The Nxt Big Thing From Nxtbook Media

A few weeks ago, we told you a little bit about NxtSync, our paid keyword tool that can be used right on your website. Here’s a bit more info. churned out by the copywriter on this exciting new tool:

NxtSync delivers listings and advertisements throughout the publisher’s website when activated by search and content. To activate these listings or advertisements, your customer can purchase specific keywords/categories directly from you. This greatly increases the ad relevance to prospects and produces high quality leads for advertisers while generating new revenue for publishers.

You sell the keywords to your customers and keep the revenue. Existing revenue from online inventory will not be affected by NxtSync contextual listings. NxtSync automatically adjusts to your web page without affecting pre-sold online impressions.

Maintenance is Free!

We manage and maintain NxtSync. Simply place a registration link and some code on your website and NxtSync does the rest. NxtSync provides the registration, billing and delivery of the contextual ad or directory listings related to categories and keywords purchased by your customers.

By utilizing keywords and content activation, NxtSync is the most effective contextual advertising product bringing advertisers visibility while prospects are actively thinking about their products and services.

The NxtSync solution offers a greater number of revenue opportunities while offering advertisers better ROI and readers more functionality.

So, that’s that about NxtSync. To see it in action, be sure to join us for a special clients-only webinar on December 17th. Click here to register.

If This Blog Had an Editor and It Wasn’t Me, I’d Fire Him…

So I just discovered a few pieces of news that – quite frankly – should’ve been front and center several weeks ago when they first came out. First up is a comment from long-time Nxtbook customer, Saul Molina. Saul left this comment on the blog a few weeks back and WordPress thought it was spam. The reality, however, is that it was wonderful, so I’m reprinting it here, too:

Just want to say thank you for all your help, advice, support and patience with our latest issue (November 09 issue). We finally got our first sponsor for the digital edition. With out all your advice and support it would have never been possible.

Andrea, Mallory and the rest of the team that I do not know but worked on it. Thank you. You guys rock!

Great video!

Thanks.

Saul Molina
Circulation Director
American Cinematographer

Like I said, classy guy, that Saul.

Moving on, I had to read on another blog about the digital Azbee awards, which were given nearly a month ago. Did you know that Nxtbook customers took home the Gold & Bronze award in the digital magazine category? To quote Jack Nicholson, Meat Loaf, et. al, "Two out of three ain’t bad."

It’s not all great news, however, as the Gold prize winner – Housing Giants – was a recent victim of the economy. Fortunately, however, Global Plant Engineering is alive and well.

Thanks, too, to Peter Houston – both for starting The Flipping Pages Blog and for pointing out the Nxtbook award winners. I recommend you keep reading his blog as it appears I’m letting a few gems slip through the cracks!

 

Technically Speaking 3rd Place is the Second Loser

True story: Somewhere there’s a 1988-1989 Solanco High School yearbook. In the part of the book where sports are covered, there are quotes from seniors on the various sports teams. Chances are you’ve never seen the page about cross-country (probably buried just before the Chess team and somewhere after the tennis squad) where I’m saying something to the effect of, "I think it says a lot about your team if you finished 17-4 and are disappointed. And we are." 

I was reminded of that quote last night as a table of Nxtbookers attended the Best Places to Work dinner in Harrisburg. Keep in mind, there are reportedly more than 16,000 businesses in the state, so even an invitation to the dinner meant that we had cracked the top 50. Just by being in the room, we’d already landed well into the top 1% of happiest places to work in the state. But still, we won this thing last year and unless you’re talking about episodes of Law & Order, repeating anything is rarely easy. In addition, when you win something, well it’s true, there’s only one place to go…

In the end, we came in #3. Or to put it another way, workers for approximately 15,997 businesses in PA woke up this morning and were less excited to come to work than the average Nxtbooker. I don’t blame them. I’d be less excited if I were them, too.

But the truth of the matter is that while we were inevitably disappointed to come in #3, one beer later we were already thinking about what we could do to get back to #1, and we fully intend to. Because one of the greatest magic tricks the owners of Nxtbook have figured out is this: if your employees want to come to work, they work harder to preserve and grow the company, its products and its customers. YOU are the fuel that enables us to keep doing what we love to do. Because of this, we work harder every day to make you number one, so that we can hopefully return to that position ourselves.

So am I disappointed about coming in #3? A little. But pride and disappointment can easily fit in the same boat and – nurtured properly – often give way to resolve, dedication and, inevitably, victory.

E-Reader, Schmee-Reader

If you think print is dead, you obviously haven’t seen this latest ad for the Sun.

 

 

Catching AIR

The recommended off-line version of the Nxtbook is built with Adobe AIR. Though it’s the slickest performing offline book we’ve ever had (or that the industry’s ever seen), a few customers have been a little slow to embrace it. "Too new. Too different. Too…Too…Too."

And yet there’s word on the street that the much awaited iTablet from Apple may very well be running…. Adobe AIR. If true, this means that all Nxtbook customers will have to do to have their content on what some are considering to be the digital Moses for magazine publishers is…. well, nothing. Your content might show up on that device right out of the box.

More Good Looking Nxtbookers….

In our newest video, we asked some of the Nxtbook team what makes them happy. Their answer in a lot of cases? YOU!

 

So New We Couldn’t Fit it On the Website.

Guess what? Nxtbook Media has a new product. How new? So new we don’t even have it on the website. So new I can’t send you a brochure about it. That new.

The product is called NxtSync. You might use it in your digital magazine, but you might just as easily use it on your website.

Here’s how it works: You sell keywords to advertisers. Keywords in your content trigger cool display ads. Pretty simple eh?

OK, there’s a bit more to it than that, so why not join us for first-ever webinar on NxtSync. See it in action. See how publishers are using it to leverage revenue, and see what’s "nxt" from Nxtbook Media.

The Coming Age of Digital Magazines

I was a big fan of Josh Quittner when he was as Business 2.0. Heck, I was a big fan of Business 2.0. These days, Quittner blogs a lot about digital magazines, which is kind of like saying John Madden is doing some play by play for your local football team.

Here’s an interesting quote from a recent post:

I had one tiny epiphany I wanted to share, however. I was invited to attend an in-house conference at Richemont, the company that owns some of the world’s best-known luxury brands.

Throughout the day, the digital brand managers were showing off some of their Web-based projects and, as I watched some of the really gorgeous, cinematic stuff that they were doing, I realized that one day soon, these sorts of things will evolve from being Web pages to being the ad pages that adorn digital magazines.

This is actually a very big deal. It means that display advertising will work again.

Right now, the model doesn’t work because you have to go to, say, Van Cleef & Arpels’s website to see its ad. But what if the ad came to you, just as it does in a magazine. Only it’s way better than a magazine
because it’s animated and compelling. Imagine reading your favorite magazine on a tablet, and you hit this leopard (Now, on the Web, you’ve got to let it load first; that won’t be a problem on a downloaded e-mag.) How could you not stop and interact with it? Advertising will work so much better in the tablet-mag world.

Two things of note here: 1. Quittner obviously doesn’t read enough Nxtbooks to know what type of Ads many of you are doing. He should read our map. 2. Quittner points out that display ads in a delivered magazine are totally different than a web ad on a page waiting for someone to show up. And he’s absolutely right.

Can You Tell Me About Anyone Else Who Did This?

Case studies. It seems like once a week we get a request for a case study from a prospect. And when we do, the requests can be awfully specific, eg: Can you please show me a case study for a quarterly magazine for red 4×4 owners living in California that’s using their digital magazine to make money?

But the reality, we have case studies for lots of industries but very likely, not yours. As Seth Godin writes:

Sure, the industries change, the goods/service ratio changes, regulation changes, names change. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same.

People are people, and basic needs and wants don’t vary so much.

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. By the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it’s going to be way too late for you to catch up.

Can’t I Just Push a Button To Do That?

Are you a member of FOLIO MediaPro? Chances are, you should be. All the cool kids from publishing hang out there.

At any rate, an interesting question was posted this week, so I’m posting it (and my answer) here:

The question:

Anyone know of a tool that parsed magazine PDFs for syndication to
eReader formats plus iPhone, Android and other mobile readers? If not,
would it be valuable?

My answer:

At this point, software can’t do this. We create BlackBerry, iPhone,
accesible versions for the visually impaired, and Kindle-friendly
versions. In a nutshell, there’s some overlap, but each version
requires massaging to various degrees.

Would it be valuable? It depends where your audience is.

If you’re a BtoB publisher, for instance, more and more of your emails
are being delivered to Blackberries. If you don’t have a BlackBerry
friendly digital edition, you’ve just lost a reader.

Until e-Readers are color, the fashion magazines probably can ignore them.

*End of answer

I didn’t want to get all preachy and salesy in the forum, but what I didn’t say was that if you are evaluating digital editions, you should be asking all providers what they’re doing for these devices because I guarantee you that a portion of your audience is migrating to a portion of these devices, and the reality is that you’re not going to see a self-service product that seamlessly converts and uploads to all of these devices.

Some digital publishers will ignore this trend. That’s fine, so long as you don’t mind losing those readers.

Other digital publishers will give you tools so that you can convert all of your content into each format. That’s fine, too, so long as you have people sitting around with nothing to do.

And then there’s us. Our plan? Figure out how to effectively convert your content for all of these devices on our time, so that your content can find your readers, wherever they are.

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