For $9.99 per month, the Next Issue app is offering subscribers the latest magazines and access to extensive archives, in a service similar to Netflix and Spotify.

The app is a collaboration between a number of publishers including News Corp and Time Inc, and provides digital access to magazines like Vogue, GQ, Elle, Esquire, Nylon, Cosmopolitan, Wired and Men's Health. For an extra $5 users can also get weekly magazines like The New Yorker, TIME Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

The app is currently only available in the US and Canada, but it is an interesting venture, and could offer some new insights into where the magazine-publishing business is going.

The company are cagey about releasing financial data, but Next Issue has said that it has 150,000 paying subscribers, and that it recently raised $50 million (€40 million) in new funding. The money was invested by the private equity firm KKR.

The company brand itself as offering users "a world of excellent journalism and award-winning photography." Interestingly the company weights payments to magazines on the amount of time that users spend reading or viewing their content. Other online publishers have experimented with this system, it values user-engagement over raw 'click counts'. It is intended to value quality content over clickbait.

The model faces an obvious problem, which is convincing users that they need to pay for the service, rather than viewing free content on the magazine's individual websites - especially since a number of its flagship titles do not have paywalls.