Digital Magazine Publishing posts focus on the digital revolution that is taking place for magazines, and how to create the best digital magazine publishing experiences for your subscribers and members.
At Mequoda Publishing Network we are big on helping print publications adapt to today’s digital environment. There are quite a few ways to bring your brand online these days, but the future of publishing is creating an online magazine. You might be thinking, “Well, yeah, everyone knows that.”
What you might not know is how we
We talk a lot about digital magazine subscription marketing around here, and unwittingly neglect your very important print publications. Once you’ve established your subscription price strategy, the next problem to solve is the offer you make in your magazine subscription marketing campaigns.
I find myself publishing digital books, magazines, and newsletters as I have transitioned away from print over the past decade. I wish I could say that I made this transition to help the planet and slow global warming. Sadly, that was not my motivation. I do believe that digital publishing is the future and that
One of the biggest moving targets in Mequoda best practices is the metered paywall.
The biggest question we get is, how much free content is enough? And you have to be careful when you’re a special interest publisher comparing your own paywall model to the New York Times or the Financial Times who have historically given
As we move into the brave new world of digital magazine publishing, one thing has not changed: your people are the absolute key to your success.
Over the past year and a half, we have built a new digital magazine publishing team from the ground up. I thought I would take a few minutes today to share with you
Digital magazine publishing is and continues to be the current and next frontier, with unlimited revenue stream options coming from creative use and integration of text, images, video, social content, native advertising and so much more.
Print advertising rates have always been robust. After all, magazine ads have been superior to broadcast ads in several ways: They offer a targeted environment, they offer adjacency, and they’re self-paced, giving readers as much time as they want, not just 15 or 30 seconds.
Digital magazine advertising offers the same enticing features. And these ads
Digital magazine publishing has come a long way from its inception. Some publishers are still offering digital magazine apps, however, the future of revenue for digital magazines comes from web editions that are sold through magazine subscription websites. Web editions are superior because they can be accessed easily from any device, giving them vastly more marketing
A magazine sales letter full of content and detail works best for selling premium information products online. No matter how hard we try to make winners out of short sales letters (after all, they’re much less work!) we still see A/B split after A/B split show that longer magazine sales letters work best.
Online magazine design has taken a number of steps forward in recent years, starting with the launch of the first-ever web magazine in 2014 called I Like Crochet. An online magazine, also known as a web magazine, is a premium publication that is read through a magazine subscription website. In our definition, it is not
“I simply don’t understand the opportunity,” one veteran magazine publisher told me at a recent industry conference. “My magazines are sponsor-driven. My issue archive includes hundreds of back issues. I have all these vendors and partners offering to digitize my back issue archive and make it available online. But I don’t have a clue how
When it comes to launching a digital magazine, there’s no single FAQ online that can answer all your questions. What type of digital magazine should you build? How should you price it? Which software is best, and is it still advisable to build a tablet edition, or should your primary focus be on building a
Contrary to what you’ve probably been thinking, the ultimate digital magazine is built in a browser, not an app. That’s why web magazines are skyrocketing to success because users are quickly figuring out that they’d rather use a web magazine than an app magazine.
Not convinced? Below we’re going to talk about the most important digital
We often hear about predictions for digital magazines; how they will grow, the revenue generation expected throughout the industry and the time frames associated with these numbers.
These predictions are important, as they help publishers better prepare for the future. What’s more interesting, however, is discovering how people who are already consuming digital magazines are enjoying
If you’d asked us five or six years ago if it was a good idea to publish a digital magazine app on a tablet so that it could be downloaded in some of the world’s largest newsstands, the answer would’ve been a resounding yes. At the time, publishers reported that 20% of their subscription sales
Only five years after the advent of the tablet, strategies for successful digital magazine publishing are starting to sort themselves out and deliver measurable results. Of course at Mequoda, we’re all about documenting these things so digital publishers don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
Here are 10 things you must do if you want to join
The scenario plays over and over again: A publisher invests the time and money to build a multiplatform publishing website, only to wonder why they’re not generating as much subscription revenue as expected. When we audit their efforts, we find they’re not sending any promotions for their magazine. Coincidence? Or maybe their magazine promotion ideas
Do you want to know how to start a magazine? In her book How Not to Start a Magazine, B. Ann Bell says the number one way new magazines fail is through poor budget planning. Poor planning for printing, postage, and marketing are among the top expenses in her book, originally published in 2006. Fast-forward fifteen
“Mad Men” may have died, but in the digital age, advertising’s been born again. In fact with a 21st century propensity for growing new tentacles, the conventional ad is evolving into a new lifeform of Star Ship Enterprise proportions, boldly going where no man (or woman) has gone before.
First, no matter how platforms change, ad-driven
Although we work with many established legacy publishers, we also work with publishing startups. In fact, these startups benefit from our years of work with legacy publishers teaching them how to start an online magazine. Meanwhile startups can teach a thing or two to the digital retread legacy publishers.
If you’re a publishing startup, or are
These days, when people talk about newsletter best practices, they’re usually referring to free email newsletters, used as a marketing tool to drive inbound traffic to websites. But because some of us are old-time journalists here at Mequoda, we also think fondly of paid newsletters, a classic journalistic form that survives today in the digital
Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Portals are not meant to be read from front to back, and are in no way linear. Users may begin on an article they found through search and hyperlink
Digital-only magazines have had their ups, downs, and (in some cases) its “in-betweens.” While some digital magazines have remained powerful and influential after going digital, others have since been discontinued. And some of them end up seeing the light of print again after they go digital for while.
Publishers have their reasons for adopting digital-only magazines–from a
It’s amazing to look back to just a year or so ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers will soon create a digital version of their product if they haven’t already.
Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Compare that with other media, where the articles are arranged with taxonomies and hyperlinks, and are not linear.
Hyperlinking is not linear. Any medium that enables or encourages the reader
As you know, having an online portal for your information is essential for growth. Using the web to publish and distribute content and not just serve as an extension of your brand is critical. But this is a new beast, and to be prepared, you must plan. This holds true even if your business has
Digital magazine publishing software is important; which option are you using?
Publishers have been trying digital magazine publishing software during the last few years in hopes of creating the best digital products for their audiences. And like everything else in digital magazine land, digital magazine software has evolved at light speed since we made our initial
The answer many people give to the common question, “What is a web magazine?” is often incorrect by our definition.
Some may say that a magazine’s website is a web magazine, but strictly speaking that’s not correct.
Others believe a web magazine is the same thing as a digital magazine, and they’re partly right, but perhaps not
When WIRED went live with the world’s first iPad magazine – a mere six weeks after the iPad’s debut – it sold 24,000 copies in the first 24 hours. For a few years, most magazine publishers and consultants, including Mequoda, focused on the 20% of tablet users reading digital magazines every day on their devices.
What
It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the word magazine which simply means storehouse, is becoming more true than ever as magazines go digital and digital magazine libraries make it easier than ever to be a genuine storehouse.
Printed magazines have always been a storehouse of curated work from multiple authors brought together by editors and other artisans to
How would you like to increase your subscription revenues by almost 60%?
It can be done, and it’s not magic. All you need are a paid subscription website, a couple of other great products to sell and one secret: Decoy pricing.
More and more publishers are discovering this secret. And it’s not a new concept. You might
Magazine pricing strategy has certainly evolved over the past decade. Back in 2013 we still believed that universal pricing was the best way to handle print, website, and tablet products. And at the time, it was! Today, we’ve evolved our own thinking to incorporate true all-access subscriptions, and we have come up with two prices
Do you run or contribute to an online magazine?
Most of our readers would consider themselves in the magazine publishing industry, that is true. But do you think you run an online magazine, or a digital magazine, a print magazine or a magazine website? You might have chosen two or three of those, or you might
If you’re making plans for your own digital publication, it behooves you to also plan how to make money from it with strategic digital magazine marketing.
After all, buying a list and mailing a big direct mail package, in hopes of getting a bunch of people to subscribe as we all did in the old print
Knowing how to start an online magazine requires first understanding the differences between an online magazine and the dozens of other publishing models available to you in the 21st century.
These differences range from the obvious – a comparison with print products, for instance, is pretty straightforward – to the more nuanced: say, discerning an online
Because an amazing amount of work goes into producing each new issue of your digital magazine, promoting each issue should leverage the unique content included in that issue. We can spend hours researching and discussing the merits of the cover story topic and how it should be presented. Your digital magazine cover story thus becomes a nexus for promoting each new issue through all of the native online
A magazine membership includes two primary components; a magazine subscription and a magazine archive, or library.
Magazine subscriptions, of course, are quite familiar to you if you are a magazine publishing company— they are the future issues of the magazine. Unlike most businesses, magazines have traditionally sold products that don’t yet exist. The consumer agrees
How do you usually promote a magazine? Subscription and newsstand sales are the keys to driving advertiser interest in print magazines, but how does that change in the digital world?
Blow-in cards. Social Media. Direct mail and email renewal series. Subscription agents. The list goes on for all the ways publishers promote print magazines.
Now what are
The latest publishing trend isn’t just about magazine publishing in general. It’s a digital publishing trend: Launching digital-only magazines without legacy print publications behind them.
Mequoda has a client who is doing just that. Prime Publishing is a company that began with free websites but no print publications whatsoever. Now the company is launching digital-only magazines
We started this year with the launch of Food Gardening Network, a digital magazine publishing system that is built to follow all of our best practices, conduct additional testing, and most importantly—deliver high-quality gardening advice and recipes. It’s a hub for food gardeners of all skill levels, for creating and maintaining a food garden at
We currently operate more than a dozen digital magazine publishing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Prime Publishing, Yankee Publishing, and Cabot Heritage Corporation. The tips and advice provided in this article are drawn from our direct experience around building and growing successful premium magazine and all-access digital magazine
It’s a good time to be a publisher. Brands have launched their own brand magazines, and many publishers have gone digital-only. In our minds, there’s not a competition between print and digital, more like an obvious need to create an online magazine from your legacy brand if you haven’t already.
Online magazines are available through a
Publishers are embracing digital magazines because users are. And it’s true for B2C and B2B, as well as pure paid subscription, controlled circulation, or both. These publishers are taking advantage of digital editions to provide the features users want and can’t get from print – video, curated collections, audio, interactive tools, social sharing, and more.
When a magazine goes digital and becomes an app, or a web magazine, it becomes alive. And that’s scary for some publishers. Suddenly, ads become more valuable to advertisers because they can be clicked. Content becomes more rich because it can also be hyperlinked to references and authors on the web. Live content can be
For digital publishing analytics to be useful, they must set the stage and provide the publisher with information on what to do with the data. On the surface, most analytics don’t provide action items; you need to know how to use them.
At Mequoda, we value four types of digital magazine analytics, which we use to
Suppose you are in the digital magazine publishing business. In that case, you may be using a myriad of media platforms for acquiring, engaging, and retaining free and premium subscribers. Even if you’re doing well, everyone wants to sell more, build more, improve their product and take it to the next level.
Our team has recently
I read with interest the latest report on digital subscription growth across the media industries. The New York Times continues to be the legacy winner that is clearly replacing local newspapers around the globe with its powerhouse editorial product and legacy brand name. While most newspapers continue to struggle, The New York Times and a
We are big proponents of both web magazines and web libraries, plus various collections and special issues that can be derived from them to create robust membership products. We recently had the privilege of managing all membership and subscription marketing for a long time publishing partner and winner of numerous community awards.
Our mandate was to
A web magazine library is an archive of your content going back many years, likely since the beginning. When done right, you can upsell a substantial number of would-be magazine subscribers to this higher-end, and higher-priced product that requires a relatively small amount of additional time, compared to the investment in creating the original content
Since most magazine publishers are competing for these dollars and losing the battle, the need for revenue from subscriptions increases every day.
