Why Esquire’s Fun to Read on the iPhone.

Esquire recently launched an iPhone version of their magazine. There are a couple of differences between this version of the magazine and others. One is good (but labor intensive for some) and one is questionable in our opinion.

1) Putting articles on the same scrollable screen. It’s hard not to like this, as it makes for a seamless reading experience. Rather than scrolling through four to six pages of a magazine article, each one is one its own screen in its entirety. Most mobile versions of magazines today (including the Nxtbook) treat a page as a page because we begin the process from a medium built with pages – the PDF. Connecting pages into singular articles is easily accomplished, but requires more labor.

2) Where’d all the ads go? Perhaps the reason the reading experience is so darn fun is that you get all of the great Esquire ads without having to flip through 30 pages (or more) of ads. Built for a single sponsor, Axe gets small mentions at the end of about half the articles and a single full screen ad at the end of the publication. Short-term, this isn’t a bad solution: Axe gets 100% of the mindshare of what is – admittedly – a small audience. But more concerning is how this model could scale once readership builds. Indeed, Esquire has lot of high profile advertisers, and – except for Axe – they were left out of this very sexy looking product.