Top 7 Digital Magaziney Things To Do This Week

While your blog editors are on vacation until the New Year, truth is I’ve always found the last week of the month to be an ideal one to do a mental re-set and do some of the intellectual work that we can’t often fit into the rest of the year.

Thus, here’s 7 things you can do – digital magazine related – to get ready for a great 2011.

1) Transfer your Delicious account to Diigo. It will take you less than 5 minutes and will save you headaches if and when Delicious goes under.
2) Watch the webinar: The State of the Digital Edition. You’ll understand where this industry is and where it’s going.
3) Check out the Best of Nxtbook and see what you can do inside your digital magazine that you’re not.
4) Download our eReader Guide and learn which devices matter now.
5) Learn why other publishers are optimizing digital editions.
6) Once you understand the value of optimizing your digital edition, learn how to.
7) Watch what we do to Nxtbook employees when they have the nerve to leave their cubicle unguarded for two weeks. (In our defense, he was in Hawaii, for crying out loud.)

Delicious, We Hardly Knew Ye…

So the big story is that Delicious (if not the first, certainly the first MAJOR online bookmarking service) is being "sun setted" by Yahoo. Depending on who you talk to, sunsetted could mean kicked to the curb, sold or put on ebay. If you’re curious about the why’s and where’s, as usual there’s no better place to go than Rex’s blog.

But from a more practical standpoint, you might be wondering what to do with your Delicious account. Google bookmarks is a wonderful service, but lacks tags, a key component of social bookmarking. For now, the Nxtbook team is experimenting with Diigo, an impressive little company that previously was focusing on the education market. If you’d like to see what our account looks like at Diigo, feel free to visit our library at Diigo here. Note that Diigo is working hard to import data from many skittish Delicious users. As of today, our tag cloud is still being processed. Still, the data imported flawlessly and – for that alone – we are grateful!

For now, we’ll continue to promote sharing to Delicious inside the Nxtbook interface, until such a time as the market decides where it will go. But our personal wagon – for the moment – has been hitched to Diigo.

 

FINAL Nxtbook Holiday Greeting

Honestly, we can’t get enough of the holidays! You always knew the owners of Nxtbook were great people, but did you know they could dance like this?

 

Holiday Greeting #2

From our icons to yours’, have a wonderful holiday!

 

Back of the Napkin Math

So this week I was comparing stats between two magazines with similar content, except for one thing: Magazine A is a digital replica, whereas Magazine B is optimized for screen reading.

Over the past three issues, 5.1% of Magazine A’s readers clicked on an ad. That’s impressive and is typical of what we see in digital magazine. But Magazine B? A whopping 15.3% of readers clicked on an ad, for an absolutely insane CTR.

Consider this: A good website banner will have a .25% click-through rate. You’d need 61 visitors to your website to generate the same results for an advertiser as 1 optimized digital magazine reader. Now THAT’s engagement.

Don’t Worry, We Can Handle It

It doesn’t happen a lot these days, but every now and then someone brings a project to Nxtbook and is a little bit worried if we can handle the traffic they’re certain their book will get. We tell them about our triple redundancy and about our "cloud" servers and that usually works, but what they really want to hear about is the type of thing that just happened last week.

Publisher A – who shall remain nameless – sent an email. Well, actually they sent a lot of emails to their database. Like more than a few million. The contents of the email were fairly simple: "Happy Birthday from Publisher X." This was well received by approximately 1 out of every 365 emails. The others responded, correctly, "It’s not my birthday."

Eager to apologize for the gaffe, the publisher opted to send an apology email and – as a gesture of goodwill – included a link to a popular book they’d first issued two years ago.

Let’s just say more than 400,000 people accepted the apology because they opened in the Nxtbook om a very short period of time.

That’s right: in the span of just a few hours, we had the traffic we usually get in 5-6 days. And the best thing of all is that – regardless of what Nxtbook you read that day – you were treated to a reliable reading experience.

Know the Facts; Check Your Stats

In pursuit of always providing publishers with relevant information, Nxtbook Media continues to monitor facts and statistics relating to how people access the Internet. As we mentioned in a previous article, Omniture provides anonymous aggregated Internet data detailing how users accessed their sites, and the breakdown includes what mobile devices users favor.

Of those who have used mobile devices to access Omniture-tracked sites in the past month, these devices claim the following percent of use:

Apple iPhone: 41.8%  
Apple iPad: 12.5%  
Motorola Droid: 7.9% 
Apple iPod Touch: 7.2%  
HTC Evo: 4.8%   
Nokia 5800: 4.4%  
Nokia 5230: 2.4%  
Blackberry 8530/Curve: 1.9% 
Motorola Droid X: 1.8%   
Nokia N8-00: 1.7%
RIM Blackberry 9700/Onyx: 1.5%  
Blackberry 8330: 1.5%
Nokia X6: 1.5%
Nokia E63: 1.4%  
HTC Droid Incredible: 1.4%   
Nokia 5233: 1.4% 
Nokia E71: 1.4%  
(Other devices are tracked but have less than 1.3% of total usage)

For a better representation of the way the trend is moving, click here to compare it to last month’s stats. 

The Problem With Media Apps

Here’s a good article about the problem facing many media apps today. Basically it says some publishers are paying a ton of money to build apps for not enough readers. Luckily, we told you that before, which is why the Nxtbook native app is about getting you there easily and affordably.

The article talks about the high cost of bandwidth, and the interviewee suggests that bandwidth can be as expensive as printing. As one astute commenter pointed out, that’s not really true:

"A 500 MB iPad magazine could be downloaded form Amazon S3 for 5 cents per customer, or on RackSpace Cloud Files for 11 cents. The storage cost would be 7 cents per issue. With e.g Wired’s 32,000 monthly iPad customers, the total would be: $1,600 (and that is for a 500 MB issue). There is no way they can print it for less than that."

Goose Your Email Campaign

As some of you are aware, Nxtbook Media offers an additional feature of creating a custom email campaign for your digital edition, or to evaluate the campaign you are already running. I had the opportunity to talk with the Director of Email Programs, Mallory Weiss, about her job:

What is a successful email campaign?

A successful email campaign gets readers for the digital edition, and if readership goes up, hopefully ad revenue will go up too. I come in after our clients’ digital edition is created and I handle their email projects. I send an alert to subscribers or people they hope will become subscribers… My number one goal is to get people to open the emails and to represent the client in the way they want to be represented.

What kind of client would benefit from this service?

Anyone who doesn’t have the manpower in-house to create an alert email and get it all together on an issue-by-issue basis. Or someone who’s never done it before or who hasn’t had much success with it in the past. This is about the full service aspect. We handle literally everything, and we have the knowledge to do it well.

What are 2 tips you’d recommend for everyone running an email campaign?

It’s important to give readers a lot of opportunities to click the digital edition. Some of our customers send me the email templates they were using before, and they’re not very compelling or only have one link to the digital edition. The biggest thing, though, is to maintain a clean list. Make sure you’re sending emails to valid addresses. It’s always disheartening when a client gives us a list of 20,000 names and 5,000 names come back as hard bounces because they didn’t go through their list.

Mallory commented that some of the common emails she sends include promotional emails for new subscribers or for advertisers, emails to former subscribers, new issue emails, subscription alerts, and emails for those who didn’t open the digital edition the first time. As part of her job, Mallory can track the success of individual emails, reporting information such as open rates, click rates, opt-outs, and bounces.

Think your company would benefit in starting a campaign or giving your current campaign a much-needed boost? Contact your Account Manager to begin a new campaign for your next edition.

Mallory Weiss, Director of Email Programs

 

From All of Us, To All of You, Happy Holidays!

Excerpt from “My Holiday” by Robert William Service:

I love the cheery bustle
Of children round the house,

The tidy maids a-hustle,

The chatter of my spouse;

The laughter and the singing,

The joy on every face:

With frequent laughter ringing,
O, Home’s a happy place!

‘Tis that time of year again when we at Nxtbook Media get a chance to celebrate the close of another great year and reflect on those who’ve made it so. Our clients, employees, friends and family make this company who we are. So it is with many thanks we offer this card of holiday greeting to you all. We wish you all the best!

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