Sports Illustrated joins Time magazine today as the first Time Inc. titles to have iPad applications.
Both apps are priced at $4.99, to compete with Wired. But Wired is dropping the price of its app to $3.99 for customers who purchased the first issue. Neither publisher has decided on subscription pricing for the iPad yet.
“We’ll be using a variety of marketing approaches and prices to stimulate more volume for the second issue. We’ll see how it goes and we’ll learn from there,” Condé Nast group president Bob Sauerberg told PaidContent earlier this week after the company announced its plans to revive Gourmet as an iPad app.
The Sports Illustrated app departs from Wired by not bundling the videos included with the issue. That means you have to be connected to the internet when you watch the app’s videos, but it also means the issue doesn’t take an eternity to download.
The Sports Illustrated app has advertisements from seven companies. Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell told The Times that a recent sales call in Chicago to pitch the app was the “best ad sales call that I’ve ever been on.”
Sports Illustrated released a demo of the application at the end of last year.