NOTE: Excerpt from the 2008 Gilbane Report

Bentley Systems
Helping to improve the world’s infrastructure Bentley Systems (www.bentley.com) provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC), and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2,000 colleagues around the world, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top 500 Design Firms and major owner-operators and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.

BE Magazine is a quarterly corporate magazine produced by Bentley Systems. It is a horizontal publication that targets small to large architectural, engineering, and construction firms and owner/operators in four main sectors: building, civil, geospatial, and plant. The theme of the publication is “improving the world’s infrastructure” with a sub-theme of “collaborating across the distributed enterprise”. BE Magazine is available to subscribers only in a digital format and is sent via HTML email to 200,000+ of their customers and prospects. They typically print 20,000 copies for distribution at trade shows, seminars, and Bentley-sponsored events. Carol Minton is the Editor in Chief of BE Magazine. It has been her vision to develop a completely digital corporate magazine to serve the Bentley Systems community.

The Challenge
BE Magazine’s goal is to engage an extremely large number of BE users in a format that combines text, images, HTML, animation, audio, and video in a single media-rich environment while featuring a value-add for advertisers by providing individual ad-specific metrics that are superior to general circulation numbers, bingo card responses, and pass-along readership estimates.

Meeting the Challenge
Carol Minton has been working to build the BE (Bentley Empowered) brand by establishing a positive connection with Bentley users, resulting in stronger relationships with users and prospective users. To help her reach her goals, she chose Nxtbook because of its technological flexibility. Their browser-based delivery mechanism does not require a download; interactive links take readers directly to more pertinent content; and the capability to print part or all of each publication is very convenient for readers. Nxtbook provides valuable connect time data and statistics, including page views, time spent on page, hits, click-throughs, etc., which BE then forwards to advertisers.

Results

• Open rates of the magazine’s HTML email blasts usually average close to 50%, which is extremely high for email distribution.

• Digital “shelf life” has translated into higher readership numbers over time as past issues are electronically archived on BE.org.

• No resources on Bentley systems are required to archive BE Magazines since they reside on Nxtbook servers. They have every issue live in the archives.

Lessons Learned

• The challenge is to find the right balance between providing the interactivity to attract readers to BE and keeping them as long as possible, while also providing interactive content and links that direct them elsewhere. They don’t want readers to leave Nxtbook too soon, risking that they will not return. Carol makes a special effort to include video, sidebars with links, etc., whenever possible.

• They keep all editorial content on the short side so that BE is a relatively quick read that stimulates readers to explore topics further.

• Digital editions offer a timeliness advantage that allows the editorial team to update materials right up to — and even after — the mass email blast has been released to the users.

Gilbane Group Conclusions

• It is the interactivity and linking that helps generate the excellent open rates and strong average session data. The willingness to allow readers to venture beyond the primary publication to further explore their interests makes it more likely that the reader will return to the primary publication’s Web site regularly.

• It is very important that the Digital Magazine be well integrated into the rest of the digital strategy. In this case, they do newsletters and printed editions for trade shows, and are planning to add community features such as wikis, blogs, and forums.

• BE is an excellent model for others wishing to develop online corporate publications.

In return for your contact info, the folks at Lyris HQ are offering Email Subject Line: 15 Rules to Make them Right. Sounds like a winner to us.

One Freakonomic looks at Maghound:

I don’t sense that magazine readers are dying to swap subscriptions
very often. Part of the appeal of receiving a magazine is knowing your
way around its format, its style, its idioms. Of course I may be
totally wrong about that; I order new magazine subscriptions all the
time and inevitably hate them after four issues. Also, the model
doesn’t suffer if people don’t swap: they pay the same regardless, and it’s less work for Maghound if they don’t swap.

Several months back, we made reference to the fact that traffic to Nxtbooks via Google is up tremendously. In fact, comparing April, May & June to January, February and March, we see more than a 400% increase in traffic via the big guy.

It’s possible that the rapid growth (which started in April but continues to increase daily) has to do with Google’s news that they’re now able to index text within Flash itself. As we’ve said, Nxtbook content has been indexed for some time via our hybrid index Flash technique. However, if Google is now indexing the Nxtbook itself, the result would be that Google would see the content twice on the page - inside the Nxtbook and within the XML. This double-shot of content seems to be having the desired effect for our publishers and their readers.

The Harvard Business Review takes a look at how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory is holding up online. In a nutshell, it’s perhaps longer (more titles) and flatter (making fewer sales) than originally thought. In fact:

In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the US
(most of them through iTunes) 24% sold only one copy and 91% sold fewer than 100 copies.

The paper suggests that blockbusters continue to rule on online sites (good for the blockbusters and the aggregators) and consumers have more choices (good for the consumers) but neither of these are leading to benefits for the producers of niche content (which is pretty much what a B-to-B publishers is).

It’s this reason that Nxtbook uses the Nxtstand - a newsstand designed to quickly get your niche customers over to your website. We simply don’t think there’s success to be found on aggregation sites. At least - not for our customers.

• Dealernews - April 2008
  Ad-Gen and Preview feature in action. Even if you’re not a subscriber, you can click on the PREVIEW button to get into the publication. Doing so delivers you to Ad-Gen, a lead generation tool that delivers leads directly to the advertiser or publisher.
  (tags: ad-gen preview drm)

At today’s webinar, we asked publishers if they had to pick one reason to have a digital magazine, what would it be? The choices given were: Revenue generation, circulation building, cost savings, brand extension or environmental. The wimpy "multiple" option was not allowed. Here’s how the percentages break out:

50% Cost savings
25% Revenue generation
12.5% Circulation building
12.5% Brand extension
0% Environmental

Where’s Greenpeace when you need them? But seriously… the cool thing about a digital magazine is that by doing any one of the other four options, the environment automatically benefits. In fact, the really cool thing about a digital magazine is that many of our publishers enjoy all five benefits. But when we made publishers choose just one, that’s how the results played out.

PriceWaterhouse recently release a study called The medium is  the message* Outlook for Magazine Publishing in the Digital Age. Well worth the price (free) and it includes a few interesting tidbits. Here’s just two:

* Consumers expect to pay more for printed content than for content distributed electronically, but they are not prepared to pay more than half the sum they would pay for a printed magazine.

* Of all magazine categories, the two where demand in digital content is the smallest are women’s magazines and home and garden magazines.

Now, if I were so inclined I’d reference the picture from the study below and proclaim that e-Paper will be HUGE and the demand for it is DOUBLY HUGE. However, it’s worth noting that the version of e-Paper shown to those taking the survey was full color and magazine-size. In other words, the way people most want to read content is the only one that hasn’t been invented yet. Imagine the scores if they’d offered readers the choice of viewing content on the heads-up display of a flying car!*

*This sarcasm in no way underscores my burning desire for e-Paper to be the biggest thing since real paper.

This industry was created by publishers looking to save money and crow circulation. More specific, the industry was created by publishers seeking to grow circulation overseas. So how do you that? This article from Circulation Management offers several thoughts:

For the preponderance of B-to-Bs that are completely or heavily
advertising-driven, the core question is, of course, whether the
advertising base wants to reach qualified readers in countries outside
the U.S. Whereas decades ago, the answer to that question was not
infrequently “no” or “not really,” global economics, including the
massive buying power represented by emerging Asian nations, have
obviously made international markets extremely attractive or critical
to marketers of most types of business products and services. 

This Thursday, we’re sponsoring an awesome webinar being produced by BtoB Online:

Digital Magazines: Readership and Revenue Growth in the New Era

Speaker for this presentation include Steve Paxhia, one of the authors of the 2008 Gilbane Report on digital magazine readership and Bob Fernekees, Publisher of CRM magazine and a Nxtbook customer for quite some time. You can read about Bob’s success with Nxtbook here, or better yet - join us for the webinar at 2pm (EDT) Thursday.