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!

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.

It’s Not the Innovation: It’s the Audience

It’s always exciting when a popular blog like ReadWriteWeb asks: The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? And judging by the many comments, there’s a lot of reader interest in the topic.

If there is a criticism to the story, it would only be the writer calling eReader devices the potential "savior" of digital magazines. But if that were true:

1) Millions of people wouldn’t be reading digital magazines every month. Now.
2) Companies like Nxtbook wouldn’t be on the Inc. 500 list. Now.
3) Publishers like Graduate Prospects wouldn’t have been able to successfully kill their print brand three years ago.
4) Publishers like Hearst wouldn’t be bolstering their custom media revenues via digital-only magazines (as they’ve been for a few years now). Now.
5) Publishers like Uptime Magazine wouldn’t be selling out the next six months of their mobile digital magazines. Now.

Make no mistake: eReaders will only help the industry. But waiting for them to do so (while your competition doesn’t) would be very unwise.

A related quote from Penelope Trunk’s blog: Stop talking about good and bad media. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t make it bad.

What, Exactly, Are You Selling?

I was on the telephone with a publisher last week, talking about their forthcoming digital-only launch. It’s a great project - one that will do quite well.

But in talking with their sales team, it became obvious that the packages they were taking to market were based on a CPM sale, which is a bad idea in most cases. CPM prices were developed when click-through percentages fell through the basement. High numbers of impressions sound good to advertisers and the salespeople don’t have to admit how bad the clicks are.

But digital magazines are the opposite. They will have fewer visitors than websites (which doesn’t help CPMs) and they will have dramatically higher click-through rates (which aren’t part of the CPM calculation).

Wise writers have said the same thing about print and what’s interesting is that we’ve proven it’s also true with digital magazines.

Rules Are… There Are No Rules.

Even way back when, Kenickie was right. Rules can get in the way, which is why we cringe when people make blanket statements about anything, particularly digital magazines.

Perhaps this is why Andrew Lowsowsky’s article in the WSJ (which is all about magazines but doesn’t mention digital magazines) is so completely cool (like Kenickie).

If you were told to ship a t-shirt with a magazine, or charge $675 for a subscription or ship the issue in a can, you’d say that these things defy the rules of magazines as we know them.

But that’s exactly the point, as that’s what these publishers are doing. Great article, Andrew.

The Digital Only… Media Guide!

If you’ve got a magazine, you’ve probably got a media guide. But if you have a media guide, wouldn’t it be cool to have an optimized digital media guide? This one from Dealernews is one of the slickest we’ve done. Effective, cool and optimized for the screen.

Nxtbook Customers Named to FOLIO 40 & AD All-Stars.

What can we say? We’ve got some impressive customers. The following were recently named to the FOLIO 40

Steve Morris, EVP Advanstar Life Sciences
David Levin, CEO, United Business Media
Don Hellinger, CEO, Quadrant Media

Meanwhile, Audience Development Magazine also named this year’s "all stars," including the following Nxtbook customers:

Denise Robbins, NewBay Media (who was noted as being a "champion" of digital editions in the article!)
Christine Shappell, Advanstar

Congratulations to all!

Everything You Wanted to Know About Digital Magazines

The next issue of FOLIO Magazine & Audience Development includes a special poly-bagged supplement on the 2009 State of Digital Magazines. The digital version of this don’t-miss supplement can be viewed here (in the NEW Nxtbook 3.0!). But if you’d like to see the LIVE version, register now for the upcoming FOLIO webinar on the same topic.

Last year’s writer Jane Zarem delivers an encore performance nearly as good as the original.

The Luxury Digital Magazine Market…

So the other day I was reading an article at PubExec that claimed that VIVmag has produced an animated cover, "a first for the luxury digital publication for women." At first glance, I read a first for A luxury digital publication for women, and I thought, "Surely that can’t be right?"

I wasn’t the only. Joe Schmitter replied, "We publish a local Home & Lifestyle magazine targeted to affluent women and our current cover is animated as well.." (Schmitter in another comment admitted to enjoying what VIV had done.)

At any rate, I was just thinking how neat it was that the industry’s mature enough for multiple digital luxury mags for women when I realized that Schmitter’s publication is in fact a Nxtbook, and a cool looking one in fact. Check out the animation here and the use of video here.

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