links for 2009-06-30

• Northumbria University [Cover1]
  Sample for University Brochure in 3.0
  (tags: education)
• Exceptional Parent – June 2009 – Page BB1

Find Your (Digital) Niche…

We’re pleased to be a sponsor of a new and exciting show coming this Fall: The Niche Digital Conference, to be held in Minneapolis from September 21-22. Niche Poobah Carl Landau writes on his website:

Ready or not, here we come! All magazine publishers are grappling with digital publishing. So how do you integrate your print and digital components? Or possible go "digital only"? And most importantly, how do you build a digital strategy with small budget resources, but maximum profit potential? You can do all this and more at the new Niche Digital Conference! 

For fun magazine publishing events, they don’t come more special than Carl’s Niche programs. If you can work it in, work it in!

But Seriously…

Last week, one of our competitors sent an e-mail to a lot of you. (This is bound to happen when you’re not afraid to promote your customers’ content.) The e-mail said (in part):

 

 

So Long Nxtbook. I’m Getting Serious With (insert classy competitor name here)

Sometimes you just grow out of a relationship because you may not be getting everything you need. We understand.

The Benefits of (working with said competitor) are endless:

Double audience readership (Compared to what??? Half audience readership???)
Track advertising and reader behavior (How very 2003)
Integrate keywords for better Google search (Cute… we had this four years ago. )
Enrich and keep sticky with multimedia content (Is it me, or does this just sound gross?)
Reduce costs of print and mailing by up to 95% (Insert baldness cure claims here)

First up, whoever is in charge of marketing for these guys should be fired. Or worse. Consider the strategy:

1. Even though the ocean of digital edition prospects is a million miles deep and a million miles wide, let’s poach them from a competitor’s website.
2. After we poach them, let’s make it obvious that we poached them in our e-mail. They’ll think we’re cool! (Judging by what we heard, most of them thought you were creepy.)
3. In the e-mail, let’s mention a bunch of features that they have and pepper it with unprovable statistics.

Are you kidding me? The only thing that was missing was a free order of steak knives if you act now.

When shared with a top ranking industry insider, he wrote, "No classiness in this type of advertising. On the other hand, you guys exemplify class… so it positions you well in an odd way." So there’s that.

All of that being said, aside from the intrusion to our customers, the only thing that stung was the idea that you and we aren’t serious about this industry.

We’ve written of the many publishers who carefully have mapped out a strategy to grow international readership through their digital magazines. We’ve promoted webinars for those publishers who’ve found six figure revenue streams. And we’ve helped others launch their first forays into the mobile space with Nxtbook Liberty. You’ve gotten serious results, and we’ve provided serious support.

Along the way, we’ve built an entire layer within our organization of Account Managers, whose only mission is to help you be more successful. We added Flash animators and video experts – specialists who exist for the sole purpose of pushing the technology as far as it will go. And along the way, we’ve added a small army of developers, whose job it is to push the boundaries of the product even further. In fact, as a full-service provider, our entire survival is based on delivering serious results.

At the end of the day, we share many traits with our customers. Our mutual dedication to pushing the digital edition envelope further is just one of them.

Rob Yoegel Thinks You Type Slow on Your BlackBerry… and Then Thinks Better of It.

Last Friday, Publishing Executive’s Rob Yoegel published a rather one-sided, non-substantive argument against digital editions. The article has been substantially changed since then. Some tidbits of the original:

Yoegel led off the article complaining than an audience development person wanted to promote a digital edition more prominently because a competitor was doing so. At this point, it was curious to see where the writer was going. He could’ve written a piece about how a competitor’s strategy should or should not dictate our own. Alternatively, he could’ve pointed out that digital editions are now often discussed in strategy sessions. Instead, he went down the least obvious road of all, and turned the essay into how people who support digital editions just don’t get it.

Yoegel went on to speculate that those who supported digital editions may be the same people who struggle to type five words a minute on their BlackBerry (because, you know, manual dexterity and digital strategy are entirely intertwined).

It’s hard to say what caused Yoegel to republish the piece: a sudden realization that he’d insulted every publisher with a digital edition or the fact that the essay was devoid of anything resembling research. (There was no mention of any of the great research and case studies which have been published by many sources in the past few years, including Yoegel’s own publication.)

At any rate, the piece has been replaced with what we’re supposed to think Yoegel meant to say: that publishers should think about mobile "rather than being enamored with digital editions" (because, you know, it’s hard to think about two things when you’re banging out those five words per minute). His reasons?

1. The New York Times is considering charging readers for accessing mobile content. In the original version of Yoegel’s story, he wrote that digital editions are little more than desperate measures for publishers trying to stay afloat. As such, this would be a great place to insert an ironic pause.

2. Yoegel reads digital magazine and newspaper content on his Blackberry Storm during his one hour commute every day. He doesn’t say if he clicks on any of the ads, mind you. And perhaps we’re supposed to know that once he’s at work he’s not on a computer, either. Because if he were, then he might have to admit that for eight hours he’s on he same device that people are using to read millions of digital magazines per month while clicking through at a dramatically higher rate than websites, while for two hours he’s staring at a three inch screen with little room for sponsorship images.

Keep in mind, we’re actually bullish about mobile. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have Nxtbook Liberty. That being said, digital editions and mobile solutions aren’t mutually exclusive. Heck, we use the PDF to make Nxtbook Liberty, even though the final format is the text pages that Yoegel seems to think represent the promised land. And also, if guys like Yoegel would actually use their mobile devices as much as they claim to, they could find plenty of research about revenue generation and audience growth in digital magazines. Personally, I’d recommend they start in the archives of the publications they write for. And finally, we’ve seen our publishers use their BlackBerries, and y’all are WAY faster than five words per minute.

links for 2009-06-26

• Nurse Week/ Spectrum – July 2009 – Page Cover1
  Section tabs are embedded into the page
  (tags: tabs-on-page)

Nxtbook of the Week…

We like the new Chief Marketer! Magazine from Penton, especially because it’s rocking the Nxtbook 3.0. This book is full of great content. That being said, this article asks "What’s a Fan Worth?" is irrelevant to us. You’re all simply priceless!

Thank You!

Thanks to all who attended our special Nxtbook 3.0 webinar today. Attendance was awesome, the questions rocked and you all sounded as excited as we are!

A few housekeeping tips:

1. The webinar and slides are going through the archive process now. When complete, we’ll send you the link if you registered.

2. We mentioned the web page where you can view the FAQ’s about 3.0 and download the new animation specs. Do that here.

3. Forgot to register/attend? Contact your Account Manager today to get the 3.0 details!

Because You Can’t Ever Have Enough Research…

We’ve been outed as a sponsor to an upcoming study on digital magazines that know how to make money. To tell your story in what we are hoping will be somewhere between an enlightening and ground-breaking story, tell us or Josh Gordon.

Somebody’s Page Counts Aren’t Falling…

Napier has a piece of research available that suggests that page counts aren’t down as far as we might thing (despite the fact that reports from audited titles seem to say the opposite). Truth is, we’ve wondered similar things at Nxtbook.

Currently, the average Nxtbook is 51 pages and that’s really only down a few pages from where we were a year ago (54.7). Could it be that publishers with digital editions simply represent a group that’s more innovative or more successful? It’s hard to say if a digital magazine helps your page count or if a publisher that can hold page count is more likely to have a digital magazine, but we definitely haven’t seen the fall-off that’s reported elsewhere.

The BPA “Gets” Digital Magazines

The BPA’s recent decision to allow publishers to include digital magazines as non-requested circ. lead to a good article over at PubExec. This particular quote shows the BPA understands the benefits of digital magazines:

I believe publishers approach electronic (digital) editions with a two-pronged approach. First, electronic editions are a far more cost-effective means of distributing a publication — especially to international subscribers. Second, publishers are recognizing a shift in subscribers’ — and advertisers’ — preferences from print to interactive platforms. For some subscribers, electronic versions can represent a better way to consume information.

 

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