08 Aug 2012
Posted by AWSC 
Huffington, the iPad Magazine that debuted just a few weeks ago in Apple’s Newsstand app, is now free.
After initially charging $1 per issue for the first five weeks and receiving approximately 115,000 downloads, it seems that The Huffington Post has decided to back to a more traditional monetization model for the publication rather than rely on subscription revenue.
A Huffington Post spokesperson told Capitol, “In the end, we felt that asking people to pay for the magazine was inconsistent with The Huffington Post itself, which has never charged for content.”
Paid subscribers continue to elude the tablet news market; last week News Corp announced that they were reducing the staff of their publication The Daily by about a third due to lackluster subscriber numbers.
We’ve already speculated that maybe The Daily would be better off scrapping their paid subscriber model, perhaps this move by the Huffington Post will reinforce that idea.
Huffington has stated that all paid subscribers will be reimbursed in full.
