April 23, 2012
An overview of iMaverick
iMaverick is Africa's first, and the world’s third tablet-only interactive daily newspaper. A digital-only publisher, iMaverick is the online sister publication of South Africa’s leading newspaper, The Daily Maverick. It contains all the content of a newspaper, with a more magazine-like appearance, with full colour pages utilising multimedia and the full visual capabilities of a tablet. Containing the latest overnight news on South African and global politics, sports, art and lifestyle, iMaverick is Africa’s most popular tablet-only interactive newspaper.
The Challenge
As digital-only publishers iMaverick needed a strategy for tablets that offered more than simply an online app. It needed to take advantage of the iPad's capabilities and they believed that a magazine styled publication would be the best solution for utilising a tablet’s full capabilities.
The Solution
iMaverick looked at various local and international providers of mobile solutions, and Snapplify was by far the best option. The iMaverick team was introduced to Snapplify at a Tech4Africa conference, and after one short demonstration, Snapplify proved they had the skill set, knowledge and enthusiasm that iMaverick needed. iMaverick’s vision of delivering a high quality daily magazine with digital elements was made possible by the Snapplify platform. It allowed the newspaper to use optimized PDF's to keep file sizes small, meaning editions could be downloaded in under minute, and easy navigation made the decision to move Snapplify a no-brainer.
The Outcome
iMaverick has been hugely popular since launching in June 2011, having had thousands of paying subscribers sign up. Moving forward, it estimates that it will see in excess of 45,000 new subscribers by the end of April 2012, and for such a high volume of download, Snapplify ticks all the boxes for this publisher. As a daily publication, iMaverick requires a reliable and user friendly interface to upload each edition and Snapplify has ensured that this is catered to through the development team’s extensive knowledge of digital publishing. From a reader's perspective, iMaverick has proven to be extremely stable and easy to use, with new updates improving the user experience all the time. This can be demonstrated through download numbers continually increasing.
Styli Charalambous, CEO at The Daily Maverick comments, “The steps to transform iMaverick into a content rich digital publication are extremely simple. There is no conversion process needed at all, and once the PDF file of iMaverick has been compiled and is ready for distribution, it simply gets uploaded to the CMS and is ready for reading in the app.”
The Feedback
Charalambous couldn’t be happier with the results since partnering with Snapplify. He comments, “We've been working closely with the Snapplify team, and it’s encouraging to see their continuous work on improving the platform. Each new update comes with awesome new features and we're delighted with Snapplify’s on-going investment in developing the platform to a world-class standard. Feedback from our readers has been that since switching to Snapplify the experience is worlds apart from our other platforms we evaluated. We're extremely grateful to have found Snapplify, a platform that is consummate with the quality of our publication.”
He continues, “As Africa's first publisher of a daily iPad-only newspaper, we needed a platform that would be easy to use, affordable and above all, match the high quality of our publication. After a global search for an affordable and feature-rich platform, we chose Snapplify as the team to customise the platform to our unique requirements.”