Battle of the Stands…

All of those people trying to tell the differences between digital publishers will finally get a little help, as three of us now have  different philosophies on the digital newsstand. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a summary. (And because we’re one of the vendors of course we’re bound to be a little biased. Still, it doesn’t mean we’re wrong. )

First up, we have Zinio – the original digital newsstand.

What it is: Zinio’s business model is predicated on selling digital subscriptions because most of their revenue comes from getting a cut of the subscription and delivering the digital copy to readers.

What publishers like about it: Because this is how Zinio makes money doing this, they try hard, with a relatively aggressive banner advertising campaign.

What’s not to like? There’s much to pick on – like how the digital edition doesn’t seem to be for sale on the publishers’ Web sites (where I’d expect the average consumer to look first), or how your competitors’ magazines are right beside yours’ on the newsstand, (or for that matter that they sent me a promotional e-mail asking me to buy Playboy for Father’s Day?) 

The biggest criticism is this: It hasn’t worked so well. According to this year’s Gilbane report, adoption of digital editions for consumer pubs is a fraction of what it is for B2B pubs. Zinio’s business model is pure long-tail, which works well for Zinio, but not necessarily for the individual publishers.

Then there’s Texterity’s Coverleaf program.  From the release: Coverleaf.com is designed to support the magazine industry by offering digital editions as a true companion to their print counterparts. In exchange for their email address, consumers can access the digital version of their paid print magazine. This will substantially improve the economics for consumer publishers by increasing the number of subscriber email addresses on file, lowering their costs to retain subscribers, and increasing engagement with advertisers. 

In a nutshell, the consumer who pays for a print sub. decides that something is missing from their life and hands over their e-mail address in exchange for a free digital companion subscription. The publishers gets the e-mail address (another way to flog people for renewals (far cheaper than reminder mailings) and the reader benefits from the companion digital product. Everybody wins.

It’s not an awful idea, other than the fact that it won’t work. Why not? If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that there are a lot of happy print readers and there are a lot of happy digital readers. There is a small group who do both, but they’re small, and, I believe,  likely to stay so. Add to the fact that you’re reaching out to someone who’s already voluntarily said they’re happy with print, and the recipe for added digital subs. It doesn’t sound so promising.

Strangely, while publishers will be giving their content away, Texterity will be charging them $2,500 and 65 cents per subscriber for the privilege of doing so.

But my biggest problem with Coverleaf – and Zinio – that our own Nxtstand was specifically built to combat is this: Both Zinio and Coverleaf are designed to give the consumer a brand experience apart from the publishers’ own website. That’s right — these newsstands are designed to live someplace where your Web site is not.

Texterity even says, "Future plans for coverleaf.com include expanded folder sharing, content category blogs and social networking options." In other words, your own content is going to be competing for you for web traffic. Does that make a lot of sense?

We don’t think so, and that’s why we launched the Nxtstand. It’s  simple. People can view your magazine (subject to the protection you’ve established) and then — once they want to know how to subscribe, they go to YOUR subscription page on YOUR Web site. We hope they subscribe, of course, but we want them to have a brand experience with YOU. We want them to see YOUR Web site. We want them to subscribe to print or digital or both — whatever you think makes sense at whatever pricing strategy rings true for your brand.

Incidentally, the Nxtstand is just our first idea in a planned extensive distribution roll-out over the next several months, but it philosophically shows what our company is thinking…. if we drive people to you, you succeed and if you succeed — we ‘ll be just fine.

POD Magazines?!

Michael Turro points out something very very cool – the private beta launch of MagCloud, a print-on-demand magazine service.

Because Michael’s more visionary than me, I have about a bajillion questions boring questions I’d want answered – the three most important being: "Can this scale (for everyone involved)?""Can it be affordable (ditto)?" and "What about the fact that according to the MPA only 10% of magazines are sold online right now?"…. but you know what? Let’s not ask hard questions today, because it is one of the wicked coolest ideas we’ve seen. Go MagCloud!

Social Media Optimization…

Just when you’ve figured out SEO, now you need to get a grip on SMO. No problem – Eric Shanfelt has got you covered:

The goal of SMO is to make it as easy as possible for others to link to
your content and thus get as many inbound links to your site as
possible. This in turn leads to more traffic to your web site and more
traffic equals more revenue opportunity.

 

Businesses That Are Dead

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader
right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy
environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this
quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast
television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales
season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its
last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

Stanly Bing just cracks us up.
 

Ten Things About the Nxtbook

I was talking to a co-worker and mentioned something about Nxtbook that she didn’t know. Then she mentioned something that I didn’t know. So we pooled together our list of Top 10 Things About the Nxtbook You Might Not Know. Here it is:

1) Though most people choose Nxtbook to save on costs, smart publishers use it to make money. At last count, 34% of our magazine publishers were selling into the Nxtbook.

2) One year ago, 85% of all Nxtbook traffic came via e-mails. As publishers embrace social media and widgets, though, the number is now closer to 55%.

3) Traffic to Nxtbooks is up 63% over last year.

4) Search engine traffic to Nxtbooks has increased 955% over last year.

5) Forum traffic to Nxtbooks has increased 244% over last year.

6) We have a new Digital Revenue Generation guide which publishers can customize for their own brand.

7) The customized tool bar we use for Fidelity’s custom publication is pretty.

We have hundreds of magazines on our new digital magazine newsstand.

9) It’s been nearly a year since we’ve had a month with less than 1 million readers.

10) Click-through rates for the Nxtbook are 4 to 10 times greater than what our publishers see on their websites.

 

Introducing the Nxtstand…

Here in Nxtbook land, we’ve struggled with digital magazine newsstands… After all, if somebody is interested in your content, wouldn’t you rather have them on your website subscribing to your magazine than signing up for a subscription on a site that’s going to try and sell them your competitors’ magazine? Yeah – that’s what we thought, too.

So we’ve launched the Nxtstand – our own digital magazine newsstand with some subtle but key differences:

1) All of the subscription links point to our publishers’ subscribe pages. YOU get the subscriptions. YOU get the data. YOU get the web traffic.

2) Because we don’t collect the data, we won’t use it to tell subs to your competitors.

3) It’s all free – FREE to be listed. FREE for every subscriber you get.

Want to see the same blog post in YouTube form? Click the video.

 

Winning on the Web…

Lots of good advice for magazine publishers this week. First up, don’t miss Scott Karp’s post, "What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About the Web." It’s a great first-person account of ways one magazine frustrates its readers. Scott raises some important questions.

If you’re looking for simpler fixes, bounce on over to 8 Simple Rules for Succeeding On the Web, which includes highlights from Jon Friedman’s presentation to city and regional magazine publishers. More great tips – all of which are destined to grow readership.

 

links for 2008-06-06

• Basic Instruments – May/June 2008 – Page 6
  Limited space on a page to place a video? Just click on “Click Here View Demo”
  (tags: video)

What 1 Percent of Your Readers Will Do…

We’ve said it before, but let’s face it — it’s nice to hear when people smarter than ourselves say it, too. In this post, Don Dodge explains what social media does for you and your content:

What is the social network 1 percent rule? Generally in a group of 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or adding to it) and the other 89 will just view it. But, everyone benefits from the activities of the whole group.

Bradley Horowitz,  an old friend from my AltaVista days, and one of the smartest guys I know uses this simple illustration to convey the idea.

 

Kindle-ing

Is the Kindle relevant at all? If so, is it relevant for what other products it will lead to? It’s a great question, one that Rex looks at in detail. Rex’s post leads us down the rabbit-hole to Michael’s great thoughts, originally written in response to a Crovitz article which mentioned – in part – a book by Jeff Gomez, entitled, "Print is Dead." Though all had great insights, the one which rang truest to me was Gomez:

    "It’s not about the page versus the screen in a technological grudge match. It’s about the screen doing a dozen things the page can’t do." Digitized words should count for more. "What’s going to be transformed isn’t just the reading of one book, but the ability to read a passage from practically any book that exists, at any time that you want to, as well as the ability to click on hyperlinks, experience multimedia, and add notes and share passages with others."

Why I love this is because the nay-sayers re: eBooks and digital magazines all seem to think we’re in a zero sum game – a "grudge match," if you will, but we don’t see it that way. In today’s world, you can be all of these things affordably – and let the reader choose which format works for them. If you don’t want to pay the premium price for a hardcover, don’t. If you can’t cuddle up to a pixelated screen, why try? Publish once. Syndicate many times and satisfy everyone.

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