‘New Yorker’ Boasts 20,000 iPad Subscribers

The first stats of subscription numbers for iPad users of the New Yorker app are in, and they’re not half bad.

Paywalls have proven to be a mixed bag when it comes to traditional print media, and one need only point to Long Island newspaper Newsday’s failtastic transition to a paywall a while back. At the price charged, only a few dozen subscribers signed up to access the (somewhat horrendously designed) site.

According to PC Mag, the iPad app for the New Yorker- a popular Gotham-centric print mag- has fared far better, even with a hefty $60 subscription price tag:

…20,000 people have purchased annual subscriptions at a yearly rate of $59.99. An additional 75,000 print subscribers have taken advantage of the option to download the iPad version of the magazine for free, and “several thousand” readers have bought individual issues for $4.99 a week. Overall, Conde says The New Yorker has 100,000 readers on the iPad.

The success of the iPad New Yorker app is probably down to a number of reasons, and likely hinges heavily on how the content is so optimized for the medium, rather than the creators simply slapping a high price over a pathetically adapted for mobile site and expecting pockets to open up and start pouring for them.

We also can’t discount the effect of the commercial below, featuring America’s hipster sweetheart, Jonathan Schwartzman. Have you paid to subscribe to a mobile version of any of your favorite magazines on iPad or a similar device? Do you find some apps to be worth a yearly fee?