Advanstar Does Digital Only Right…

Advanstar recently moved their popular Aftermarket Business publication to digital-only. When doing that, it makes all the sense in the world to design for the medium. Check out the snazzy layout, attractive font styles and sizes and dynamic navigation. The publication also uses our "text tool bar," perfect for the icon-adverse.

Designing for the Medium

One of the cooler trends we’ve seen in the past two years involves publishers designing for the digital magazine medium, focusing on products that fit the screen and can be enjoyed without the reader having to work to zoom or navigate the real estate.

Here’s a great example from 495 Communications. Because this Nxtbook was designed for digital-only, they used a landscape layout with larger fonts and added enhanced navigation controls. Though I’m not a huge fan of ad serving in most digital magazines, the ads are so closely tied to the content here (travel shoppers are always looking for deals) that I think it’s a natural fit in this publication.

Moreover, the ad-serving gives the publication a dynamic look. Well done!

Supposedly Apple Has Something New Coming Out?

After months of anticipation, the iPad is here. If you missed the press conference, here’s a fairly comprehensive review of the product. If you want to see what some of Folio’s readers thought about it, click here. Here are some of the questions (and answers) we’ve been thinking about today:

What’s it mean for the eReader market?
Probably not a lot for the Nook or Kindle, which will continue to offer a comfortable eReading experience with huge stores for content. Products like the premium priced Que Reader – which hasn’t even launched, yet – might be left out in the cold.

Will a Nxtbook play on the iPad?
The native Nxtbook is built with Flash, which doesn’t work on the iPad. However, the recently released iPhone version of the Nxtbook should play just fine, and will even play all embedded videos and have live advertising links (two features fairly uncommon in the marketplace). And, given the likely adoption of this product, if it doesn’t run awesome on an iPad, it will!

Where do apps fit in?
One of the questions we’ll be asking over the next few months is where apps fit into the iPad equation. After all, if the device lets you see Facebook in its full-page browser glory, the benefits of the app are reduced to notifications (admittedly a plus). Sure, games and other products will succeed mightily on the device as apps, but publishers should look at how your app would be different than either your website content or your optimized digital magazine.

Doesn’t Steve Jobs want to sell my magazine?
Apparently not. Valleywag pointed out that even though the iPad was being hailed as a savior to the magazine industry, there was no talk about them showing up on iTunes. To me, though, this is like finding out you weren’t invited to a party at the school bully’s house. Yes, it’s a party, but people aren’t having that much fun. We’ll say it again: the best place to sell your magazine is your website. Period.

Your move:
The iPad is just one of a slew of products that will compete for your audience. Partnering with Nxtbook and enabling your iPhone version guarantees a seamless transition to this new device the day it’s released.

 

 

Do your readers want a mobile digital edition?

Bill Mickey asked us to chime in with some mobile usage rates, and I was only glad to do so, because when a publisher spreads the idea that people are going to spend 83 minutes staring at a magazine on an iPhone, someone has to speak up.

(My guess is that readers were surveyed about those 83 minutes, which closely mirrors that 71 they say they spend in print. If I’m wrong, please somebody correct me.)

At any rate, Bill’s question got me digging into our statistics, and I realized something critical: The main reason less than 1% of Nxtbooks are read on mobile devices is because our clients haven’t asked their Account Manager how to get their mobile version turned on, so let’s get on it folks!

Then that got me to wondering what’s happening among those publishers who have enabled their mobile versions. This, then, is the e-mail I sent to Bill:

Thanks for asking about our mobile stats. While we are very much in the infancy of all of us, I agree: now’s really the time for publishers to be exploring, experimenting and testing a market that’s rapidly evolving.

A couple disclaimers:

1) It’s important to keep context in mind. A recent Quantcast study says that 1.26% of all web pages viewed in the US came from mobile devices. While this isn’t the same as app. traffic, it’s an interesting place to put a flag in the ground. In the case of Nxtbook, since we use web apps at this point, it’s a very relevant number. The study is a terrific read and can be viewed here.

2) The Quantcast study is good, but it doesn’t examine reader engagement. I point this out, because the idea of eighty-three minutes of reader engagement for the GQ app is somewhat odd. I wonder if those results were measured or if readers said they spent that long in the publication. It’s curious to note that it’s very close to how much time they "say" they spend inside the print edition.

If I’m right, this is a classic example of a publisher not realizing that advertisers are weary of survey metrics, particularly when the real data is close at hand.

3) At Nxtbook, we introduced our iPhone version last September. Our BlackBerry versions have been out for over a year. While we don’t currently have an Android specific version, our other versions run fairly well on Android devices. Moreover, the rapid adoption of Android devices has us racing to fine tune our product for them.

Here are some metrics:
1) Engagement time. The average engagement time for all Nxtbook readers over the past 30 days was just under seven minutes. Unlike survey data, this is an actual average, so the person who stays inside the book for 1 page gets averaged with the person who stays in for an hour (or more).

2) Our iPhone readers stayed the longest of all mobile devices – more than three and a half minutes. BlackBerry readers were next, at just over two and a half minutes. Android readers were only a tiny bit less, at 2:23. We attribute this to the fact that – as mentioned – the experience hasn’t been optimized for Android devices, yet.

3) According to Quantcast, 1.26% of all web pages were viewed on mobile devices. Among the Nxtbook clients who have enabled either the iPhone or BlackBerry versions of their digital magazines, the percentage of pages viewed from mobile devices varies widely, very much depending on how much the publisher publicizes it and what % of their audience is on the devices. The single best performing title I found was one that has received 7% of their page views from mobile devices since November of last year. This is a publisher who receives about 3-5000 digital magazine readers per issue. We would expect this number to grow quite a bit in the common months.

UPDATED: Conde Naste has responded to my question, writing to Bill Mickey:

"It comes from the analytics package built into the app.  In other words it is a metric that comes from real-world app use and our measurement of it."

Considering the average iPhone app has an engagement time of nine minutes, is Conde on to something?

Dynamite Webinar

Two Nxtbook customers did an outstanding job telling their digital publishing stories at a webinar produced by University Business magazine last week.

From the description:

Digital Viewbooks, Alumni Magazines and More: Bringing Your Print Materials Online

In the past few years, higher education marketing professionals
have increasingly been turning to new digital publishing technology as
a way to reach their audiences. Digital publishing reaches more people
than print at a fraction of the cost, while allowing the inclusion of
video and other multi-media. The end result is a dynamic product with
cutting edge analytics than can be shared across all forms of social
media.
Join Web Seminar Editor J.D. Solomon and a panel of higher education
professionals using digital publishing for a discussion of topics such
as:
•How digital viewbooks and alumni magazines differ from Web-based
versions
•What makes digital publishing different from print and websites
•How to best promote your latest projects to the Facebook crowd
•How digital publishing provides metrics impossible to find in print
There is no fee to attend thanks to sponsorship by Nxtbook Media.
Presentations by: Peter Field – Director of Business Development,
RE:CREATIVE Sherri Miles – Director of Communications, Suffolk
University

Do yourself a favor and check out the archive here. 

Nxtbook Customer Goes Digital-Only

From the Napier News blog:

"The layout will be changed completely, moving to a screen-optimised format on the NxtBook (sic.) platform similar to recent EE Times special editions. The layout is nice – similar to ED Europe in some ways, but offering full page adverts as well as leaderboard and MPU fractional ads. It’s great to see a publisher recognise the need to optimise the layout for the readers, whilst allowing advertisers to use familiar formats with high visual impact. We’re also promised special editions, which will be driven by sponsors."

Congrats to the ESD team!

 

Going Everywhere… Easily.

Good article at FOLIO that talks about how publishers need to get on the coming eReaders, without making their lives more complicated:

Says one publisher, "As long as we just need to send out PDFs I’ll adopt as many platforms
as possible. This could scale, but it will only make sense if we don’t
have to do a lot of customization."

Which, in a nutshell, is the Nxtbook philosophy. Give us your PDF – we’ll get you on the devices.

Out on the ledge prediction.

Ready for this?

The mobile share of digital consumption will be somewhere between 3 and 50% of all web pages within three years.

Huh? What kind of prediction is that?

It all started a couple weeks ago with a Quantcast report that pegged the percentage of pages consumed on mobile devices to be around 1.26% in the US. The report also predicted we’d be above 2% by year’s end. In other words, it IS growing and it’s growing fast. But when you start at zilch, growth takes time.

Meanwhile, Steve Smith’s headline reads Mobile Will Overtake Desktop Web in Three Years. His story references a recent report by Gartner. Except, the report doesn’t speculate about usage at all. What Steve writes and what the report says is that we’ll have more mobile devices that can get on the Web than we’ll have computers, which is actually a pretty different thing. How different?

Let’s pretend you have one computer in your house and one Wii. In that scenario, 50% of the devices in your house that can access the web are not computers. But do you use your Wii to read Yahoo news? I know I don’t.

Or to push it even further, here’s how my house is set up. Your mileage may vary:

2 computers
1 Wii
3 web-friendly phones
2 iPod Touches
1 Kindle

In this scenario, only 33% of the devices in our house that can surf the Web are computers, but guess what? None of those devices approach the volume of web content consumed by the computers – even the ones – like the iPod Touch – that do it well.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t be thinking about getting your content on all of these devices. Quite frankly, you have to. But if you go out telling your advertisers that they better be coughing up all kinds of money for mobile sponsorships because that’s where half your traffic is going, well you might have some explaining to do. Probably not in twelve years. But definitely in three.

Choose….. Wisely.

Most of the e-Readers discussed at CES last week haven’t even been released and yet BusinessWeek says most of them won’t even be here a year from now. We agree.

That’s why Nxtbook Media offers our Liberty version, which we have billed from the get-go as being platform agnostic. Simply put, it’s designed to run on all of these devices, or at least the ones that matter.

Chances are, you’ve got people asking you how to get on the KindleQueSonyReaderAppleTablet. Each one of these devices has slightly different rules and slightly different specs, requiring slightly different processes. You can figure each one out separately or you can just send us your PDF and let us deal with it.

I Bet Somebody Famous Reads Your Magazine

When people Tweet your content, you get readers. When the Tweeter is a famous business consultant, you get even more readers. Yesterday, best-selling author Ken Blanchard tweeted some great content he found in a Nxtbook, which served as a free endorsement to Blanchard’s more than 6,000 followers, some of whom re-promoted the content.

Your move: find out who YOUR influential readers are and make sure they know what you’re publishing!

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