After almost four years of continuous development and testing, Maghound.com, Time Inc.’s Netflix-like service for magazines, is finally set to launch this September, Dave Ventresca, president of Maghound Enterprises, Inc., told attendees of the 2008 Circulation Management Conference in Chicago Tuesday.
Ventresca gave a detailed presentation called “A Look Inside the Maghound.com Model,” which included a step-by-step account of how the idea was born and developed as well as a demo of how the site will operate once launched. According to Ventresca, 280 titles are currently on board with the service. He hopes to have 300 titles participating by the launch and 400 by the end of the year.
Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships and can cancel whenever they wish. Ventresca says that Maghound.com offers “flexibility, choice, control and personalization.”
“There has been this major paradigm shift in the way consumers shop, pay for and manage the services they choose,” Ventresca said. “And this shift has occurred everywhere except for magazines. We still sell on a fixed-term subscription or by single copy with no innovation. And [Maghound] is hoping to change that.”
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