Not every publisher has the resources to cover all the bases and provide tablet editions for all the digital newsstands out there. Plus, Next Issue Media, for now, still remains relatively exclusive in the brands it selects for its platform. Here, we present a handy table that compares feature, service and reporting sets for the top newsstands: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Next Issue, Zinio and Google.
For example, much hay has been made over data sharing and reporting—particularly with Apple. But the chart shows that the various newsstand have very different standards for what’s shared and what’s not.
And auditing? Not our problem, say Apple and Amazon. But Next Issue Media and Zinio are a bit more empathetic. Other important considerations include free trail support, print authentication and report access. Zinio is the only one out of the bunch that pushes reports to publishers. The rest offer little to no automated access, leaving publishers in the painful position of having to manually cobble together massive Excel spreadsheets from a variety of reporting formats.
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