magazine brands for tablets. Branson told Bloomberg it would be “great” if Project attracted 50,000 subscribers (one-sixteenth of the number Murdoch told the Australian Financial Review he needs for The Daily), but his daughter was more circumspect about the size of the market. “It’s quite difficult to put a figure on. It’s virgin territory,” she said.
