Here’s Where Things Start to Get Complicated

So when the new iPad was announced, some people said digital magazines would like better than ever. Other people (like us) said you better be careful about file size on a product that already struggles with… file size.

But as you can see from this graphic (which might be premature), the new iPad’s traffic is small compared to the other iPads already in the market. This means a couple of things:

1) If you’re thinking more than a little about this new retina display, which is now a sliver of a sliver of an audience, you might be thinking too much.

2) If you really do care about that audience, just make sure you have lower res versions of the product at the ready, so that people with the original iPads don’t complain more about your file size.

3) Just use Nxtbook, because we’re prepared for this type of market confusion. 

This Post Would Be Much Better With Pictures or a Video

As part of the marketing department, I’ll begin this post by apologizing, as this news deserves a video demo or at least a few screenshots. Unfortunately, words will have to do.

News came from our development department that our new mobile browser is very nearly ready for release; like within a week ready.

Our mobile browser is a fairly critical product, as it’s the version of the Nxtbook that plays when people on smartphones or tablets receive an email with a link to a digital edition and click on it. For most of our publishers, the percentage of readers accessing their content this way is somewhere between 10 and 20%.

The new mobile browser, to be direct, is about a hundred times better than our current version. Here are just a few things to look for:

1. Near native performance with near native speed. Though it’s hard to imagine, the page by page navigation taking place in the browser is wicked fast and outperforms any other mobile browser-based digital edition we’ve put it up against.

2. Brand consistency. Remember the fancy new Nxtbook 3.3 toolbar we released just a few weeks ago? Well the mobile browser tool bar looks like its kids sister, not it’s third cousin, twice removed. This way, your mobile readers will have a similar experience, regardless of which device they’re on.

Expect to hear more about the mobile browser when we go live, but know this: your smartphone and tablet readers are going to love it! 

You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down

We were excited to read about the return of Peter Goldstone to Hanley Wood this week. In addition to being a long-time supporter of Nxtbook, Goldstone’s innovative ideas coupled with his deep understanding of Hanley Wood and the industry should be great for everyone involved. Welcome back, Peter!

Next Issue Media Solves One Problem, Creates Another

or… It’s funny watching old dogs learn new tricks.

A few years back, Time, Inc. offered up a mix and match magazine subscription service called Maghound. Back then, we talked about why it wouldn’t work. And we were right.

Fast forward a few years, and Next Issue Media (of which Time, Inc. is a partner/investor) has rolled out something like Maghound, but for digital titles. And that’s smart. (Kind of why we suggested it two years ago.) The problem this time, around, however, is that they’re doing it as a native app only. (I won’t even mention the fact that it’s Android native apps, as they supposedly have an iOs solution is coming.)

Not only will the future be browser-based, so is the present. Here at Nxtbook, we still see 85% of most of our customers’ readers coming through the browser. That’s 85% of readers that won’t be accessing their content via the Next Issue solution. But give it time; it only took them two years to implement our last suggestion. 

Why Your Digital Readership Might Not Be What You Expected

AdAge reports that digital circulation is tiny compared to print, at least among titles audited by the ABC. Here are some likely reasons for this:

1) The fact that the titles are audited by the ABC means that we’re looking at mostly paid, B2C, titles. Since the dawn of digital editions, the B2B titles have outperformed their sexier counterparts, generating 15% or more of digital readership in most cases, or 7 times what many B2C titles have.

2) The fact that the titles are audited by the ABC says something about the titles, too. Audited titles – and I’m generalizing here – often seem stuck on proving metrics that don’t make sense anymore (circulation over readership being a prime example). Until magazines begin to chase the right carrot, the bunny’s won’t look as fuzzy.

3) The fact that so many magazines have hitched their wagon to native apps to drive readership. Listen, we love native apps, but our most successful publishers still get more than half of their readership through the Internet browser digital edition. The app road is a pretty road; it’s just also pretty narrow.

4) Magazine titles that get audited are also between a rock and a hard place. Don’t optimize your content enough for screen reading, and readers won’t be interested. Optimize it too much and it won’t count as the same title. It’s yet another issue the ABC has struggled to define in this new era.

Your take-aways? Make sure you’re optimizing your content and publishing to the browser. And, of course, if you’re truly focusing on circulation, you might want to look at analytics a bit differently. 

A Future Involving Ink

So let’s pretend you wanted to do a video that made printed magazines sound as important as they were before the Internet. If that were the case, it might make sense to have the video take place on an airplane where (for the time being) you can’t always be online.

The result, while not very convincing, is still inspiring:

Finding Readers

There are a lot of reasons we like delivering digital editions through the browser, but when it comes down to it, this one might be the most important: it’s easier for you to get to your readers. Finding a reader via a native app is a much more complicated route. It can be done, mind you, but only if your audience development department is prepared to pick up some new skills. Don’t believe us? Check out the handy infographic below.

 

Size Does Matter, or Why I Think Mike Haney is Wrong

Last week I posted our concern about what the new iPad will mean to digital edition sizes. Over at FOLIO, Mag+’s Mike Haney says you have nothing to worry about:

"The retina iPad, with its print-like resolution and rich backlit color is giving an industry whose value proposition is built on beautiful imagery, careful design and readable text the most amazing platform it’s ever had for all of those things. Its introduction should not be a cause for fretting about the death of an experiment that’s just begun on the altar of file size, but a moment to ask ourselves: what are we doing with it? "

Simply put, I disagree, and here are just a few reasons why:

1.) He’s comparing the wrong thing. In his argument, he reasons that the best selling thing on iTunes is the Walking Dead, but comparing a creative work to works of nonfiction is apples and oranges. Aside from National Geography, which wins award every time they get the camera out of the bag, you won’t see many nonfiction shows topping the list of most paid-for content on iTunes.

2.) The expectation that it’s easy to archive magazines. Nowhere is our packrat mentality more apparent than when we buy a magazine. It’s a core product feature people expect, and they’re sure to be disappointed when they can only fit one year’s worth on their device. To suggest otherwise means you don’t know your readers.

There’s no argument here that Haney is right about one thing: magazine publishers have an opportunity (perhaps even a necessity) to optimize their content for this new breed of high-end tablet. At the same time, publishers would be wise to seek out solutions that won’t have their readers abandoning their issues midway through the download. 

Nice Idea, Forbes

You may have missed it last year, but there’s been a bit of a dust-up about whether or not digital ads on websites are being seen. The theory is fairly sound: if your ad appears on the lower section of a webpage and if, in particular, the user is using a small screen, it’s possible the user could click away without seeing an ad, yet the ad view gets counted.

On one hand, I could argue that unless you’re into brand advertising, it doesn’t matter… after all, advertisers really want clicks, engagement, etc. But that argument aside, it’s a worthwhile concern, particularly as websites (and digital editions) morph into entities that might make it easier or more difficult for your ads to be seen.

Forbes is launching a new service that will guarantee that if they say your ad was seen, it was really seen. On its service, this is a little silly, but when you consider the ways we measure print traffic, well, it’s at least a lot better than that. Read more about the Forbes technology here. 

Sharing is Polite

When we launched the new Nxtbook 3.3 last week, we simultaneously made the new interface a little bit easier and a little bit harder to share content. Here’s why:

As the infographic below shows, sharing via Twitter and LinkedIn is growing like made online. While you could point out that Facebook is even greater (and you’d be right), the bulk of our publishers are BtoB customers, who we know are more likely to share work content via LinkedIn than Facebook. Because one of the key goals of the new interface was to use fewer buttons, but the buttons people use more, we moved Facebook "under the hood" a bit more.

But there’s another key stat in the infographic below which can’t be ignored. Truth of the matter is, most people don’t use ANY share buttons. Rather they copy and paste URLs from the browser! In other words, they share content, but for the most part, they have their own way of doing it, which is another reason our basic Share button has been placed deeper into the interface.

 

 

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