How Engaging is a Buffet?

I admit it: I’ve been to one or 10 buffets in my lifetime. Most were fine. Some were  good. None, however, were memorable and none provided me with what I’d call an "engaging experience."

Over at FOLIO, Tony Silber recounts an interesting exchange where two-thirds of print executive say they consume more media online than they do print. When I hear the word "consumption," I think of buffets.

Here’s the thing: If asked that question, I’d likely answer the same way. But is that really the question that we should be asking? In a given day, I’ll visit dozens of websites and scan hundreds of feeds. I will — however — notice  few online ads and click even less. When I look at a magazine, though, I notice the vast majority of the ads and read well more than half. In short, I’m engaging with the content.

As we’ve said before, reader habits in a digital magazine are marketedly different than they are in the traditional online sense. Click-through rates, in particular, are crazy higher. People have been habitualized to read magazine advertisements. Quite quickly, though, we’ve been habitualized to ignore traditional online ads.

If you’re Google — and you’re serving up the world’s biggest buffet of content — you can get away with mass consumption low margin activity. But most of us in the niche trade world aren’t in the buffet business. Instead, our task is to provide a memorable experience for our customers. An engaging one, rather than one based on "consumption." For those publishers, the digital magazine provides just that experience at an expense far lower than print.