Now to Sell Advertisers on Tablets

If you wanted to get your message in front of a reader of The New Yorker, it would cost you $141,174 for a full-page ad in the magazine’s glossy pages. What would it be worth to reach the same reader if he or she were on an iPad? More, less or the same? That is the one very pertinent question after an active week in magazine publishers’ fitful effort to be part of, rather than run over by, the digital revolution.

Hearst Magazines struck a deal to sell three of its magazines — Esquire, Popular Mechanics and O, the Oprah Magazine — for the iPad, using Apple’s subscription model, beginning in July. Hearst is the first major publisher to agree to sell multiple magazines in the app store. The Hearst announcement comes on the heels of word that Time Inc. negotiated an agreement with Apple in which subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune would be able to read their magazines on the iPad free as long as they verified their identity. (Both deals were first reported in The Wall Street Journal.) And there are indications that Condé Nast, the third part of the triumvirate, will actually be the first to market among major publishers with iPad subscriptions to some of its bigger magazines. The deals represent a significant thaw between the technologists at Apple and the mandarins of Manhattan publishing. According to the publisher in each of those discussions, Apple, which has a reputation for setting unilateral terms, demonstrated some degree of flexibility around pricing, terms and custody of data.