Digital Magazine Symposium Review
March 12, 2008 by Marcus
This event took place yesterday at the Publishing Executive Conference in NYC. Nxtbook was a sponsor and I was one of many speakers, so consider that my disclaimer. Here’s how I expect the media to cover this event:
14 Word Summary: Digital magazines don’t work for consumer titles. They do, however, work great for BtoB.
20 Word Summary: Digital magazines don’t work for consumer titles, unless the audiences are well defined. They do, however, work great for BtoB.
The detailed report:
The symposium was chaired by Peter Meirs from Time, Inc. If you know anything about Time, you know that they do consumer titles aimed at broad audiences. Thus, it should come as no shock that Peter was less than thrilled about digital magazines. Granted, he’s hopeful for the future and likes to look far down the road, but this time he was more interesed in talking about things that don’t work. Or rather haven’t worked. For him. Peter’s a brilliant a guy but even he admitted he wasn’t exactly a natural choice for the chair. However, mad props to the guy for admitting he knew "less about BtoB than anyone in the room." Peter’s upfront in saying today’s digital magazines don’t work well for him, but he gets that they work for others.
Next up was Steve Paxhia from the Gilbane Group, which is completing the first ever comprehensive study on the audience size and growth of digital magazines. Steve delivered a very similar executive summary to the one he delivered at our webinar last week and said the complete study would be available from the sponsors in the next few weeks. We’re one of those sponsors but - truth be told - I was hoping Steve would give up more of the goods yesterday. As MediaBistro demonstrates today, surveys coming from sponsors are often not as trusted by the media. Regardless, Steve’s message was that things are great for digital magazines. When we see the study, you’ll be the first to know.
Next up was Gloria Adams from Pennwell. Gloria has been the pied piper for BtoB digital magazines for some time and while her show offered little new material for those of us who’ve seen her perform before, it’s always a good show and was freshened up with the latest data. We’re a big fan of Gloria - she’s a great cheerleader for digital editions.
Gloria was followed by Sylvia Sierra from Access Intelligence. Among other solutions, Sierra uses our Nxtprint product, courtesy of the YGS group, though I wasn’t aware of this until she told me prior to the program. I hadn’t heard Sylvia speak before and was extremely impressed. Great insight - well presented, and another big fan of digital magazines. Here’s the head-scratcher from her presentation, though:
Access Intelligence is the same company that publishes MIN’s BtoB, where writer Steve Smith has frequently made a habit of blasting digital editions. His favorite line is that they’re a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. In previous posts, I’ve accused Steve of being a lazy journalist because he rarely backs up his assertions with quotes and/our sources. Now - realizing that a publisher he writes for has such a vibrant outspoken supporter of digital editions - I’m not sure what to think, other than that the employees at Access Intelligence should mingle a bit more. (Disclaimer: I’ve written for MIN. Aside from Smith’s columns, I’m a fan. Alas, Smith is the one entrusted to the keys of the digital kingdom over yonder, so readers can expect to hear more of the same from him.)
So that was panel one - 3 people saying digital magazines saved money and generated revenue being moderated by a guy who had little good to say about them. A wee-bit off-center, but successful never-the-less.
Panelists shifted a bit the second time around, with myself and a competitor joining the panel along with Marta Worhrle. All went well and I don’t think I said anything that I haven’t spouted on this particular soap box before.
Was this event better than the Digital Magazine Forum from 18 months ago that we had less than flattering things to say about? I’d say yes and no… 18 months ago, there was no clear delineation between who was successful and who wasn’t. Yesterday, the line was drawn pretty clearly: Digital Magazines work for BtoB and the jury’s out about whether or not they work for BtoC, but if you’re going that way, go after a narrow niche.
Though that makes for a good story, I’m not 100% certain it’s the whole story. Keep in mind that the lion’s share of consumer titles run through Zinio. And keep in mind that just when people were embracing browser-based EVERYTHING four years ago, Zinio rolled out a downloadable product. In recent weeks, Zinio finally turned that particular ocean liner around and released a browser-based solution. While far from perfect (in our Nxtbook opinion), it’s a big step in the right direction. This wasn’t even discussed in yesterday’s sympoium but it crossed my mind: is the lackluster performance of general audience BtoC digital publications due to the audience or the horse the publisher opted to ride at the time? Only time will tell.
Though the audience for the event was skewed in the BtoB corner, I wished I had the opportunity to bring up this point to the BtoC crowd. If you see a BtoC publisher who attended the symposium, send this post their way.
I clearly struck a nerve with my statements on Tuesday. My intention was not to disparage the service providers who offer these digital facsimile models but to say that enough time has passed to know this isn’t a model that works for many consumers. Imagine that Sony brought out a new digital TV that required special software for different shows, letterboxed every program and had a button to zoom in on the screen to see details because the resolution was 1/16th of a regular TV? How many sets would they sell?
Marcus and Cimarron both did an excellent job supporting their model in their remarks and I have nothing but respect for the technologies and expertise they bring to publishers. These technologies obviously work great for BtoB and selected BtoC markets and I truly support using facsimiles for sampling, first copy delivery, catalogs, etc. I wish I had made that clearer in my presentation.
I want this to work and I think it can but we need to recognize that the consumer is the ultimate validator and it seems they are still waiting for a better alternative to print. NXTBook, Texterity, Olive, Qmags and Zinio are great partners and resources for publishers that have an audience that fits their model but it’s time for some new ideas!
Thanks for the comment, Peter. I appreciate it. Still, I continue to think there’s a lot more going on than simple technology issues. If the technology truly wasn’t there, how would BtoB publishers be able to so articulately explain their success?
The BtoB success stories go far beyond audience, in my opinion. These publishers have demonstrated a focus and dedication to the medium, rather than simply just run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, which seems to be what most of the lackluster BtoC titles have done.
Moreover - per the last paragraph of my post - the early adopters among publishers of BtoC titles often went with downloadable readers (pointed out by panelists as being a bad idea) and offered readers no way to view content from the publishers’ websites, which is the way most consumers begin their brand interaction with the publisher.
As a technology provider, we’re tasked with relentlessly improving our products and will continue to do so, but if so many BtoB publishers are being successful, perhaps the reasons many BtoC titles haven’t enjoyed similar success go further than audience, and include more business-centric reasons, such as technologies chosen, strategy and execution as well.
Several months ago, we instituted a 30/60/90 day plan to help publishers set up good digital magazine strategies. Other providers do something similar via “best practices” groups. The point here is that - just like everything else we do in business, the product doesn’t succeed without a well executed strategy and launch, and when we talk to publishers who’ve had less than stellar experiences, a lack of the former is often part of the problem.
Again - not discounting the need for the product to improve at every turn. Just saying many factors are to blame when lackluster results occur.
M
Marcus: as I said and as you’ve repeated, I don’t know anything about BtoB. But I do know those publications have a different demand curve than consumer pubs and there’s a different level of engagement based upon whether content is read for business or for pleasure. I won’t argue that absolutely committing to the platform may yield a larger audience but larger is a relative term. If we went full bore on dig mag marketing efforts and doubled the amount of subscribers we captured during our experiments with eCompany Now, Popular Science and SI on Campus it would have still represented, at best, less than 1% of those title’s overall rate bases. If you added back the incremental production, marketing and service costs we would have still been on the wrong side of the P&L. I hope you aren’t suggesting that the reason we failed to attract digital readers is because we’d selected a different online technology than NXTbook.
Publishers like Time Inc. view this model with opportunity cost in mind. Why invest in a model where the industry leader has captured far less than 5% of readers per issue when you could put those incremental dollars toward online where traffic is measured in the millions and the revenue stream is proven?
“I hope you aren’t suggesting that the reason we failed to attract digital readers is because we’d selected a different online technology than NXTbook.”
Not necessarily. Hindsight’s 20-20, but here are some basics that BtoC publishers - by and large - haven’t done. These are features standard to Nxtbook but - to be frank - are widely available today:
*Browser-based products. I’m of the opinion that if Zinio would’ve been browser-based from the beginning, circulation figures would be much higher. Just my opinion, but I think this one aspect prevented explosive growth.
*Flexible DRM allowing people to browse selected pages of protected content. Protected content has been largely walled off from everything Web 2.0 until Nxtbook and Texterity came out with these features in the previous year.
*Content indexed by search engines. No explanation necessary.
And while larger is definitely a relative term, the costs to do digital magazines via enhancing a PDF are quite small, relative to a custom created Flash project.
My opinion: A consumer title using a replication model (low investment in terms of time and money) in a browser-based environment, indexed by search engines with flexible DRM that allows the publisher to simultaneously monetize and market their content could be “successful,” given proper strategy and execution. And while success will always be relative, it would be a noble experiment that would cost a fraction of many of the experiments I’ve seen publishers attempt.
You may be correct that online digital facsimiles would have generated more audience had that technology been available from the beginning. Of course the user experience may have been worse for other reasons since most consumers in 2001 were still using 56KB dial up connections. The client based readers turned off a lot of people in my company and the lack of consumer response confirmed their viewpoints. I’m still happy to help any Time Inc. magazine team that wants to do a facsimile initiative. But that’s not what they seem to be looking for at this point.