Montreal-based TVA Group has joined the growing number of magazine publishers offering digital delivery with the launch of its new digital newsstand service, Molto. The iOS and Android-based service offers subscribers unlimited access to up to 30 TVA magazines on tablets and smartphones.
Lucie Dumas, vice-president, group publisher of TVA’s magazine division, said Molto makes its titles more accessible to readers, who are increasingly consuming content via mobile devices.
While TVA has been experimenting with “smart editions” of certain titles featuring video and interactive advertising since 2010, Dumas said they had not been financially successful. “They were beautiful to read [and offered] amazing bonus content, but the readers were not there,” she said.
Molto (the name is Italian for “abundance,” said Dumas) will provide digital access to all of TVA’s titles including Coup de pouce, Canadian Living, 7 Jours, La Semaine and Elle Canda, for $8.49 per month. “For the price of two magazines you have 400 issues and 30 brands as a starter,” said Dumas. “It’s so affordable and so complete.”
TVA is also offering two themed packages, one providing access to its food titles and another to its home décor publications, for a monthly fee of $5.49. The company also plans to create additional themed packages, said Dumas.
It also plans to open up Molto to non-TVA publications and possibly book publishers, with Dumas telling Marketing the name was selected so consumers would not perceive the service as being magazine-centric.
Dumas said TVA was currently in discussions with publishers in Canada, the U.S., England and France about adding titles to the service, which could happen within the next 12 months.
Online and social media channels have increased TVA’s monthly reach to 10.8 million, according to the most recent Vividata report, though Dumas said monetizing those additional followers remained a challenge.
“Nobody has cracked the code in terms of monetizing all those eyeballs, and as an industry we need to try new approaches,” said Dumas, who said there is potential value in a transactional approach to content, such as enabling readers to purchase a featured product such as a pair of shoes directly from the Molto app.
Molto was developed in association with the Canadian arm of miLibris, a seven-year-old French company that has worked with publications including the New York Daily News and Le Figaro.
Several North American publications including Canadian Family, La Presse, AutoTrader and Newsweek have abandoned print in favour of digital-only delivery in recent years, but TVA said it remained “fully committed” to print, calling it a “core component” of its business strategy.
Dumas said weekly magazines like TV Hebdo, La Semaine and 7 Jours remain strong impulse purchases for Quebeckers. Their financial model, which is more reliant on newsstand sales, means they have remained somewhat immune to the challenges faced by their monthly counterparts, which are far more reliant on advertising revenues, said Dumas.
TVA joins a growing number of publishers offering digital delivery of their titles. Rogers has partnered with the U.S. publishers Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, Meredith and News Corp on the digital newsstand Texture by Next Issue, which offers digital access to more than 150 consumer titles including Chatelaine, Macleans, Today’s Parent, Esquire and GQ.
Rogers has not disclosed the number of Canadian subscribers to Texture, though senior vice-president of publishing Steve Maich said last year that it had “well north” of 100,000 users.
Doug Knight, president of Toronto’s St. Joseph Media, which owns magazine titles including Toronto Life, Fashion and Weddingbells, said the company had no plans to launch a digital subscription service, “but will watch [Molto] with interest.”
St. Joseph converted Canadian Family to a digital-only model in 2014, citing an “ultimately unsustainable” erosion of advertiser support. Knight said it continued to perform well as a digital property, with 125,000 unique visitors and 598,000 page views in the past three months, a 2% increase over the previous period.
The publication has also garnered 51,000 page views on Pinterest and 18,000 on Facebook, as well as 34,000 subscribers to its weekly e-newsletter and 31,000 for its food-focused e-newsletter.
TVA is supporting the launch of Molto with a marketing campaign that includes PR, social media and SEO, accompanied by print, radio, out-of-home and TV. The traditional campaign elements were created by Montreal agency Écorce, while Konversion oversaw the digital campaign. Sarah Châtelain, national director of marketing, communications and events for TVA Group, said the campaign was aimed at the “broadest audience possible.”
