if you read a magazine for the ads, you should not be reading that magazine.

@1 ... I see you've never read Vanity Fair, or many fashion or bridal magazines.

That said, the iPad consumer should be a highly premium ad market, as they might buy things that geeks with their netbooks won't.

Having no ads in your magazine makes you not answerable to advertisers for your content. That makes for good journalism, right? What am I missing?

What, people who can afford to piss away $800 on an iPad are too cheap to spend $5 on something to read? Cry me a river.

Wonder what they'll do for magazine subscription rates? Should iPad users expect the 75% newsstand price that many magazines offer?

I suppose it depends what you read, but printed magazines, to me, are more important than printed daily papers or even printed books.

2 points.

1) Glossy ad-driven magazines, whose content is always an afterthought, will be terrible on the iPad. The iPad is great for content-driven material. Most magazines today are not content-driven, but ad driven. Of course I won't pay for that, because, as Constant notes, we browse magazines in large part for the ads. Does anyone even read the content?

2) People will pay for content-rich media on the iPad; books, movies, music. And even content-rich newspapers and content-rich magazines.

The ads are what tell you the demographics and socio-economic strata the magazine is aiming at, which is valuable information both now and especially historically. When you look at old magazines, the ads are usually the most compelling part. Maxim has very different ads from Cigar Connoisseur or The New York Review of Books.

For instance, I defy anyone with eyes to look at this Ebony from 1970 without spending the rest of your day goggling at the fantastic ads.

@6, there are loads of content-driven magazines. The New Yorker is content-driven. The National Geographic is content-driven. So are The Atlantic, The New Republic, TNYRB, Harper's, and hundreds of others. It's not all Woman's Day or Big Truck Monthly.

@6, the market for various types of content is proven. The market for mixed content is not. No one knows if anyone wants magazines with video embedded in it, for instance. I know that I personally would expect my e-reader version of ANY magazine to be exactly the same as the paper version in every way possible. I can find my own videos and music, thanks. A link, sure; embedded? No. A magazine is not the same thing as a blog.

#8 - thanks for that link Fnarf.

@10 Fnarf…I'm aware that there are content-driven magazines, which is why I stated @6 that people will pay for content-driven magazines (see the last sentence).

As for new content? I don't close myself to the possibility that new mediums will emerge. I can't a priori say that I wouldn't like something that I may, upon seeing the right implementation, in fact love.

I do know that I hope people will push the envelope of the delivery of content. It can't be possible that we've reached the end of ways to convey information, entertainment and ideas.

Remember that, even if you sell an ad-free version of a magazine, by virtue of the Apple store interface, you effectively can target ads via email that go to that iPad.

Thus, as a marketer, I don't mind selling an ad-free version of my magazine if I can resell my list of qualified consumers, with content choice information, to a reseller.

You'd be surprised how that works.