Award Winning Game Changers

Congratulations to Nxtbook Media customer Network Media Partners for winning the Association Media & Publishing’s EXCEL Award for Online Publishing Innovation!  Check out their award winning digital magazine, MOVE.

Click here to be taken to their blog and read more about the EXCEL award and MOVE magazine.  Note the description provided on their website:  "This category recognizes the game changers – associations that are connecting with their audiences in new and innovative ways online." 

Our compliments on your success and impressive use of rich media in your digital magazine.  Well done!

 

What’s Your Click-Through Rate?

The guys that watch the tracking whispered into my ear a bit of information about a certain client. I won’t give out their name here, but I am going to share the data, because it’s a classic definition of what an engaged audience fed by viral activity looks like.

First up, the magazine was e-mailed out to the subscriber list. This tried and true method yielded nearly 3,800 reads. But from there, things got crazy… Links posted to MySpace, blogs and internet forums netted the magazine an additional 18,900 reads, for a total of 22,642.

How engaged was the audience? The average reader read nearly 60 pages of the publication and stayed inside for nearly 15 minutes (Keep in mind – this is the AVERAGE – and includes everyone who left after seeing one page.)

Looking to monetize the publication? Check this out: 28 percent of readers clicked on at least one ad. Here’s the real head-turner. One ad in the magazine was clicked on by 170 readers. On, and by the way, the ad appears on page 25 of the publication!

What’s your click-through rate?

 

Most Comprehensive Report on Digital Magazines – EVER!

This month’s FOLIO and CM both come poly-bagged with a special supplement. Digital Magazines 2008: Shift in Technology, Shift in Psychology contains more case studies, success stories, tips, tricks and reasons to go digital than any coverage ever done in our growing industry. Simply put, if you have a digital magazine or have thought about having a digital magazine, you won’t want to miss this 18 page report.

But why wait for the mailman? Click here to view Digital Magazines 2008 in Nxtbook format! 

Want more? Click here to attend FOLIO’s end of the month webinar where they’ll be discussing the report with publishers. 

All Looks – No Brains

There’s a fair amount of buzz on the Interweb this week about Issuu, a free do-it-yourself digital edition service from Europe. (Warning: When you let people upload their own content to a portal like Issuu, some of that content may not be suitable for all eyes.)

The folks from Issuu hit a home run in the PR department, getting written up at both TechCrunch and by Robert Scoble, who both fawned over the sleek UI which – truth be told – is gorgeous.

But here’s the thing: once you get past Issuu’s looks, what else is there? The content – though locally searchable – isn’t indexed by Google or Yahoo, like a Nxtbook. There’s no way to embed rich media, like a Nxtbook. And if there is any tracking information available to publishers, it isn’t mentioned on the site. And that’s just the beginning.

Pfauth sums it up perfectly: Web 2.0 is also about finding stuff, just ask David Weinberger. And an online pdf file sounds a bit 1.0 to me. You can’t link to a particular article and people can’t tag a page on del.icio.us or Fleck, or comment wherever they want. And don’t even think of embedding a YouTube video. It reminds me of the newspapers in the early years of the Internet who just published their articles on-line and that was it.

This doesn’t mean that Issuu doesn’t have a place. As the digital edition market has matured in the past several months, we’ve seen greater segmentation. There are products that offer more which do more and provide more ROI which cost more (like Nxtbook) and there are do-it-yourself solutions that require you to do the work and provide fewer features, which results in a smaller ROI. Those players at the shallow end of the pool had best pay attention to Issuu because if there’s one thing customers who like to pay a little like more than paying a little – it’s paying nothing, and Issuu offers them that opportunity. Meanwhile, Nxtbook customers will continue to reap the benefits of a product that’s designed for complete Web 2.0 integration and revenue generation.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble stopped by, asking for a sample link in this post. Here’s the latest copy of Project Analog, made from a PDF.