iOS 5 Newsstand “Booming” For Magazine Publishers

paidContent reports on some initial indications that Newsstand, a new feature in iOS 5, is helping publishers achieve more sales and subscriptions:

Exact Editions, which says it made about 10 percent of the Newsstand app titles on iTunes Store, says downloads of freemium sample editions jumped by 14x in just a few days, whilst some titles’ actual sales have more than doubled.

Consumer magazine publisher Future says free container apps for its titles were downloaded two million times in three days and reports “consumer spending well in excess of normal monthly revenues”. “Future has sold more digital editions in the past four days through Apple’s Newsstand than in a normal month,” says UK CEO Mark Wood.

By integrating Newsstand directly into the OS, Apple is not only giving publishers an opportunity to showcase their publications out of the box on every iOS device, to every iOS user interested in reading magazines and newspapers, they’re also giving publishers the tools to make reading and downloading as frictionless as possible. As we detailed in our overview, Newsstand lets you easily subscribe and forget to manually download new content when it’s published. iOS does it for you.

So while geeks may despise the new default icon on the Home screen and the fact that it’s a feature they may never use, the new integrated system – as opposed to single app downloads – makes for a better experience that will encourage readers to subscribe more, manage less, and ultimately read more. I expect Newsstand adoption to grow exponentially in the next months. Looking back, it’s clear iTunes app subscriptions were meant for Newsstand.