Jellyfish - a Digital Edition Autopsy
August 14, 2007 by Marcus
Jellyfish Magazine, a digital-only publication in the UK, has beached itself due to “distribution challenges”.
A commenter on one blog said that the publication went into greater detail on its failures, citing problems with getting through Hotmail’s spam filters and problems with getting Flash past corporate servers. Though we haven’t been able to find these quotes directly attributed to the publisher, we agree that - if true - the publisher didn’t know the product as well as they should. With more than 97% penetration, Flash appears on more computers than Acrobat. Not to mention that Jellyfish’s readers aren’t very likely to be hanging out behind massive firewalls.
In addition, Jellyfish (along with digital provider Ceros) could’ve done a lot of things to help overcome those challenges:
* The content could’ve been indexed by search engines (it doesn’t appear to be), so the magazine was invisible to everyone except subscribers.
* No widgets. No cool way to tease people with your content.
* No social media integration. Jellyfish would’ve played well on Facebook.
* Lots of custom Flash animation. If you don’t have a system in place to make animation affordable, it’s not a fun expense to incur every month.
RIP, Jellyfish. Without Google & Facebook knowing about you, we hardly knew ye.
[...] NXTblog - The blog of NXTbook Media » Blog Archive » Jellyfish - a Digital Edition Autopsy In addition, Jellyfish (along with digital provider Ceros) could’ve done a lot of things to help overcome those challenges: * The content could’ve been indexed by search engines (it doesn’t appear to be), so the magazine was invisible to everyone ex (tags: Media Magazines Ceros Digital_Archive Digital_Edition Publishing Jellyfish social_networking) [...]
There was a small amount of social media integration, but there could have been more.
Facebook was aware of the magazine, Bebo and Myspace also had large amounts of promotion running within their sites.
Ultimately, the magazine needed more marketing support. An offline magazine usually launches with a seven figure marketing spend behind it - this didn’t happen. Since the majority of people didn’t know what it was, the majority of people didn’t read it.
Launching magazines is always a risky business. Like new businesses, 90% don’t make it through their first year.
Jellyfish gave national magazines a large amount of learnings which will hopefully be exploited in the near future.