For the past six months, you’ve heard rumors about the "Gilbane study," the first report EVER to co-mingle data from the biggest names in North American digital magazine publishing (plus a few other companies). Rather than the company specific reports we all toss out from time to time, this was the first time that actual publishing activity and reader activity have been put together to create a comprehensive picture of the industry.

Here are two impressive numbers from the report: More than 13,000,000 subscriptions are being delivered across 3286 magazines  (mostly in North America). Wow - how’s that for a good number?

The report also includes a large Best Practices section, with many case studies featuring Nxtbook customers. 

We’ll be releasing our official copy of the report very shortly, but if you just can’t wait, drop me an e-mail at mgrimm [AT] nxtbookmedia.com, and I’ll send it you the old-fashioned way (PDF).

In many conversations I’ve had with people about social media, blogging, etc…. the inevitable question that comes up is, "Where do people find the time to do THAT?" I’ve given many long-winded answers, but none of them are as witty and as insightful as Clay Shirky’s explanation at the Web 2.0 Expo. If you’re a publisher, the take-away here is simple: as your readers become more of Generation Y, they will expect to participate in your media. If they can’t, they’ll likely consider it to be lacking.

Spring has obviously sprung, as evidenced by the amount of publishing professionals taking to the roads in local races. Last weekend, the Nxtbook team had better than a half-dozen participants in a local 5k that drew nearly 3,000 participants. Meanwhile, a few other Nxtbookers made their way up to Allentown for the Lehigh Valley Half Marathon. But for running documentary work, we were all out-shined by Rex Hammock, who videotaped his way through the Country Music 1/2 Marathon. Nice work, Rex!

Here we see somebody selling something on Craigslist… to help tell the story, he references an article about it in a Nxtbook.

When we made the decision to launch LiNKED Magazine last year, it was due to a growing sense of frustration with how the press was focusing on print publishers who didn’t "get" new media - all while we’re constantly working with publishers trying to forge new digital initiatives.

However, we also understood that a secondary benefit of creating our own digital magazine is that we’d be able to see our product through the lens of our customers. Here’s what we’ve learned from the data that comes to us from our second issue being released this week:

1.) People stay inside a digital edition longer than they stay inside your website. The average reader from this week stayed inside LiNKED for 4:30 and read 12 of the 18 pages, though 15% made it all the way to the last two pages.

2.) People click-through a digital edition at a much higher rate than they click through a web-site. 10% of the visitors clicked on an ad in this current edition. This is actually a bit lower than what most of our publishers see (usually closer to 15-20%), but I think a good bit of that can be explained that we were the only company to run an ad in the publication. It stands to reason that if our readers had a choice for other advertisers, those advertisers would’ve benefited.

3.) Social media is a small - but vital - component of a digital edition. How small? According to our tracking data, only a  small percentage of people did something "social" with LiNKED - posted it to a forum, blog or saved it to a link aggregator. However, this small percentage of postings led to about 40% of the total traffic to the book. Posting to blogs and forums create third-party referrals for your content, which is vital for growing brand trust and readership. As important, these third-party readers came without any marketing cost.

• Government Technology - November 2007
  Example of flash bellyband
  (tags: bellyband-flash)

Well, this doesn’t help. A new study shows that 18% of the e-mails people have requested ends up in the spam filter.

Even worse, many of these things aren’t things that you can easily control:

Message content doesn’t carry the same weight as sender reputation in determining where a message is delivered…

Then again, some of it you can:

The top three most
frequently triggered “red flags” were emails containing images with
little to no text, a “from” name that isn’t real and messages that are
60 percent or more HTML.

But the real point here is this: If you’re relying solely on e-mail to deliver your digital edition, you’re missing the big picture. Your digital edition can and should be promoted on your website and within your RSS feeds. Keep in mind, the Nxt Widget allows you to this this one time and never have to do it again. So it’s easy, it’s free and it will help you reach those 18% of your digital subscribers who didn’t get your e-mail.

We could give you our opinion, but wouldn’t you rather read a detailed article that appeared in one of our customers’ magazines? We thought so!

Junta Joe has published The New Rules of Custom Publishing - 9 Key Strategies for Creating a World-Class Content Marketing Company. Wow - that’s quite a promise. No worries, though. As usual, Joe delivers what he promises. Check out the book here.  

Did you know that the Nxtbook Corporate Offices are just down the road from where Jim Furyk learned his way around the links? We expect that Jim and the rest of the PGA crowd will be enjoying Inland Empire Golfer, one of the newest publications in the Nxtbook family. Like all Nxtbook publications, Inland Empire Golfer had the choice of any background color they wanted. Not surprisingly, they chose a gorgeous shade of green. Check it out here.