Where 50% of Your Readers Come From…

Three years ago, the vast majority of digital magazine readers came from e-mail – that cheaper than print but costlier than free solution that – let’s face it – has seen far better days. Now, between 40 and 60% of all Nxtbooks (depending on the month) are opened because somebody posted the content on a blog or forum. Here are three examples, just from this week:

An article about Baltimore bars posted on the Baltimore Sun’s night-time blog. 

An article from Quill Magazine, posted on an educator’s blog. 

A publisher’s press release, talking about the why’s and how’s of their new digital magazine. 

From the Twitter-ati…

Here’s an example of 1 Tweet pulling in readers to Nxtbook content. This particular one is quite timely, though, as it’s for a Shaklee catalog. The Shaklee network is comprised of thousands of independent distributors around the world, many of whom wanted to send their product catalog out via e-mail. The challenge, however, was how to ensure click-throughs from the Nxtbook to the Shaklee e-commerce site resulted in the proper distributor getting credit for the sale.

How’d we do it? Tune in to Shaklee’s John Cortez’s webinar presentation on Thursday to find out!

Stack ‘Em Up

Mike Turro points us to a new and innovative service called STACK that bundles magazines and mails them to us all at once. Primarily in the UK now (though they do have international pricing), STACK’s a clever approach to get past some distribution expenses. 

Fundamentally, I love this idea – all of my magazines coming at once? Very cool, particularly for titles that I can’t readily get my hands on in the US.

So Much for Online Journalism Being Full of…

The Pulitzer Prize Board has announced it will now accept submissions from online-only news outlets for the first time in its history.

Submissions are required to be text-based and come from online- only publications from the United Sates. The submissions should come from online news organizations that publish at least weekly. Entries comprised of entirely online content can be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

Google Book Search – Now For Magazines

Fresh off a settlement with the book industry, Google is now scanning and uploading magazine content. Devoid of auditing, live links, rich media and anything involving reader engagement, it nevertheless serves as yet another way for publishers to get their content out there.

Unlike true digital magazines, which serve as proactive products sending out a publishers’ best look to interested readers, Google Book results exist for the person searching for content, regardless of form and function. In this manner, it will compete with a publisher’s website for user attention. As advertising links aren’t live, you can also expect advertisers to be less than interested.

Other free – or close to free – services might feel the heat from this solution, as it offers limited product for zero cost. If I had a magazine today, I’d give it serious consideration for legacy archives, but would stop well before I’d consider it to be a compelling solution for current content.

links for 2008-12-09

• Credit Union Times – December 10, 2008 – Page BB1
  Great example of an animated logo on the toolbar and an animated bellyband.
  (tags: Toolbar-sponsor bellyband-flash)
• Incentive – December 2008 – Page 38
  Example of an ad promoting the digital edition
  (tags: digital-edition-ad)
• Nolitours – Go South from Montreal, Quebec or Ottawa
  Give your customers the ability to create their own brochures.
  (tags: mybrochure)

links for 2008-12-08

• Printed Circuit Design & Fab – December 2008 – Page Cover1
  Great example of what a print ad can't do.
  (tags: sponsorship)

Does the Digital Magazine Industry Need an Association?

Josh Gordon thinks so. In a recent article, he said that our industry needs its own trade advocacy group, similar to MPA or the CAB. It’s a fair question, but the solution may be less simple than he’s suggesting.

First off, he starts by saying One publisher told me, ‘We tried doing a digital magazine, but couldn’t sell any additional ad space. The click throughs were abysmal and after a few issues we stopped doing it.” Then in the very next line says that digital magazines are a distribution success story.

These two lines are a direct contradiction of each other. Click-through rates for digital magazines are always dramatically higher than websites, so a publisher complaining about click-throughs is – in reality – complaining about readership. In fact, digital magazines are a distribution success story, but not in every case for every publisher. From our perspective, if readership is grown, click throughs will always take care of themselves.

Gordon next asks for better data in how readers navigate digital magazines, though perhaps Gordon is giving too much credit to many vendors in the space. It’s a fair question and one that’s easily answered for Nxtbook Media customers. However, we learned last year that Nxtbook provided gobs of data for the Gilbane Study that had to be ignored simply because not enough vendors were able to compile similar information. We provided click-through rates, rich media usage, and engagement time for the study, but not enough vendors were willing – or able – to provide the Gilbane group with this information.

Such a data discrepancy is a huge factor in having the "association" Gordon is calling for. Simply put, few companies compile data in the same way and making their technology do so may be something they are unable or unwilling to do.

Gordon goes on to say: Please, no more surveys documenting the rapid growth of digital magazines and how happy the readers are with them. This measures only the success of digital magazines as a distribution medium. If this is all we get, media buyers will continue to be unimpressed.

This paragraph made me smile as we agree with it 100%. Asking digital magazine readers what they think about digital magazines is like asking someone with an iPod how they feel about iTunes. Moreover, statistics that ask digital magazine readers how long they read the magazine (instead of simply stating what the tracking metrics show) further serve to make our industry sound less sophisticated. Like subscriber data, they ignore the very value implicit in a digital offering: namely, the ability to quantify success.

Ironic, isn’t it? I started this essay by suggesting that Gordon doesn’t quite understand the digital magazine industry. But then again, isn’t that exactly what he’s saying? That ad buyers (and, heck, ad reps) need to know how best to position and market this product? In the end, I think Gordon’s right, but wonder how many other digital magazine vendors are willing to embrace the necessity and value of true data in place of smoke and mirrors and feel-good studies?

Knowing that a healthy number of vendors read our blog, I’ll take up Gordon on his "call to arms" and invite any vendors that agree with this idea to write me direct at mgrimm [AT] nxtbookmedia.com.

 

Headlines That Make You Go “Click”

The only thing perhaps more negative than a lot of the news from those covering the magazine industry of late is my own complaining about it. So it was like a breath of fresh air to get an e-newsletter (from Min, of which we have mostly favorable things to say) which read: Top 5 Ways To Improve Online Sales.

Written by Daniel Ambrose, the article has good solid tips, from selling webinar sponsorships to finding a single sponsor for your digital magazine. (Hey, where did we hear that before?) With my e-mail box filling up with layoff and cutback doom and gloom, this was a nice surprise.

Single Sponsor Magazines…

There’s a good article about a single-sponsor magazine over at FOLIO. However, when the sponsor is Ford, BtoB publishers might wonder how relevant the news is to them.

However, we’ve been fortunate to be involved with several single sponsor digital-only magazines in the BtoB space. Launched for a fraction of the cost of print and delivering knock-out click-through rates, these projects are a powerful tool for the BtoB publisher. Check out Project Lighting (sponsored by Digi-key) or Project Analog (sponsored by Microchip).

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