Yesterday, we had the pleasure of sponsoring and attending the Digital Magazine Forum in New York.
This is always an interesting event – a smaller, shorter show than most we attend, but also heavily focused. There’s plenty of talk on digital editions – what they are and what they should be.
It’s also interesting because unlike most trade shows which are produced by trade show companies, this one is produced, directed and hosted by one of our competitors. It’s not completely unlike paying your competitor to put on a day-long sales call which you get to attend. Nevertheless, the content is always interesting and the attendees are always interested, so we were glad to participate.
There were seven presentations throughout the day, ranging from the big picture – “What is ‘the magazine’?” to technology “Microsoft’s Vista – the New Frontier?” to one on VC firms talking about where they’re currently chasing the money in the digital media space.
I’m not a reporter and this blog doesn’t pretend to be wholly objective. That being said, I’ve decided to present a long list of quotes and observations throughout the day. Through reading this, I hope you’ll learn much of what we learned yesterday and – where appropriate – what the “NXTbook response” is to certain observations from within the industry.
The first panel included Peter Meirs from Time, Inc. & David Klein from the Ad Age Group. We’ve blogged about Meirs before and love the fact that he’s always pushing the fringiest stuff out there, including Idiomag, which we blogged about several weeks ago.
Meirs – like some – continues to show a lot of disdain for “digital facsimiles” of magazines, because they attempt to recreate a portrait reading experience in a landscape environment. While Meirs is 100% correct in that this is something that all digital publishers must strive to improve upon, the reality is that until this type of technology is both cost and time-efficient, this format will be out of the reach for many small publishers.
Your move if you’re a publisher: Creating a dynamic user experience is paramount to digital publishing success. Choose a digital publishing company that knows where the technology must get to tomorrow, even if it’s not wholly practical today.
Meirs next said something that we consider to be gospel at NXTbook: “The goal of a digital magazine is indifference.” His implied message was that if people are too hung up on the technology, they’re not focused on the content. In that statement, he’s entirely correct. What could’ve been highlighted, though, is that even though Meirs has been saying the same thing for some time, in many cases, digital publishers have already succeeded.
Here are two examples where bloggers are talking about the content of a NXTbook and have absolutely nothing to say about the format at all. We’d call that glorious indifference.
David Klein spoke next about Ad Age’s experience with Zinio. Klein said that Ad Age has only converted 7.8% of its international readership to digital. He would’ve liked to explain why his numbers were so poor, but admitted that Zinio provides him with no tracking data.
The problem with this admission – in the first program of the day – is that it sets up would-be digital publishers with the idea that it’s difficult to get tracking data. The reality is that any reputable digital publisher can provide you with more data than you get on your website. A lack of data isn’t a digital publishing problem. It’s a Zinio problem.
The next panel discussion asked what digital magazines of tomorrow will look like, and was led by Bob Sacks (Bo to those who know and/or read him.) Though I’ve read Bo, this was the first I had a chance to hear him speak, and all I can say is, “Wow.” Entertaining. Dynamic. Enlightening. What perhaps came across most of all in Bo’s speech was that the technology will continue to get better. But waiting until it does is not a strategy. All of that being said, I wish Bo put more of his content into his RSS feed…
On the same panel was Paul Gerbino from the Thomas Publishing Company. Gerbino is one of those guys who puts out content in many different formats so that the reader can choose how they wish to receive it. He feels that access to his content is a key differentiator today and also spoke about the increasing need to get users to interact with the content. Great presentation.
The same panel also included Dana Fisher from Questex. Dana has been a NXTbook customer for several years now. As Dana shared, Cadalyst Magazine has 15,000 BPA certified digital subscribers, many of them overseas. Readers love the content. Dana loves the numbers. We love Dana.
Next up, two quick insights from the session entitled “How Print and Electronic Content Work Together.”
At one point, moderator Jon Fine asked the panelists about the smartest and dumbest thing they’ve done online. Forbes.com VP-Chief Advertising Officer Bill Flately had no trouble naming their dumbest: their short experiment with in-text advertising from IntelliTXT. If you missed that story, here’s a good rant from Paul Conley about IntelliTXT.
And here’s a cute banter between moderator Fine and Jason Pontin of Technology Review:
Fine: “Can you convince me Zinio is a good solution?”
Pontin: “No.”
The next couple hours included technology talk by Bill McCoy from Adobe, Ron Hawkins from Sony, Bob Larson from the NY Times (who worked on the Times Reader project), Mike Cooper, Microsoft (Ditto) and Arturo Duran from CanWest.
As techies, we loved these couple of hours. That being said, for publishers the Adobe and Microsoft tools are totally beta-ware and will be for some time. One wonders why publishers were being shown things they can’t use yet and won’t be using anytime in the near future. (Not that this kept McCoy from encouraging publishers to use them… )
Microsoft did a very cool job showing how WPF works and why it’s neat. However, there was a nary a mention of the fact that using it to design ads will require new software, new skill sets and existing PDF ads will be worthless in the WPF environment.
Your move if you’re a publisher: If you’re considering a digital-only publication, WPF will be mighty cool. But Adobe’s Bill McCoy thinks that in five years, digital edition revenue will be 25% for the average print publication and we tend to think that Bill’s a pretty smart guy. For 25%, does it make sense to learn an entirely new advertising package? (from Microsoft?)
I have little to report about the last two forums, simply because I enjoyed them without critiquing them. Dorian Benkoil did a great job moderating a panel that included Om Malik (Business 2.0 hasn’t been the same since he left) and Peter Rojas (who was kind of meek as a moderator but rocked the house as a panelist!), which was followed by three venture capitalists talking about money (although the highlight for me was that one of them was Tony Schneider, CEO of the firm that wrote the software this blog is written on as well as the firm that prevents spammers from trying to sell Viagra via the comments on this blog).
And finally, a slightly out of left field comment:
Dan Schwartz, CEO of Qiosk was the moderator for many of the panels and as I mentioned at the beginning of this report, Qiosk is one of our competitors. While Dan did a decent job of making the day relatively objective, many in the audience – including us – were taken a bit by surprise to hear him say, “Rich media has no place in a digital magazine.” As we’ve seen from many of our favorite projects, the inclusion of rich media in a digital edition is an exciting, vibrant way to make the user experience powerful and we side with the dozens of people in the crowd who were scratching their collective heads at that moment.
So, all in all an interesting day with lots of interesting people.
