by Herman Manson (@marklives) Africa’s first tablet magazine, iMaverick, has ceased operation. The title, from the publishers of the Daily Maverick, stopped publishing at the end of January 2014.
“Whilst reader interest and growth [were] there, advertisers just weren’t taking to the medium,” says publisher Styli Charalambous. “And being such a small team, we decided to focus our energies on web and mobile.”
“It may have been a different story if we had existing print advertisers that we could convert, but trying to eke out budgets from digital spenders was a task too big for a team this size,” says Charalambous. “In other words, we’re picking our battles.”
Stretched the small team
Charalambous says a manual production process stretched the small team. By ending publication, energy can be reverted to Daily Maverick, which just broke through the 400 000 unique users mark.
iMaverick launched in mid 2011 as a daily, then morphed into a weekly one year later. At the time that it went weekly, subscriptions had climbed to 7800. When it closed down at the start of 2014, it had only grown to around 8000.
No formal retrenchments have taken place but some freelance relationships have been ended. The Daily Maverick will launch a new-look website later in the year and is focusing on mobile and events to make up for lost revenue.
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