The Long Tail of Digital Magazines

Writing the "long tail" in a blog title in 2008 sure has a tired feel about it. After all, the phrase has been around for four years now. Still, it reared its long neck just yesterday, so I assure you it’s timely.

Commonly, we’re asked by publishers how we’re different from the competition. If the question is coming from a technical perspective, we provide answers such as those provided on the Why Nxtbook? section of the website. But sometimes the question is being asked from a business model perspective. Likewise, sometimes the competitor being asked about is Zinio. That’s what this post is about.

In a press release yesterday, a new Zinio partner had this to say:

“The Zinio Global Newsstand is ‘long tail’; at its most powerful. In a marketplace where access is traditionally defined by geographic scale of demand, Zinio enables mass and niche interest communities worldwide to connect with specific magazine content regardless of local market demand viability,” said Joan Solã, Acceso Group’s CEO.

For those unfamiliar with the terms, long tail economics states that businesses that serve as aggregators (Amazon is the best-known example) make a ton of money by selling small quantities of lots of stuff (Longer definition here.).

The curious thing is this: The benefits of the long-tail are far greater for the aggregator than for the individual vendor (or publisher in this case). David Hornik explains it thusly:

I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially two general classes of technology the will benefit economically from the Long Tail — aggregators and filterers. And while both aggregators and filterers rely upon the increasing volume and diversity of content to assure their value in the ecosystem, that growth of content will not have a material impact upon the value of any one piece of content floating somewhere in the Tail. The value will all inure to the benefit of the aggregators and filterers.

In previous press releases, Zinio has claimed to deliver 18 million digital magazines per year from more than 800 publications. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that 18 million are read - kind of like the difference between e-mails sent and e-mails opened. If we make the assumption that a certain small percentage of the Zinio audience doesn’t open the digital magazine (print or digital, we’ve all got magazines we haven’t read), we see that Nxtbook has similar readership, though with slightly more than 500 publications. So how do we generate more readers for BtoB magazines than Zinio does for consumer titles? The answer is in the long tail.

In long-tail economics, the aggregator isn’t concerned with the performance of any single piece of content. To be blunt, the concept is to fill up a warehouse with gobs of stuff - too much stuff for any one to do great - but enough stuff so that somebody will buy something. Either way, the aggregator wins when the person goes through the check-out line.

Publishers need to understand that this business model - by necessity - means that the aggregator isn’t concerned about individual performance. The aggregator is focused on aggregation, and the multiples that it produces.

At Nxtbook, we’ve always believed that the best person to sell your content is you. You know your audience. When they come online, they don’t go "browsing" for content. They go to your website. They read your newsletters and they subscribe to your feeds. That’s why our business model is about making your content easy to place on your website, easy to link to and easy to create feeds from. We give you those tools so that you can take them to your audience.

Simple take-away: there is money to be made in the long tail of digital magazines. But unless you’re an aggregator, that guy isn’t you.