The Wall Street Journal is profiling all the magazines that are doing the iPad thing:

Time magazine has signed up Unilever, Toyota Motor , Fidelity Investments and at least three others for marketing agreements priced at about $200,000 apiece for a single ad spot in each of the first eight issues of the magazine’s iPad edition, according to people familiar with the matter.

Magazines largely are planning downloadable iPad applications that are near-replicas of the stories in the print versions, but they are demonstrating the new-media bells and whistles for advertisers: add-ons like videos, social-networking tools and navigation that take advantage of the large screen, touch technology and Internet connections of the tablet computer.

This was to be expected – and to a certain extent this sector move may drive adoption of the iPad. More than likely, though, it’ll be a non-profitable move unless the magazines themselves subsidize the cost of the device in the subscription cost (something that, as I’ve discussed previously, still leaves a healthy profit margin, particularly if done with bulk pricing).

The bottom line is that people love magazines, but not enough to buy them in the numbers they used to, people love tablet PCs, but not in enough numbers to make them mainstream computing devices, and people love looking at souped up magazines on computer screens, but haven’t yet flocked to versions customized for any one particular platform.

The elements of the winning combination are all there, but as with anything relating to consumer electronics, in the end it all comes down to price.