This digital product is hot, hot, hot

It’s always a good time when a woman gets to read a men’s magazine as part of her job.

I swear I was researching whether Men’s Health advertises their digital edition on their website when I got sidetracked by the “100 Hottest Women of All Time” feature – I just had to know what millennials know or care about anyone not currently starring in primetime TV or the latest action movie.

(Quite a lot, it turns out: silent star Clara Bow, 1950s glam Hollywood hottie Rita Hayworth and a dancer I never even heard of from the 1930s were all included, right along with all the usual supermodels and Hottie #1 Jennifer Aniston. Color me surprised!)

But back to Men’s Health digital, the scholarly subject of today’s blog. Christopher Pine graces the print cover, and the iPad edition boasts some fun behind-the-scenes photo extras of that exceptionally hot young Captain Kirk and  … OK, I really got sidetracked there.

Right, then.

With a digital circulation of 76,462 reported to the Association of Audited Media as of December 2012 – 4.5% of its total circulation of 1.9 million – Men’s Health is a leader in the digital space. It was one of the earliest magazines to go digital, and its experience shows. This is one hot digital magazine.

Digital magazine publishing for digital natives

Men’s Health has a fairly young demographic, meaning their primary audience is what we call digital natives – people who’ve never known a media world without computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets. The Rodale publication appears to be meeting that challenge well.

There are hundreds of reviews of the digital version, almost all of them from loyal Men’s Health readers, judging by their comments, and almost all of them glowing. Trust me, this is not the norm. Every week I see scathing commentary from regular magazine readers of various apps from around the magazine industry. Digital magazine publishing isn’t as easy as it looks.

It’s easy to see why readers love digital Men’s Health. Excellent use of the technology shows up the minute you download the app. While there’s no free content in the app – which is a shame, as I opined last week – you do get something I haven’t seen anywhere else, at least not yet: An awesome video preview of the newest issue featuring the magazine’s editors extolling the highlights of the issue.

This makes one ponder the sad possibility that even magazine editors will now be judged by how young, good-looking and camera-friendly they are instead of being hired for their actual editorial skills, like all those plastic TV “news” anchors … but I digress. It was certainly a more compelling preview than just scrolling through a static table of contents.

Interestingly, Men’s Health also employs a digital layout we’re only just beginning to see in the industry. Instead of horizontal, right-to-left swiping throughout, Men’s Health uses the traditional swipe only for the first page of every article and for all ads. To read the rest of each individual article, you swipe up and the article itself is laid out vertically.

New York and Consumer Reports both use this layout, and I personally find it easy and intuitive, despite the fact that it’s completely different from the print experience.

In addition to the behind-the-scenes photo gallery from the main feature that I mentioned above, the digital version also offers other fun things. The Christopher Pine feature, for example, is supposed to be telling readers how they can achieve their career goals in the same way as the actor. When Pine explains how he over came certain challenges, on the same page you’ll find a small image in the corner that you tap, and you’re rewarded with related advice from a career expert.

Price, promotion and partners: More than healthy

When it comes to other crucial components of this product, the magazine is in pretty good shape. Men’s Health is thankfully not giving away its content, at $34.77 for print and $23.99 for the digital edition. Of course, at Mequoda we believe the digital product should be priced the same or higher compared to the print product if you’re putting in the extra cost and effort to produce fun stuff like videos and other extra content, but this is a debate within the industry that’s probably years from being settled.

And Rodale’s promotion of the digital product is fairly fit, showing up in the digital newsstand, social media, email, the app itself, and the Men’s Health website … although I had to Google “Men’s Health digital” to find the page. You won’t find any digital subscription promos at the Men’s Health website any other way that I can determine, and I hate to see this product being left only to those readers eager enough to read it digitally that they’re Googling for it.

Another fitness faux pas: The print subscription includes the digital version, but you wouldn’t know it. The print subscription offer page makes no mention of even the existence of a digital product, and I only figured out that it’s included with print by reading about it on an FAQ page … which I only found via that Google search.

Still, Rodale’s very healthy digital product is being seen these days in all the right places, including the Apple newsstand (including an iPhone-specific app that’s included with the iPad version), Zinio, Google Play, Windows and Amazon. The Kindle version is a simple replica at this stage, though, so we look forward to seeing it gain the fun bells and whistles that the iPad version boasts.

If you’re not in the digital space already, you should be making your move soon. I recommend that you buy an issue of Men’s Health on your iPad pronto – strictly for research purposes, of course! – and find out how you should be doing your own publication’s digital edition. And be sure to tell me what you think of it or what your own plans include – horizontal layout? Videos? Better promotion of your digital product on your website? I’m dying to know what our readers are up to!

Did you ever think that consumers would prefer digital magazines over print magazines? We do, and we think it’ll happen within the next seven years.

And that judgement isn’t even based on speculation.

We just completed our first annual 2013 Mequoda Tablet Study, which revealed that in 2013, 55% of internet users own or have access to a tablet.

If growth occurs at the same rapid pace we’ve been witnessing thus far, we predict that market penetration will be at 85% by 2020.

And to align those numbers with the rate at which people prefer digital magazines to print magazines, we start with our 2013 Mequoda Tablet Study results.

Our study, which surveyed over 1,200 tablet users, showed that 26% prefer digital magazines to print magazines. This number is significantly high considering that the iPad (the leading tablet in our study) was released barely three years ago. 0 to 26% in three years? Remarkable!

At the same rate of growth, we predict that number will rise quickly  to 77% by 2020 as digital magazines get better and conform to the user experience that subscribers expect.

We predict that by 2020, 65% of adult US Internet users will prefer digital magazines to print magazines. To get this number, we calculate that the percent of consumers who prefer digital magazine over print magazines is equal to the percent who have access to a tablet (85% by 2020), times the percent who prefer the digital editions (77% by 2020). In 2020, that calculation is 77% x 85% = 65%.

And how can we make such a bold statement when people still claim to like the feel of paper?

Digital magazines are better in at least seven ways:

• Timely – When the issue is released, it can be viewed and downloaded instantly. For news-based magazines especially, this is crucial. It’s even important for those who look forward to reading the latest celebrity gossip as it hits the newsstands.
• Portable – When given the choice to bring seven magazines on a 12-hour flight, or an iPad mini, which takes up the least amount of space?
• Collectible – Just as tablet users collect apps, they can collect magazines. Magazine apps are increasingly allowing subscribers to clip and save certain articles of the magazine too, which makes it even easier to replace print. And again, apps take up a lot less space than print magazines!
• Searchable – Usability of print magazines has never been optimal. Sometimes it’s hard even find the index amongst a plethora of ads. Searchable (and tap-able) magazines reduce the barrier to engagement.
• Shareable – App publishers are getting savvy about allowing subscribers to share content. In a social media driven world, customers want to share everything with everyone, a feature of print that simply doesn’t exist naturally.
• Video enhanced – Thirty years ago, science fiction films predicted that we’d be watching video news clips in our print magazines. That was just silly. Digital magazines with video tutorials, interviews, and even video advertisements make much more sense!
• Audio enhanced – Along the same lines, subscribers enjoy listening to sound clips, interviews and advertorials, something not even possible in the print medium.

Tablets have bridged the gap between magazines and magazine websites. They’ve created a complete hybrid of information. Once tablet users actually see and engage with a digital magazine, they’re more likely to subscribe.

The rapid consumer adoption of tablets. and an early  preference for digital magazines over print magazines by their users, leads us to conclude that a long-range digital publishing strategy is imperative to the survival and prosperity of every magazine publisher.

That strategy should consider format, partners, and a paywall subscription website to be used as a home base for all paid magazine subscribers. Mequoda advises and guides all its clients in achieving these goals, and you must begin to chart your course, too.

While it’s certain and probable that format and platforms will shift, it seems clear that the web will remain a nexus for all consumer activity and the number one application for tablet users.

Download your copy of our 2013 Mequoda Tablet Study: How American Adults Consume Magazines on Tablets.

As the first wave of digital magazine apps has passed, we’ve discovered one thing: People hate apps with nothing in them.

And yet, the vast majority of digital magazine apps available today are nothing more than a retail outlet for single copies and subscriptions!

They are labeled as free, but have nothing to offer unless a purchase is made within the app. This practice is the reason why so many magazine apps have low ratings, as can be witnessed by reading the reviews.

While I’ve been blogging recently about prices, and opining on the dire need to raise them, at the same time, magazine readers are like many other digital consumers in expecting something free on their tablets. And disappointing them right out of the gate when they first download your app is not exactly a marketing Best Practice.

In case you hadn’t noticed, your competition and peers are starting to solve this problem. So it behooves publishers to rethink their app strategy pronto, if not sooner! But fear not, we have some solutions to the app customer service nightmare, courtesy of some very savvy publishers.

What kind of apps do people want, #1: The magalog

Condé Nast, as we’ve mentioned before, is on the leading edge in digital magazine publishing. So it’s no surprise that they’ve developed an app for SELF (Motto: Tap into your best self!) that combines free content – enhanced with videos and extra “tapable” content, with sell copy urging you to subscribe now.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s a lot like the magalog of old – a carefully crafted blend of free content and marketing messages. SELF does it with a back issue from 2011. On a page titled Let’s Get Physical, featuring two exercises that are illustrated with video, SELF proclaims, “Buy it now! Get the new issue of SELF and let us be your personal trainer!”

There are variations of this message on every page, from beauty to fashion to healthy eating. One quibble: You can’t get to the “Subscribe” page by tapping on these messages. You have to know enough about apps to tap on the Home icon. At least one of them includes instructions, at least; “Go to the home screen of this app to buy the newest issue! You’ll find tons of easy ways to eat better today.”

All in all, a clever approach that combines the best of free content with marketing. Watching someone actually do an exercise is roughly 2,376 times more useful than looking at a static image, and that tempted even an old marketing hand like me to hurry up and subscribe.

What kind of apps do people want, #2: The free issue

Interestingly, the publisher who perfected the magalog in the olden days, Consumer Reports, doesn’t do an app magalog. Instead, it delivers free issues. This is the most common style of content-rich app, and you can choose to offer either a free back issue, or a special issue you’ve put together for this purpose.

Consumer Reports does the latter, although I suspect it’s actually an existing back issue. Why do I only “suspect?” Because there isn’t a single date in this free issue, not even in the car reviews. The reader has no idea which model year is being reviewed, and that goes for the tablet reviews, the washer and dryer reviews, and everything else in the free issue.

As a marketer, I love it. You get the full flavor of Consumer Reports’ rich content, yet nothing is really being given away – who would choose a car based on data that could be years old, and then decide they already got what they wanted and exit the app without subscribing?

What’s more, at the end of every article is a full-page ad featuring an image of an iPad with a cover related to the content of that article – the Best Tablets, Cameras, TV, Phones, E-readers and More issue after the tablet review, the annual auto issue after the car review, and so on. The text is the same on every ad: Enjoying your free preview issue? Subscribe today and save up to 59% off the single-issue price.

What kind of apps do people want, #3: Updated free content

Instead of just offering a free issue, you can really step up your game like New York magazine. This is the most entertaining, awesome digital magazine app out there. I kid you not.

New York has broken new ground. With this free app, you get daily content including news, features and columns. Pages and pages of free, new content. You could easily spend an hour or more reading it.

Then, when you’re done, and you’re well and thoroughly dazzled, you simply tap on the magazine link at the bottom left, and you get the table of contents and the opportunity to buy.

If you’re already a subscriber, you still enjoy the free content, and when you’re ready to read your issue, it’s only a seamless swipe away. Finally, for the pièce de résistance, there’s a link on the “Latest News” page – the home page for the free content – to the website.

New York’s free news content and paid magazine content are both easily accessible at all times with their unique “window shade” feature – just pull the handle with a finger. And then there’s the thumbnail menu of the magazine’s pages at the bottom when you’re in that part of the app. There are just so many ways to love this app, I can’t list them all.

Everything New York magazine does is readily available, free or for a price, seamlessly connected, and easy to navigate. Clearly you need a fairly large staff of journalists to make this kind of daily content happen for free, but the app, launched on March 28 to mark the magazine’s 45^th anniversary, is a home run. Of course it’s far too early to tell how it will impact circulation and website visitors, but we’ll be checking back in a few months to report on that.

Meanwhile, please share your favorite digital magazine apps, and let us know if there’s a model we haven’t mentioned.

I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to comment on magazine pricing strategies in the online age. It’s a topic of burning importance to publishers, after all, now that the new digital versions of their products are in growing demand by a tablet-addicted public, and advertising revenues are falling.

Interestingly, an article in PCWorld published just weeks before the iPad’s debut in 2010 speculated that publishers would continue their traditional pricing models of $10 to $20 per year … and “I hope that’s the model iPad magazines go with,” added the writer. Of course you would. You’ve been getting thick, glossy, content-rich magazines for pennies since the beginning of time. Why would you want to pay more?

One of Don’s biggest pet peeves is the decades-long policy that magazine publishers pursued – mostly to ensure that they had as many readers as they had promised to their advertisers – of pricing their publications dirt cheap. $9.99 was indeed a common price for 12 full issues of a consumer magazine.

As Don notes, that policy trained generations of consumers to believe that magazines are cheap, throwaway products. Mind you, this seems to have been restricted to the U.S. When we taught our Digital Publishing Course in London to global publishers recently, the eyebrows in the room rose collectively to the ceiling when Don mentioned the prices of some well-known American magazines. They were astonished that any industry would shoot itself in the foot in that way.

Don’s angst over this issue made him practically float out of his chair with happiness at the recent MPA Swipe 2.0 conference in March when Hearst Executive Vice President John Loughlin declared war on cheap magazine pricing now that digital versions are so popular.

What does Loughlin think is a fair price? “19.99 is the start of fair value,” he said, adding that nearly 900,000 Hearst subscribers have already agreed with him. Loughlin isn’t shy about his position: He also sounded this theme when talking to the Wall Street Journal in January. “I hope that this is the demise of $6 and $7 and $8 and $9 print subscriptions,” he said at the time.

Digital magazine publishing as camouflage

As the WSJ noted, Hearst is joined in this campaign by publishers such as Bonnier, owner of Popular Science and Field & Stream, and by Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker. In fact,as I recently wrote, The New Yorker has not only raised its prices, it did so in a somewhat surreptitious way by simply attaching a $20 higher price to the magazine, print or digital, when it launched its digital edition in 2011.

Nowhere did The New Yorker actually announce a price increase, thus completely camouflaging that extra $20 behind the dazzling debut of its app.

The Economist has also joined in this sleight-of-hand. While we love the universal pricing that the venerable publication adopted from the beginning for its digital and print editions – one price for digital, print and archive access – they’ve recently not only abandoned universal pricing, they took the opportunity that move provided to bump the price from $129 to $160 for the bundle, while leaving the $129 price in place for digital-only or print-only.

What makes digital magazine publishing worth more?

So 2013 would appear to be all about higher digital prices being accepted by the consumer, and at the same time driving higher print prices. But are digital magazines really worth more than the old print magazines? At Mequoda, we really do believe that higher prices for digital subscriptions are about more than just correcting decades of underpricing.

Digital magazines, as Hearst’s Loughlin points out, offer extra value, including instant delivery, enhanced and extra content, and interactivity, not to mention being easily archivable and searchable without taking up space.

And for younger consumers, it also appears to be important that digital magazines are green.

Then there’s the data starting to trickle in showing that tablet owners hit two of marketing’s most desirable demographics: They’re young, and they’re affluent. It’s not often you can get both of those demographics in one product. This two-fer means that the target audience for digital subscriptions is more willing to spend money because they have more to spend – and on top of that, they haven’t been trained to think that print magazines are birdcage liners.

How often do you get a win-win situation like that? And oh by the way … as I discovered recently, Condé Nast’s tablet subscribers are renewing their subscriptions at a higher rate than print-only subscribers – and they’re also paying higher prices for their renewal subscriptions. By my count, we’re now up to a win-win-win.

So we have a massive advantage for digital magazine publishing in terms of price. But that doesn’t mean everyone is on the bandwagon with Hearst and Condé Nast. Time Inc., for instance, told the Wall Street Journal that because they never discounted their subscriptions in the first place, they’re not raising prices now.

Walking the walk

Fair enough. We’ve seen from Time Inc. that they understand online publishing pretty well.  Among the country’s top magazines in circulation, TIME and People are two of the only three publications (the third being National Geographic) to boast an OMI above 1 – that is, they have far more unique visitors to their free website than they have paid circulation. The OMI is one of Mequoda’s key metrics for measuring the success of an online publication, specifically, its audience development strategy.

Just for fun, I decided to see how these “top” publishers are pricing their subscriptions, as an exercise in digital publishing savvy. I also checked out a list of Don’s “Nimble Niche Leaders” who all have solid OMI numbers.

Here’s what I found:

Magazine pricing policies are as varied as snowflakes. Even within one publishing company, there’s no standard.

Print prices:

• All the Nimble Niche publications but one, with OMIs over 1, are charging at least $15. National Geographic is the low at $15, and most are at $19.97-$29.99.
• The Nimble Niche exception is Eating Well, which charges only $9.99 for print ($5 on Amazon!).
• Hearst may talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk. They still give away print, under $8 for their two represented magazines. They also defy the other pattern: Magazines on our list found on Amazon are all less there than on their websites, except for Woman’s Day. No, I have no idea.
• Meredith is the biggest sinner. $5 on Amazon, or $15 at the website, for Better Homes & Gardens – and even less for other publications? Boggles the mind.

Digital prices:

• Prices are impossible to characterize. But note the jaw-dropping $4.99 charged by Autoweek!
• Some publishers with outstanding OMIs haven’t gotten around to bundling (and thus have no opportunity for disguised price increases … yet).
• Some folks have apps, others have digital editions available only from the website … and Videomaker says it’s available in iTune, not in the Apple Newsstand … but I couldn’t find it there.

Pricing is sure to continue as a mystery for many publishers in this completely new era. At Mequoda, we’re still voting for strategies of universal pricing for all editions and raising prices in print. And as these things evolve, we’ll follow developments and come up with some best practices.

In the meantime, what are your experiences? Do you have a carefully-thought-out, bulletproof pricing policy? Or are you winging it like the biggest names in the industry?

Digital apps are driving readership, traffic and profits

In the three years since the introduction of the iPad, it’s become clear that the tablet has rescued the magazine industry from the brink of destruction. Mequoda noted as early as 2011 that digital magazines had already become solidly profitable, led by Hearst Magazines and other forward-thinking publications such as The Economist.

Of course if you read this blog regularly, you know there are enough digital magazine apps available in 2013 that we’re reviewing digital magazines and apps regularly in order to stay on top of the trends. And the most important trend for magazine publishers to note: Mobile web usage is predicted to surpass desktop usage by 2015, according to a Morgan Stanley study.

Tablet statistics vs. smartphones

One thing confusing publishers, however: Does “mobile” mean smartphones, or does it mean tablets? Unfortunately for those of us trying to figure out where to put our resources, researchers, including Morgan Stanley and Google, think it means both.

So what we have to do is decide whether to focus on phones or tablets for our apps – assuming most of us are niche publishers lacking the endless resources of, say, Meredith or Rodale – and Mequoda has decided that tablets are far more important to publishers than are smartphones.

But Mary, you say, surely more people own smartphones than tablets! And I agree that they do. But there are still a lot of tablets out there! Mequoda recently conducted its own survey of Internet users, and found an astonishing 55% of them own or have access to a tablet. Unlike most surveys, which ask about ownership, we asked about access, too – because we know that couples and families often share. And we think that’s a pretty impressive number for publishers to heed.

(Yes, we’ll be publishing complete results of our tablet statistics shortly. Stay tuned to this space!)

Besides, for publishers who make a living selling long-form content, the smartphone just isn’t a medium that will work for you. Even young people with great eyesight won’t be comfortable consuming content on a four-inch screen for more than a few minutes. As Don likes to say, the smartphone is for “snack” reading.

Although it’s hyped as a positive statistic, the MPA recently found that 39% of users spent one hour or less reading magazines on their smartphones. That’s good news, all right! But what about tablets?  That number is 73%. Now those are tablet statistics to believe in!

Researchers believe that this kind of usage comes about because the tablet is still portable – and being taken away from home by more people every day, just like smartphones – and at the same time, much more readable with its larger screen. In 2011, a Pew study showed that 42% of tablet users regularly read in-depth news articles and analysis on their tablet.

Tablet statistics have good news for publishers

What does all this mean for magazine publishers? Why is Mequoda focusing so heavily on tablet apps? Consider this: PriceWaterhouseCoopers has predicted that consumer spending on digital magazines will exceed $80.2B by 2016! Tell me you don’t want to get in on that action.

What’s more, 66% of the MPA’s tablet survey respondents said they believed that they would be increasing the amount of time they spend reading digital magazines on their tablets in the coming year. And finally, 46% of those tablet users reported that they were reading more magazine issues in any format than they had done a year before the study.

And finally, the MPA also found that 63% of its tablet respondents visited a magazine’s website as a result of reading the magazine’s digital version on their device.

In short: Tablet statistics prove that users spend more time reading magazines on their devices than do smartphone users, they spend a lot of money to do so, their device reading also drives them to magazine websites, and tablets are causing many users to read more magazines than they did when print was the only available option.

Tablets have not only stopped the downward spiral in magazine readership, they’ve turned the trend around. That helps all of us sleep better at night.

Turning tablet statistics into cold hard cash

Forward-thinking magazine publishers have already developed digital editions of their magazines, of course. As I’ve recently noted, some big players, such as The Atlantic and Forbes, have hit the revenue jackpot with their apps. These folks are taking advantage of something that tablet users say they crave: features that they can’t get in a print version, such as related videos and photo galleries.

And even smaller – much smaller – publishers, such as the nonprofit Biblical Archaeology Society, have managed to do the same with adding video and photos to their magazine – and the cost was worth it, because in just three months, the organization’s digital offerings managed to contribute 6.4% of its entire 2012 revenues!

What’s more, having digital-only features is helping publishers change the public’s well-known belief that digital content should be free, or at least as cheap as the insanely low prices the industry has foolishly charged for its print products over the past few decades. Recall that the New Yorker increased its subscription price by $20 simply by bundling its fancy new digital magazine with print.

Other ideas we’re hearing about from magazine such as New York include enabling readers to move seamlessly between the online subscription website and the digital magazine. Remember, even without that feature, tablet users report that they often wind up at the website eventually anyway, and that’s the kind of traffic you want to increase in order to enhance revenues from Internet advertising.

And in addition to delivering more impressions per Web-based ads, tablet advertising offers a revenue stream of its own: Researchers are reporting year-on-year growth in 2012 of an incredible 600%. Any publisher who relies on advertising should sit up and take notice of that statistic.

All in all, no publisher should wait one single day more to launch a digital magazine. No matter how tiny your operation, there appears to be no downside for digital magazines and apps, and at the same time, there are clearly massive new revenue streams to be had.

Of course we recognize that it might seem a daunting task. I suggest that publishers without a clear path to mobile magazines start out by watching our webinar, 5 Tablet Publishing Trends below. And for even more ideas, including with the latest trends, check out our three-day Digital Publishing Intensive, coming up in July.

On a day when journalists were rising to the occasion as they are rarely asked to – as the city of Boston hunkered down in lockdown and a manhunt was under way – I was proud to be associated with the magazine industry.

Some of the oldest, most venerable and presumably staid publications were doing something their founders certainly could never have imagined, as they reported on the news in real time, on a medium that’s broadcast instantly into homes and tiny handheld communication devices all over the world.

My assignment last Friday was to review the app created by The Atlantic, a 156-year-old publication that was born from the minds of Boston’s intellectual elite – hardly a publication you’d expect to be leading the way in any creation of the 21st century.

And sure enough, The Atlantic spent the early years of website and digital publishing floundering.

When it made a profit in 2010, it was the first time in decades. But this very failure is what has driven the company to be one of the industry’s digital leaders, according to owner David Bradley in a 2010 interview. Bleeding red ink meant that there was nothing to lose.

So The Atlantic didn’t just jump into the digital age. It dove headfirst without a safety net.

Throwing caution to the wind

Sure enough, by going “digital first,” The Atlantic has turned itself around. It is now one of the rare magazines with a positive Online Media Index number, and in fact has improved that number since 2011. Its current number, because it has far more website unique visitors than paid circulation, is 3.48. That number is up from 3.23 in 2011.

And at the recent MPA Swipe 2.0 digital media conference, president M. Scott Havens shared that their audience has increased by 330% from 2009 to 2013, and its financials have improved by 76%. Havens noted that the keys to the turnaround are the magazine’s world-class editorial talent, staying true to the brand’s culture and DNA, and a forward-thinking digital strategy.

So what, exactly, is The Atlantic’s digital strategy?

I started out with the iPhone app, which was just launched in February. And I forged bravely ahead despite almost universally ugly reviews. “Buggy” and “prone to crashing” were the kinder descriptions. Almost every reviewer complained because the app wasn’t available to them in the Apple Newsstand, but had to be bought from iTunes.

I had just downloaded the app from the newsstand, so apparently The Atlantic remedied that situation fairly recently. And I didn’t experience any of the bugs that earlier reviewers had noted.

Instead, I dug into its live coverage of the Boston manhunt, all available free from its AtlanticWired brand, which was deep and varied. Having already spent the morning perusing the coverage from dozens of other media outlets, I could make a fairly informed judgment – and I was impressed. I did notice that there was not a single link to related content, nor any enhancements such as those delivered by Forbes. What you get in the iPhone app is exactly what the print reader gets, except for swiping.

It was simple to navigate the free content, and easy to read. This is not an accident, of course. In a recent Mashable article, Kimberly Lau, VP and General Manager of The Atlantic Digital, said the company wanted to ensure that the experience was different from the existing iPad app and better suited to the smaller screen. The iPhone version therefore features pages created in HTML rather than PDFs, so that users can adjust the font size on their phones. I did, and it was a piece of cake to do so.

Other thoughtful touches include the ability to retract menu bars to fit more text on the screen, and an innovative “folder” feature that lets the reader save free articles in one place. And here’s where I started to wonder a bit about The Atlantic’s digital strategy: One of the best things about the iPhone app, the folder, is mysteriously missing when reading premium magazine content via the iPhone app, and is missing altogether from the older iPad app.

It’s on the Internet. It must be free.

Off I went to my iPad, where I bought and enjoyed the April issue – even if I couldn’t save my favorite articles. Finally, I sat down at my desk to check out the website. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the magazine, a premium product, is available entirely free there! IPad and iPhone subscribers pay for the convenience of digital portability, but nothing else.

Mind you, the subscription price would hardly break the bank. In December 2012, the single-copy price was raised from $4.99 to $6.99. And a one-year digital subscription of 10 issues costs $21.99 when you buy it through the app. If you buy at the website, you’re offered print for $24.50, with the digital editions included for that price. We’re not quite clear why some publishers, including mighty Time, offer different prices for different outlets, but perhaps someone will explain to us in the comments below.

And we’re not huge fans of a $21.99 price point – even less enamored of it when the price of the magazine on desktop or laptop is $0.00. The Atlantic’s early foray into digital publishing seems to have reaped them substantial advertising revenues – Mashable reported that digital ad revenues topped print in October 2011, up 86% year-over-year – which may explain this bargain-basement decision, but the price would also seem to be a remnant of the suicidal, rock-bottom pricing within the entire industry during the print era.

As I recently wrote, some publishers are starting to raise their prices to reasonable levels. The New Yorker made the leap from $19.99 in 1998 to $39.99 during the ‘00s, and again to $59.99 or $69.99, depending on the package, when it launched its digital edition in 2011.

But The Atlantic is aware. Havens recently admitted to Forbes, “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot a little by having the paid app in the iTunes store while offering ourselves for free in Safari.” So 2013 will the year when The Atlantic, which has been giving away its content online since 2005, at least explores a paywall, Havens notes.

Please do! Between the industry’s brain-dead print pricing, and the early training of Internet users in the ‘00s that all online content should be free, subscription revenues will continue to falter unless everybody gets on board the New Yorker’s train. And, The Atlantic’s success notwithstanding, who knows when digital advertising revenues for the rest of the industry will recover to pre-Internet levels?

One other caveat from The Atlantic’s digital edition: There’s no attempt to drive traffic from their free content to the magazine. In fact, when I decided after reading my single copy that I’d like to subscribe, I looked in vain for a link to a “subscribe” page. Later, when I was experimenting and clicked on the “issues” link to buy another single copy, I found a “Subscribe” banner at the top left of that page. Nothing but luck and persistent poking around got me there.

Ah, but as we all know by now, digital publishing is all about experimentation and evolution, and it’s almost refreshing to have something new to learn when I get up in the morning, instead of doing the same thing every day that I did every year since I started my magazine marketing career in the print era – and that everyone before me had done, day after day, for decades.

What do you think of The Atlantic’s app? Did you get it before they added it to the Apple Newsstand? Has it been glitchy for you? Do you think they’re charging enough? Let us know in the comments, and stay tuned for more app reviews going forward as we try to establish some Best Practices for this infant industry.

Mainz, Germany, 1439: Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, invents movable type technology. This launches the information age, and the use of the printing press all over Europe even leads to a name for the new information media, the press.

Germany, 1663: The Western world’s first magazine, Edifying Monthly Discussions, is published. The magazine industry is born.

It took 224 years for an entrepreneur to harness the printing press for generating what we now know as magazines, and create an entire new industry.

London, England, June 20, 1981: The Economist mentions the World Wide Web in an article about CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

United States, Aug. 12, 1981: IBM releases its first personal computer.

United States, Oct. 27, 1994: The first commercial magazine website, HotWired, is launched by Wired magazine. The digital magazine publishing industry is born.

It took 13 years for the magazine industry to jump on the computer bandwagon.

California, United States, April 3, 2010: Apple releases the revolutionary new iPad.

United States, May 26, 2010: Wired magazine’s iPad edition goes live and sells 24,000 copies in the first 24 hours. Condé Nast is only slightly behind Wired. The digital magazine publishing industry is born again.

It took 53 days for the magazine industry to begin leveraging the iPad.

United States, Jan. 17, 2013: Forrester announces that in the three years since the iPad was released, 200 million tablets have been sold worldwide. By contrast, they note, it took the laptop 10 years to sell 27 million units. And today the laptop is being abandoned for tablets.

United States, April 9, 2013: The iPad newsstand includes 8,419 magazine apps. Amazon, creator of the Kindle tablet, has 609 magazine apps.

It took 3 years for the magazine industry to make digital magazine apps as readily available as any other product on the market today.

Anyone who doubts that the iPad is the most important media-related technological innovation in all of human history should re-read those dates. If speed of adoption indicates affection, then consumers and the magazine industry are truly, madly, deeply in love with tablets.

And the exciting thing for those of us who live and breathe magazines is that we get to live through this incredible era!

The other exciting, but also sobering, thought is that the iPad has clearly become the savior of our industry, once on the verge of extinction. The iPad and its competitor tablets are perfect for lean-back consumption of content, in a way that computers never could be – who wants to sit at a desk to relax with their favorite magazine? – and consumers are increasingly demanding rich digital content that print obviously cannot deliver. Finally, tablets are more portable than laptops, but have a large enough screen to make reading content comfortable.

Tablets, led by the iPad, are hotter in the marketplace than anyone ever imagined. Forrester has projected that 112.5 million US adults, or 34.3%, will own a tablet by 2016. In Europe, that number is 105.7 million, or 30.4%. And that’s small potatoes: Forrester also believes that the Asian Pacific region is growing in tablet ownership so fast that it will be the home of 34% of all tablet owners worldwide by 2017.

Caution: iPad ownership in Asia, Eastern Europe and South America is currently lagging behind to the extent that magazines trying to reach the digital audience there may have to rely on iPhones for the time being. And reading magazines on iPhones is problematic, as I’ll be blogging about in due time.

At the same time, the Alliance for Audited Media reported in February that the number of US magazines sold on tablets and other mobile platforms in the second half of 2012 more than doubled from the same period in 2011. There are 289 titles with digital editions audited by AAM, which saw 7.9 million sales, up from 3.2 million in the same period a year earlier.

Put tights and a cape on the tablet, it’s a superhero!

Consumers quicker to adapt than digital publishing industry itself

Oddly, many of the publishers I talk to regularly still haven’t recognized the significance of the tablet to their own survival. Today’s tablets are not the boring black-and-white experience of the early Kindle. They deliver a user-friendly, saturated four-color publishing platform.

The iPad has taken off well beyond Apple’s expectations, and I suspect that Steve Jobs – who initially considered content consumption a minor “hobby” use for the Apple tablet – will go down in history not for the Mac or even the iPhone, but for the iPad.

For awhile there, it was touch and go for digital magazine publishing. Some of us feared that the industry would collapse before the right technology came along. But today I’m thrilled that both the reading public and the digital publishing industry have so quickly adopted the tablet as the lifeline it is today.

Indeed, the data starting to flow indicates that consumers might even love reading magazines on tablets more than they do in print. As reported in FOLIO:, Time Inc. has been researching its subscribers since it launched its app, and those readers say they return to view the same issue close to five times, and spend about 40 minutes with each tablet edition, comparable to the average for print.

Better still, reports Condé Nast, their tablet subscribers (including those who are tablet-plus-print subscribers) are renewing their subscriptions at a higher rate than print-only subscribers – and they’re also paying higher prices for their renewal subscriptions.

Certainly, some publishers are farther along than others in riding the tablet train. Generally speaking, FOLIO: notes in its recent Digital Magazines 2013, the larger the company, the faster and farther the tablet adoption has come. The recent MPA Swipe 2.0 conference speaker list was filled with Hearst, Condé Nast, and other large-circulation publishers discussing their latest app launches, or even relaunches.

But that doesn’t mean smaller niche publishers shouldn’t get in on the action. While Forbes magazine has that absolutely awesome, technology-rich app that I wrote about last week, let’s not forget the comparatively tiny Biblical Archaeology Review, whose digital magazine publishing strategy Don wrote about recently.

BAR is the publication of a nonprofit organization, and has roughly 50,000 unique visitors monthly. But its digital edition drove 6.4% of the organization’s revenues in 2012, even though digital wasn’t launched until October of that year, and that rate doubled in the first two months of this year.

Digital magazine publishing and you

Obviously, Mequoda urges every publisher reading this blog to get going with a digital edition, whether you’re BAR or Forbes, or something in between. The monetization of your content will go through the roof for a plethora of reasons.

First, as FOLIO: notes, tablet editions open you up to younger and more affluent readers. Usually you can get one or the other in your audience, but not both: This is the best of both worlds. In addition, with the cost of printing and mailing print issues eliminated, your content can be “delivered” and read all over the world.

Then there’s advertising. You probably already know that advertisers are fleeing print for digital in droves, but did you know that you can charge more for those digital ads? Rich content enhanced with extra photos, slideshows, videos and audio content such as I recently described in Forbes and The New Yorker is worth more to readers, keeps them engaged longer, and of course, builds a bigger audience base. Not only that, but many platforms allow for interactive buying from within an ad.

At Wired, 2012 saw digital ad revenues hit 50% of its total, and The Atlantic hit 59%. Some observers are cautious, but with the rapid and enthusiastic adoption of mobile magazine reading by consumers, we’re still optimistic here at Mequoda.

There are dozens of companies out there looking for your business in translating your print product to a mobile edition. BAR, our modest-sized client, partnered with BlueToad, and Forbes went with MAZ for its fancier version.

Of course, if you can do it in-house, the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is the industry standard. And another technology that fascinates us here at Mequoda is FlipBoard. Intended originally as a platform for social sharing of consumers’ favorite content, it’s simple to use, and we think it has potential for very small publishers to use for dipping their toes in the waters of digital magazine publishing.

So don’t wait. If you haven’t jumped into the pool yet, take the leap! We’d love to hear about your success stories, challenges, mistakes made and problems solved in going mobile. And remember, being here for this incredible moment in media and technology history is rewarding all by itself, so let’s all enjoy the ride.

When people aren’t talking about Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy these days, it seems they’re talking about iPads. And when they talk about iPads in our world, they’re talking about digital magazine publishing and apps.

The evolution of digital magazine publishing since the invention of the iPad has been fascinating to watch. Some publishers rushed in right out of the gate, without any clear notion of what to do. These folks were roundly criticized by media pundits – and sure enough, while these early apps were a tremendous hit in the first few months, enthusiasm quickly waned.

Yet we now know that the iPad and digital magazine publishing will be the salvation of magazines, as consumer demand for digital content continues to make print less and less viable. The only question remains is, how best to offer our content digitally?

Digital magazine publishing and the free app

Here at Mequoda, we’ve long preached that digital magazine publishing shouldn’t be all about shoveling all your content to the Internet and hoping to make money from ad impressions. Our version of life involves a portal, where you can blog and offer some limited free content with the aim of converting visitors to your magazine; a digital magazine; and a store where you sell your visitors and subscribers other products such as DVDs and books.

We don’t believe in giving away your content, but at the same time, we don’t believe that you should make everything paid content, because without free content you can’t convince people to buy your premium content.

Indeed, one of the biggest complaints consumers have about the fun new content apps that are being offered is that there’s no there there. Downloading something that looks awesome, then finding that it’s simply a retail sales outlet for a magazine, isn’t very satisfying.

Solving this dilemma has fallen to Forbes magazine. Unlike many other large publishers, Forbes refused to fling itself headlong into the digital age. Chief Product Officer Lewis D’Vorkin writes, “We didn’t lust after the pixie dust floating around the iPad like most publishers did.”

Instead, Forbes decided to wait, and in the meantime, to spend its time productively reinforcing its website – which boasted 44.2 million unique visitors in February 2013 – rebuilding its smartphone platform, and reinvigorating the print product.

Then the company started reviewing other digital magazine apps and pondering its next move. As Nina LaFrance, SVP for Consumer Marketing and Business Development, put it at the recent MPA Swipe Conference, “We found that the usual replica-plus versions were beautiful pieces of art. But that wasn’t for us.”

What has Forbes wrought? Something that we at Mequoda think of as a “multiplatform app,” including a rich, user-rewarding environment of text, images and videos, plus unique social sharing features and even the ability to click-to-purchase from within ads.

The Forbes online magazine lives and breathes

Partnering with a platform startup called MAZ, and building its own set of tools that allows editors to self-publish 400-500 pieces of content every day, Forbes has created an experience that allows readers to move seamlessly from the app to the online magazine’s masses of free content and back again, read a free issue, and instantly share content socially.

In reading my free issue, I found links to detailed profiles, photo galleries, opinion, behind-the-scenes pieces about the content and more, all layered on top of the magazine PDFs. According to LaFrance, the current issue contains some 1,600 links to additional content on the website.

In short, the digital magazine functions as a navigation tool to help readers access the incredibly rich content on the website. The app becomes both portal and digital magazine, and rewards the user who downloads it with an unbeatable experience that’s simply irresistible. I don’t even normally read financial publications, and I was ready to subscribe after just a few minutes.

A particularly fun feature within the app is the clipping tool. I admit I could play with this one for hours. You simply use two fingers to tap on an image or article, and you get a frame that you can move to fit around anything you want to keep or share. Besides the fact that it’s fun and useful, in taking sharing of content to another level, Forbes has increased the likelihood of readers helping their content to go viral, and to promote new subscriptions.

Readers as marketers: It’s a theme we’re starting to hear about in digital magazine publishing circles, and Forbes has actually put it into action. When I sent a clipping to myself, I got a lovely visual that actually looks “torn” from a page, plus a link to see the entire article, and a link to download the Forbes app. And when I clicked over to the article, there’s even a “Try Forbes for free” link – the free content in exchange for data that’s at the heart of the Mequoda method.

Digital magazine publishing and apps are within your reach

We always urge our clients and Intensive participants, all of them small niche publishers, to take it slow when it comes to apps, at least gadget apps. When you’re good at content, but you have limited bandwidth in terms of money, time and staffing, why try to become a software company? Gadget or game apps that do something other than promote your magazine won’t make you a dime.

But as long as you already have a robust portal and lots of visitors to it, and you’re making a substantial portion of your revenues from digital magazine publishing, you should be considering how to build a content-driven app to access your content and sell more subscriptions to your digital magazine.

These bells and whistles at Forbes might seem daunting to you. But startups like MAZ, which Forbes uses, are popping up every day. Which means that costs are dropping rapidly, and your content- and feature-rich app could just be months away. Mequoda believes that the iPad and magazine apps are the most significant change in publishing since Gutenberg invented the printing press, and we’re excited to start following this path with our clients.

If you have any experiences with building digital magazine publishing apps, or any favorite magazine apps that you’d like to share, please let us know in the comments. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to playing at Forbes.

On March 3, 1923, TIME magazine was born. It was what most publications were in that era: an aggregator, dedicated to rewriting the news from around the world in pithy, pointed nuggets. To their prospective financiers, founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden boasted that the average reader could get through an entire issue in 30 minutes.

Fast forward almost exactly 90 years, and today’s TIME is no longer a mere aggregator, but the grandfather of the weekly news magazine, boasting a worldwide staff of journalists, award-winning, in-depth reporting and an august history.

But this is another turning point in TIME’s history. With parent company Time-Warner recently deciding to spin it off, along with its 20 magazine siblings, as a separate, publicly-traded company – and with print publications, especially news weeklies, already struggling to survive in an instant-media digital world – the future is frighteningly uncertain.

I wish I could whisper in TIME’s ear.

TIME as it turns 90

First, I’ll give TIME credit. The website boasts a strong OMI – that is, Online Media Index, which is the ratio of online users to print users (you should have more of the former than the latter) – and generates about 10 million unique visitors per month.

So they’re doing about 80% of what a strong digital media brand should be doing. But that’s simply not going to be enough going forward. Content strategy, brand strategy and revenue strategy all have to be perfect for TIME. Because in their cutthroat market, anything but perfect is death.

I often praise The Economist for refining its content strategy, expanding its brand strategy and keeping its revenue strategy subscriber-based. TIME’s got content down, but is losing its brand in the mad dash to become CNN news, and is completely upside down on revenue strategy. TIME management is assuredly wrestling with new ideas for the future even as publications like The Economist redefine digital publishing.

I believe this could be the beginning of a new era for TIME, if only its leadership knew what Mequoda clients know. It’s time to go back to its roots of investigative, interpretive journalism as content strategy, stop trying to compete with Yahoo, CNN and every other soundbite medium as a brand strategy, and forge an entirely new revenue strategy that relies more on its products than its advertising.

The method that rescues dying print publications

I’m not going to be bashful here. I’ve spent years perfecting the Mequoda Method of successful online publishing and marketing, I’ve seen it work over and over, and I believe it would work for TIME.

One of the problems that mass media brands like TIME struggle with is the fierce competition for advertising in the digital age. If you can advertise on CNN or Yahoo and be seen thousands of times a minute, all day long, why would you bother with TIME?

The answer is: You won’t. So when I say TIME has to get back to its roots, I mean it has to not only remember that its primary function has always been investigative journalism, but also that journalism’s function is serving readers first and advertisers second.

This lesson was driven home to me last week at the MPA Swipe 2.0 event, where I enjoyed hearing about the incredible strides that TIME’s competitors are making with digital publishing. One thing I heard over and over: Content is king (or at least queen). The asset that these publishers believe is most important to them is their writers. Long-form journalism reigns, and all their brands are built around it.

Sadly, TIME Inc. was represented at Swipe only by Sports Illustrated, and trust me when I say that the topic those magazine’s editors discussed as the event’s grand finale was not journalism, but photography. If you know what I mean …

No, it was major publishers at Hearst, Meredith, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Foreign Affairs who waxed eloquent about their journalism. These folks are confident that real journalism – not general newsgathering – is a valuable commodity even as they leap into the digital world. Indeed, even TIME executives and employees are said to be heartened at the spin-off because they believe that now they can return to the time-honored Henry Luce journalism model.

So if TIME, The Atlantic and similar publications aren’t trying to compete as general news publications, they’ve become niche brands – just like all niche brands which have never relied on advertisers for the bulk of revenues.  And the Mequoda Method works for all niche brands, large and small, because it solves the advertising problem and makes the most of the content that publishers are already producing.

TIME magazine of the future, step 1: Content strategy

Read TIME and understand. Remember that advertising slogan from not so long ago? It was compelling, effective, and truthful. But while TIME rushes to compete with soundbite journalism, the “understanding” part has been overshadowed by an emphasis on speed. The first step to TIME’s future is to refocus its content strategy on what it’s always done best, and claim the niche of original, in-depth reporting and interpreting the news.

Americans could once again trust TIME to tell us what we need to know, what it means, and what everyone else is saying about it. TIME must find its editorial voice once again, and prove that the news weekly is still meaningful.

This means refocusing its content strategy on interpretive journalism, discarding soundbites, 30-second “news” videos and other trappings of an Internet news source, and putting its service journalism front and center. TIME has always been the home of the best writers, the best thinkers and the most compelling topics, but these things have been somewhat lost in the desperate search for relevance in the digital world.

Reminding us of its true purpose should not only increase TIME’s readership, but will also help put the shine back on a slightly tarnished brand.

TIME magazine of the future, step 2: Brand strategy

No matter how popular Internet and cable TV news become, one thing will always be in TIME’s favor: Reading stimulates thought in a way that video does not. Former parent Time-Warner is an Internet and TV company, not a news company. Even they recognize the cognitive dissonance, according to media reports:

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes explained the spinoff will allow the larger company to “focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile”. He also said it will allow Time Inc. to attract “a more natural stockholder base”, which could mean luring investors who want to invest purely in news and publications rather than the wider world of entertainment.
Time Warner move leaves Time Inc. magazine company to fend for itself
The Guardian, March 3, 2012

To rebuild the brand, TIME must be led by a magazine publisher or editor with a journalism degree. Not someone from advertising, not someone from TV. And if I heard that this individual was someone who had actually worked somewhere in the TIME Inc. building for at least the past 20 years, I’d be a happy man. That someone would, of course, be familiar with the Luce model that many of us in the industry believe is TIME’s saving grace.

Once value has been added to its news reporting by interpreting and explaining the news, TIME’s content becomes evergreen. More than just “Today the President said …”, which is irrelevant tomorrow in the instant-news business, TIME would have content that has meaning far into the future. And evergreen content like that can be recycled into new premium products such as books and DVDs.

In just a few years, historians, students and simply interested readers would be able, for example, to study a TIME book on the 2012 election. TIME becomes the go-to source for understanding a moment in history. Remember my post on the Biblical Archaeology Society and their collections of past material? They use them as teasers to sell subscriptions to their archives. If a tiny niche publisher like BAS can do it, certainly TIME can.

With its evergreen content and new products in hand, TIME could then generate that brand wheel to support its business model, like the one below. This includes a new portal, TIME Daily, where TIME would offer readers free real-time reporting, and also host SEO blogging that drives web surfers to subscribe to another new brand – the new, all-important e-newsletter. It also includes free reports, which are used to harvest email addresses. This is the heart of the Mequoda Method.

As all my successful clients know, those email addresses and newsletter subscribers become the most qualified audience of potential buyers of premium products for any publication, from TIME down to the tiniest craft publication. TIME could sell evergreen DVDs, books and book collections all day long.

TIME magazine of the future, step 3: Revenue strategy

If you visit TIME.com today, you find free news soundbites and free videos. Even the archives are included in a print subscription. TIME simply isn’t selling much of anything, and, as mentioned above, it’s competing with much bigger fish for advertising.

On the new theoretical TIME brand wheel I’ve invented, the only free things at TIME.com are the portal/blog, the newsletter, and the free reports which are used to harvest email addresses. Videos, books and archives become paid, premium products along with the magazine itself. Presto: brand new revenue streams, and still no advertising required.

But once TIME has created satisfied readers and established desirable new products, advertising comes back into play. The point is to establish the appealing environment of interested, engaged readers that print publications once had before TV and the Internet, so you can get advertisers to pay you the prices you were once accustomed to before the Internet came along.

TIME wouldn’t be delivering just eyeballs and impressions. It would deliver adjacency and qualified buyers who spend an hour or more with TIME – not just fleeting moments as with cable TV and Internet ads. Once again, the news weekly can command attention, respect, and hefty advertising dollars. But never again should a journalism publication rely so exclusively on advertising that it chases website-based economics.

As I often tell clients, your magazine is not a website – if you do it right, it’s worth far more to advertisers than any website. And your website is not a magazine – it’s only a place to generate an engaged audience and sell premium products that include your magazine, books, DVDs and even events.

I’m still refining the Mequoda Method as the evolution of the tablet and other technology continue to change publishing. Starting next week we’ll be blogging about some fantastic ideas for digital publishing that we learned at Swipe, with some of the savviest publishers on the planet revealing how they’re managing their brands and moving forward in the digital age, without falling prey to the Internet, TV and cable, and without trying to be something they’re not.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll share your thoughts on this ongoing struggle in the comments below. We can all learn from each other  … and all hope that TIME leads the way.

There’s been a tremendous amount of speculation on what the perfect digital magazine might be and where the future of digital publishing is headed.

While others pontificate, we have projects brewing. The focus is not to produce a digital magazine itself, but to produce the digital magazine subscription website where the digital magazine should ultimately be housed. It will be the nexus between client and server relationships.

The subscription website is important because people who own tablet devices are spending more time browsing. The World Wide Web is still the ultimate app as it offers so much content.

When it comes to the digital future, some publishers focus on the digital magazine and some focus on the digital magazine software that powers the magazine; we focus deeply on the subscription website.

In each case, every publisher has different desires of how a digital magazine should function. I’ve laid out several possibilities because at the end of day, I don’t know how it will play out in the long term.

Design and functionality characteristics of digital magazines that publishers are deploying

Short-term variations will be critical to publishers’ success over a period of time.

Publishers need to consider three main issues associated with the process of creating and distributing digital magazines.

Digital magazine publishing software option #1 – Issue ownership:

-Download Option: Subscribers would receive an issue of a digital magazine and it would reside on their hard drive. In this instance, a subscriber would have total ownership. For collectors of antique media, the download option would be the desired platform for digital magazine publishers to use.

-Streaming Magazine: In this scenario, subscribers would never have possession of the digital magazine. Instead, the subscriber would have possession of a reader or browser that would allow the digital magazine to be read online.

-Rental Option: This would allow subscribers to view the content as long as they remain paying members. In this instance subscribers would be relying on the publisher to stay in business while maintaining content and software functionality.

-Hybrid: This option would let subscribers download the file, but certain pieces would not be included. For instance, photography, video or software apps may live on a server elsewhere. Subscribers would have possession in sorts, but unless the publisher manages to keep those files in good standing, things may no longer work as the magazine ages.

Digital magazine publishing software option #2 – Digital Rights Management Security:

Digital rights management security will depend on how publishers let people access the content itself. Most digital magazines will be accessed over the web through subscription websites. Some will require registration, while others will allow downloads with no registration or blocking.

Password protection will involve a simple password associated with the user’s account or a more elaborate security scheme where file recognition is on the server’s side. The user would be reliant on the publisher to maintain functionality.

When registration is required, subscribers will be able to access the content as long as their account is active. If the subscriber’s account becomes inactive, the publisher will put the content back behind the firewall.

Digital magazine publishing software option #3 – Price in Term:

Single Copies – What price will you offer? How will it compare to prices associated with print content? If your digital issue is full of rich media, it can be priced higher than print products. If its features are comparable to those found in a print issue, the price should be similar.

Forward-based Subscription – Consumers would receive the current issue plus a year or two year’s worth of content for one price. In this model you will have to determine if current subscribers will be able to come back and download the issue more than once.

All-Access Pass – This pricing strategy would give access to every issue of the digital magazine that has ever been published.

If you want to build a digital magazine subscription website…

-You should have a thorough open-minded Needs Analysis before the building process starts.

-You need to be informed about your options on how subscription websites should be set up and coded.

If you seek recommendations on these pressing subjects, we’d love to guide you through the process.

The subject of digital magazine publishing is an important issue to a majority of publishers. New business opportunities can be found within a successful approach to digital magazine publishing, as reverse integration is possible. Digital publications starting online can begin to launch physical products and live events. Currently, the Mequoda Pyramid remains solid, as live events and physical products are still highly desirable.

If you’re on the East Coast in April, join us for our Subscription Marketing Secrets session at the Internet Marketing Intensive. If you’re on the West Coast, we’ll be presenting the Internet Marketing Intensive in Malibu at Pepperdine University this fall.

I look forward to seeing you in 2013.

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Originally published on 2/16/2011