Analysts Offer Ringing Endorsement of Digital Editions!
September 15, 2007 by Marcus Grimm
"Over the next 15 years, the digital magazine will grow to become 30% of the magazine market. Within 25 years they will represent more than 75% of the market for periodicals."
So sayeth David Renard, Nick Hampshire and Bo Sacks in their piece, "The Definition of a Print & Digital Magazine."
The trio have opened up a consulting service to help publishers figure out what the future is and obviously we’re glad to see they feel good about digital magazines. We feel very good that we’re listed as one of the companies pushing the industry, too.
The trio also list what they consider to be integral parts of all magazines, the fact that they are: Metered, Edited, Designed, Date-Stamped, Permanent and Periodic.
There are certainly some issues in the essay to debate – Michael Turro as always offers thoughtful criticism about some of the points – but it’s great to see so much thoughts from so many respected sources and – more than anything – we think this essay serves as one of the finest starting points to define our little industry that we’ve read.
As far as the 30% number goes, it’s probably as good a place to throw a dart as any… While we have a handfull of very successful digital-only pubs with several thousand subscribers, there is certainly a sweet spot around 20-25%. Magazines that convert that percentage from print to digital usually save more in print and distribution than it costs to create the digital edition and have enough critical mass to attract sponsorship revenue to move the digital magazine from a cost saver to an actual revenue generator.
I believe digital editions need to have a larger screen than can be viewed on even a screen as large as an iPhone. I think seven inches is the sweet spot for magazines. So if a dedicated epaper or eink device is to succeed, magazine groups would be smart to subsidize (like cell phone providers do) the purchase of the $300-$700 electronic readers. One newspaper in France is doing just that (see my blog http://www.CustomPublishingNews.com for details). A lot of magazines would love to lock in subscribers for a two year contract. Any other two year subscriptions to magazines from the same family could be added at reduced cost to the subscriber but virtually no cost to the magazine group. I don’t think the readers are ready for the mass audience yet. If the readers drop in price by about half and add color, that could be a deal changer. The public is intererested in the technology and a fleet-footed first mover could get a real advantage.
Don Lipper
http://www.LipperCustomPublishing
http://www.CustomPublishingNews.com
Don,
Thanks for your comment – I think you hit on some great points. We tend to agree — viewing a magazine in standard format isn’t likely to be a rewarding experience on a miniature device. That’s why we focus more energy on parsing content into text streams (rss, etc.) that can more easily be consumed on such devices.
Along those same lines, we’d love to see a well priced color reader in a larger format, but think it only has a great chance to succeed without a lot of proprietary locks on it. The Nxtbook is produced in Flash, which 97% of computers have and produces RSS feeds, which can be read virtually anywhere…. if a Nxtbook can’t be read on a given device, we maintain it’s likely that the product won’t have mass consumption.
M