Month by month magazines come and go. Print, website, and digital editions head out to your readers and newsstands.
Your website and digital edition continue to live on way past the launch date through search, social, email, and other digital channels. The reuse of quality content has become almost ubiquitous. The clicks continue and advertisers get added value for their media buys. Whereas print, unless you go through a reprint or your readers hold onto an archive, wilts on the paper, yellowing as it sits in a room somewhere.
This begs the question, what is a publisher to do with those old editions that came solely through print? The ones without an online presence? The ones that are literally sitting in an archive room wilting away. Those editions took as much effort as your current one. They hold valuable information that took hours to find and curate. Additionally, there is intriguing information that speaks to how your unique content was portrayed in a different time and cultural context.
Should you pull those archives out and give them new life digitally? Let’s look at some reasons why.
To Serve Your Readers
I don’t think I need to be another resounding gong when it comes to this issue, making your readers happy is critical in our media-saturated environment. Oftentimes those who consume your content, especially your most avid ones, love it so much that they will go back years to look at an article. We have individuals daily who will jump into digital editions that are well over a decade old and consume content for minutes on end.
Would they be interested in articles published in 90’s, 80’s, and before? The answer is probably yes. The only honest answer though will come from your readers. A solid survey can help to gauge interest and find out if overall satisfaction with your publication will grow, hence increasing retention and customer lifetime value.
To Serve Your Advertisers
If your readers are interested, then there is a good chance your advertisers will be as well.
The struggle is that Chances are that a lot of the ads that were shown in your original print are no longer relevant. Digital editions allow for the creating of supplementary digital advertising around the publication that can be used as an added value for your advertisers or an additional revenue source for your publication.
If you would like to see an example of how this may look you can check out one of our digital edition platforms with all the advertising bells and whistles here.
To Celebrate A Milestone
Celebrating 10, 25, or 50 years in publishing is a massive milestone for many organizations. In order to celebrate this, publishers oftentimes will take every edition created and combine it into a digital archive.
These archives serve as a source of pride and a pat yourself on the back moment to many longstanding employees. It is truly an opportunity to improve the morale of an organization, to be able to look back and say “job well done”.
It can also bring a level of prestige to a publication that may have not otherwise been understood by employees, readers, or advertisers. This, in turn, helps to serve the overall importance of a brand for these important stakeholder groups.
It’s A Simple Process
Knowing the need and desire to create digital archives, along with the maxed out schedules of publishers, we have made the process simple. The only requirement is the sending of print archives to our team (or PDF files if you have them).
In regards to print archives, we can scan these editions, build them into our fully HTML based page turning nxtbook4 system, and have a searchable, organized index of archives within a matter of a few weeks. Converting PDF files into an archive, of course, does not take as long. The time, manpower, and savings created by using our system, in comparison to placing all this information on a website or into another type of content management system, is massive to say the least.
If you would like to find out about how we can revitalize your content, feel free to request a demo by filling out our Get Started Form.
Additionally, you can check out two archive page examples below, one inside a publication and another website based.