Long Tail Gets Longer: What it Means for Mag. Circulation

The Harvard Business Review takes a look at how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory is holding up online. In a nutshell, it’s perhaps longer (more titles) and flatter (making fewer sales) than originally thought. In fact:

In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the U.S. (most of them through iTunes) 24 percent sold only one copy and 91 percent sold fewer than 100 copies.

The paper suggests that blockbusters continue to rule on online sites (good for the blockbusters and the aggregators) and consumers have more choices (good for the consumers) but neither of these are leading to benefits for the producers of niche content (which is pretty much the same as B2B publishers).

It’s this reason that Nxtbook uses the Nxtstand - a newsstand designed to quickly get your niche customers over to your Web site. We simply don’t think there’s success to be found on aggregation sites. At least not for our customers.

 

links for 2008-06-27

• Dealernews - April 2008
  Ad-Gen and Preview feature in action. Even if you’re not a subscriber, you can click on the PREVIEW button to get into the publication. Doing so delivers you to Ad-Gen, a lead generation tool that delivers leads directly to the advertiser or publisher.
  (tags: ad-gen preview drm)

Why a Digital Magazine?

At today’s Webinar, we asked publishers if they had to pick one reason to have a digital magazine, what would it be? The choices given were: Revenue generation, circulation building, cost savings, brand extension or environmental. The wimpy "multiple" option was not allowed.

 Here’s how the percentages break out:

• Cost savings: 50 percent
• Revenue generation: 25 percent
• Circulation building: 12.5 percent
• Brand extension: 12.5 percent

The cool thing about a digital magazine is that by doing any one of the options, the environment automatically benefits (even though no one voted on it). In fact, the really cool thing about a digital magazine is that many of our publishers enjoy all of the benefits. But when we made publishers choose just one, that’s how the results played out.

We Love the Shiny (Uninvented) Things…

PriceWaterhouse recently release a study called The medium is  the message* Outlook for Magazine Publishing in the Digital Age. Well worth the price (free) and it includes a few interesting tidbits. Here’s just two:

• Consumers expect to pay more for printed content than for content distributed electronically, but they are not prepared to pay more than half the sum they would pay for a printed magazine.

• Of all magazine categories, the two where demand in digital content is the smallest are women’s magazines and home and garden magazines.

Now, if I were so inclined I’d reference the picture from the study below and proclaim that e-Paper will be HUGE and the demand for it is DOUBLY HUGE. However, it’s worth noting that the version of e-Paper shown to those taking the survey was full color and magazine-size. In other words, the way people most want to read content is the only one that hasn’t been invented yet. Imagine the scores if they’d offered readers the choice of viewing content on the heads-up display of a flying car!*

 

*This sarcasm in no way underscores my burning desire for e-Paper to be the biggest thing since real paper.

 

Crossing the Border…

This industry was created by publishers looking to save money and grow circulation. More specifically, the industry was created by publishers seeking to grow circulation overseas. So how do you that? This article from Circulation Management offers several thoughts:

For the preponderance of B2Bs that are completely or heavily advertising-driven, the core question is, of course, whether the advertising base wants to reach qualified readers in countries outside the U.S. Whereas decades ago, the answer to that question was not infrequently “no” or “not really,” global economics, including the massive buying power represented by emerging Asian nations, have obviously made international markets extremely attractive or critical to marketers of most types of business products and services. 

Don’t Miss the Webinar!

This Thursday, we’re sponsoring an awesome webinar being produced by BtoB Online:

Digital Magazines: Readership and Revenue Growth in the New Era

Speaker for this presentation include Steve Paxhia, one of the authors of the 2008 Gilbane Report on digital magazine readership and Bob Fernekees, Publisher of CRM magazine and a Nxtbook customer for quite some time. You can read about Bob’s success with Nxtbook here, or better yet — join us for the Webinar at 2 p.m. (EDT) Thursday.

 

It’s Like Blind Date, Except Without the Blind…

Congratulations to Junta Joe and his Junta42 Match service, which went live today. As an organization with a custom publication, I can tell you this: This service is well needed.

For the first time ever, marketers can find the right custom publisher for their needs. Congrats to Joe and to all of the publishers who’ve already signed up for the service.

And if you’re a marketer in need of a custom publication, this should now be your first stop. And if Joe built this thing right — and we suspect he has — it will likely be your last stop, too.

Getting Rid of E-mail…

As we’ve said many times, our most successful publishers are promoting their content in more ways than e-mail. Here’s the statistic we repeat all the time because it’s vital: one year ago, 85 percent of all Nxtbooks were read as a result of e-mail. Now, despite readership that’s nearly doubled in the past year, the percentage is just more than 50 percent. People are becoming less and less reliant on e-mail as a way to consume your content.

If you really want to understand why and how people are changing, read this great post from Dave Pollard. Pollard is always ahead of the curve, mind you, but he’s almost always on the correct road.

So, what I’m saying is that if I had no e-mail address (and for that matter, no voicemail box), I’d get along just fine. I’d send and receive lots of spontaneous IMs (including those in Skype, Twitter and Second Life) that sometimes migrate to voice-to-voice conversations. I’d get my exercise at work walking the halls to visit with people, and learn to be a better phone conversationalist. I’d use RSS to create my own personalized newspaper of important things to read, and I’d tweak the sources and filters so the volume was just enough to be comfortably manageable in the time I have available for reading. And I’d go home from work every night with nothing in my work inbox, and to bed at night with nothing in my personal inbox.

Where is the Web Going?

Every now and then, somebody writes something really important about content and where it’s going. Today, that guy is Scott Karp. We’ve been a sponsor of his for several months and it’s because of posts like this one that make all of us think harder.

Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.

Scott’s post was written, in part, because the AP now says they’re going to charge bloggers for words taken from their content. If Scott’s post is a bit too deep for you, our buddy Stanley Bing questions the price the AP is charging:

News comes that the Associated Press, in one attempt to define the nature of content in the new media, is looking to charge online writers for use of their material — as little as five words, which would cost $12.50… 

Other things that cost $12.50:

• A cab ride from my home to my office;
• A cup of coffee and one slice of buttered toast from Michael’s Restaurant (including tax and tip); and
  
• Two magazines and a newspaper at the airport.

I think you can see that each of these things is of greater intrinsic value than five words from the Associated Press.

 

“Our Digital Edition is Now More Powerful”

Don’t take our word for it, though. Take his. And notice the use of our widget on the left-hand column of their Web site.

Awesome.

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