Our most-read digital magazine publishing posts of 2015 reveal a desire for better understanding of creating, publishing, pricing and selling magazines
This year in our Digital Magazine Publishing articles we’ve tackled everything from choosing the right magazine software, to identifying pricing strategies that get buyers to pick your highest package, and how to design a digital magazine
Category: Digital Magazine Publishing
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.
How magazine content monetization has gotten more profitable, if you publish it in the right places
Something we know from talking to niche publishers at the industry events we speak at, and during our own CEO Institute, is 99% of magazine publishers are giving away 100% of their content and not separating their free portal content
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What is a Paywall?
Digital magazines are relying less on advertising by implementing paywalls that influence more subscriptions
Remember the days when digital editions of magazines were only available by paid subscriptions? You’d arrive at a static home page with a snapshot of the recent issues, and then be prompted to sign in or register to view any content. The
These six publishers are nailing sponsored content, but all in very different ways
Last week we talked about the guidelines for writing native content advertising, also known as sponsored content. Now let’s take a look at some great examples of publishers who create this sponsored content for their advertising clients.
These particular examples of sponsored content were
From content planning to determining your exit strategy, every successful multiplatform magazine business model includes planning these seven things
At Mequoda we spend a significant amount of time building custom business plans for our niche magazine clients who are adopting a multiplatform magazine business model. During this process, we run through seven elements of the business
Why do modern multiplatform magazines make so much money?
At Mequoda we talk about publishers that have multiplatform magazines on a regular basis, but what we don’t always mention is that those who are the most niche, see the greatest gains. General interest publishers are having a heck of a time figuring out a content strategy,
If you’re looking for digital magazine software that allows more control over pricing and distribution, then a web magazine is for you
Attention publishers: digital magazine apps for tablets and mobile phones are leaving money on the table.
We recommend having a magazine app, because, who can beat the marketing that comes from the online marketplace that
Ever wondered where Kim and her team find all of their magazine industry news for our daily Digital Publishing Trends posts?
Well, I have, so I asked them for their top 5 sources – their “go-to” sites for discovering the latest and most useful news and analysis for magazine publishers. Of course, they had a hard
Keep more revenue while offering a better customer experience by ditching the app and launching a web magazine
In our eyes, there are two digital magazine publishing software giants: Adobe and Mag+. When we work with publishers developing digital magazine apps for tablets, we recommend Mag+, a spin-out company that sprung from Bonnier Corp.’s very early Popular Science app.
We
The digital revolution not only makes content more accessible; it offers additional ways to generate revenue
Have the changes in digital magazine publishing created new revenue generating opportunities for you?
Those opportunities may exist for many digital publishers, even if they don’t realize it due to other focuses.
Starting an online magazine business brings one platform that offers advertisers the visibility and tracking accountability they desire
A growth in digital medium usage portrays the increasing value of digital magazine publishing
In 2015, our Digital Magazine Market Study study showed that people read an average of 2.37 digital issues and an average of 2.91 print issues every month, which puts digital magazine consumption at 43% of print magazine consumption and climbing rapidly.
Going digital means that you’ll attract a
Is gamification the next step in digital magazine design? The medium is certainly calling for it.
Design – its theory and execution – has always been important for publications, and now that importance ranks right up there with technology itself. Major redesigns have taken a back seat to periodic tweaks and refreshers that make digital magazines more nimble
Breakthroughs in digital magazine pricing and contrast pricing yield startling results
A few years ago, we were still huge fans of universal pricing for digital, print and website subscriptions.
We still like it. We just don’t like like it.
Universal pricing, in which the subscriber gets access to your content on all of your platforms, certainly has its
Our Mequoda Best Practices list continues to evolve. Last year certainly proved that standards – and even what is technologically possible – can change almost overnight.
Here’s a look at our current digital magazine app publishing best practices for your reference, with a few notes on what we expect might to change:
Even Sesame Street is pulling together more dynamic digital magazine apps than most legacy publishers
The magazine industry used to be a tank of big fish in big pools. Only the most prestigious writers worked at magazines, and a managing editor was a title worthy of a six-figure salary, a glass-paned condo and a driver. Advertisers
The upsides and downsides to the tablet statistics floating around
Tablets have no doubt shaped the future of reading. From digital magazines to eBooks, publishers have embraced the technology almost as much as readers have.
From bottomless reflowed pages to video advertising to text scrolling seamlessly past stationary images – and all the other tablet magazine best
As MediaShift puts it, “what advertisers want from B2B media is solid leads on potential customers for their products and services.”
Not so long ago, web and digital magazines were considered adjunct media—the consensus among publishers was that almost like ads, they would drive prospective subscribers to their print editions. In fact as readers struggled with
Over the past few years, publishers have been wringing their hands over the failure of digital advertising to come to their rescue as print advertising revenues continued to evaporate. You had to look hard to find the occasional glimmer of hope.
Have you ever spent time poking around on your iPad, just to see how customers feel about the digital magazines they buy and subscribe to? We make this a habit of ours, picking out some of the common themes (typically, bad usability and type size complaints) and also purchasing habits.
Given that we’ve already revised our thinking since I started regularly reviewing digital magazines back in March, I concede that anything we name as a Best Practice in digital magazines is purely temporary.
But I’m going to bravely list our current Best Practices for the mobile magazine that I know you’re all going to publish, if
Five years after Apple introduced the iPad and the magazine industry latched on for dear life, digital magazine consumption has reached 43% of print magazine consumption and is climbing rapidly.
We’ve been writing about the pricing of website and digital and print magazine subscriptions a lot lately, which has lead us to dig up some intriguing themes. Of course, the word “intriguing” tends to mean different things to different people: In discussing our best practice of decoy pricing with a client who is a psychotherapist
If it seems like everybody has a digital magazine, that’s because they do. If you’re a publisher and reading this, then I’m guessing you’re not quite “everyone” yet, but you’re seeing the influx around you, and maybe even your customers are asking for a digital edition.
When I first got an iPad, the first thing I
Digital magazines come in all shapes and sizes. We recommend web magazines, because they adapts to any device, even tablets. But a digital magazine app is most native to tablet publishing because every tablet comes with a digital newsstand of some type; a place where the user can plop down on the couch, find a
Generation Y, the millennials, were born in a hugely broad span of time for a “generation,” which is between 1977 and 2001.
Depending on the pundits you read, those years may be slightly closer together. What defines a millennial is their access to technology for most of their lives. At Mequoda we consider Digital Natives those
Place yourself in the shoes of someone with vision issues: you are at the age where you’re kind of set in your ways, yet haven’t completely lost the will to progress through this wonderful (yet frustrating) age of technological advancement. And those that have seen their parents read a digital replica edition of their favorite
I recently talked to a publisher who, up until recently, almost never promoted his magazine. But he didn’t realize it. He has a Portal with free content, a magazine website that sells his magazine, and an online store with a dozen books that sell for $10-$20 each.
He felt pretty organized and was excited to brag
Most publishers today approach the idea of digital magazines with hesitation, lacking background or experience to guide them in this wholly new enterprise.
Our brand new Digital Magazine Publishing handbook, however, answers all of the questions most publishers have, and even some they probably haven’t yet thought of.
Is the digital publishing industry unstoppable? These facts and figures argue a resounding yes, especially when it comes to audience development.
Digital publishing success comes with a multiplatform publishing approach.
Digital publishers who recognize this are finding numerous way to reach their audiences, building subscribers from social media, through email, and funneling traffic to their websites from 3rd party sites.
There are plenty of digital newsstand options in today’s landscape. If you have a limited budget, don’t waste time by publishing on the wrong digital newsstand. Which should you be using to maximize the potential of your publications?
Well, first of all, we think digital magazines not on the digital newsstand are the best. Web magazines.
Deft use of digital publishing platforms is a must for magazines looking to solidify their place in the industry. Thanks to astute observers like Talking New Media, we can monitor trends as they’re taking shape. Here are five headlines from one of our favorite sources of information.
So is the underreporting of digital magazines sales the fault of publishers themselves, or should AAM’s audit be modified to accommodate universal pricing and packaging?
We think it’s time to accommodate. Because there are about 277 million adults in the United States with Internet access, and according to our most recent study, 20 percent of them
Tell us, what’s the best digital magazine, in your humble opinion?
The last time someone you knew won an award, did you agree that they were the best person to win? I bet at some point in your life, someone has won an award that you feel they didn’t deserve. Maybe a coworker won “employee of
If you own a tablet that you use often, is it hard to imagine what life was like before it? I have friends who use their tablets to cook every dinner with, or spend several hours with it at night, reading books and magazines. Consumers aren’t as attached at the hip to tablets as they
It’s no secret that Apple’s Newsstand is a frustrating experience for many users, which in turn means it’s frustrating for publishers as well. Conventional wisdom holds that because Apple allows buyers to get their magazines directly from the publisher, Newsstand simply isn’t a revenue generator that’s going to get Apple’s corporate attention.
The truth is I don’t have enough space to tell you how to use digital magazine software for every service out there. There are more options than I can count on two hands, and 800 words when it comes to choosing digital magazine software, and they don’t all have the same features.
However, what I can
What’s up with mobile apps and the people who use them? Anyone publishing a digital magazine, or planning to publish one, must keep up with app user statistics. Recent mobile app user statistics bear out earlier predictions: We living in a mobile, mobile world.
Because we constantly survey the app field to keep our clients well-informed,
Digital magazine publishing software is used by publishers to design, produce and publish digital magazines. These three functions may or may not reside in the same tools. For example, you might design your digital magazine in InDesign, then use Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to finalize and distribute the magazine.
With apps, mobile has overtaken desktop in total Internet usage, but not in web browsing
Mobile Internet usage has surpassed desktop Internet usage, according to comScore, but contrary to predictions in recent years, mobile web browsing itself is flat, if not in decline. What does this mean for publishers?
Don’t overlook this powerful revenue stream
When magazine publishers get together to talk about their advertising revenues, the common complaint is that even though they’re counting on online advertising to replace declining print ad pages, they’re “trading print dollars for digital dimes.”
Worse, they say, they now have to trade those digital dimes for mobile pennies.
Certainly print
It’s time once again to gaze into the crystal ball and set out what I think 2015 will deliver.
As someone from the ‘boomer’ generation, it appears I must now bow out gracefully and hand centre-stage to that rather scary creature, the Millennial. Aged between 18-35 and making up about a quarter of the world’s population,
“For $10,000 per issue I can create a magazine that the big boys can’t produce for $250,000. Apple and Amazon have given me a distribution platform where I can compete head-to-head. The big magazine companies have no idea where the industry is going.”
The above comment was shared with us at a magazine industry event. The
Stay current with new digital magazine trends and you’ll stay ahead of the competition. That’s the idea, right? Those may be words to consider every day you step into the office and plan the day, or better yet, your next business move.
Wouldn’t it be great if the future could be perfectly detailed and explained to
Digital magazines comprise the whole ecosystem of paperless magazines.
If a story can be read digitally, it’s a digital magazine. It doesn’t matter if it’s read on the web, or a tablet, or a smartphone – if you can’t flip a physical page, then it’s a digital magazines.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking specifially
Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about digital magazines and specifically online magazines – the online edition of a magazine in HTML format, which typically comes with a library of back content.
Do you sell an online magazine or a digital magazine? How about both? Many publishers do, and they don’t even realize that both have totally different business models.
Online magazines are read online and are not formatted for a tablet or other e-reading device. They can be read just like any web page and may be
As teachers and observers of the digital publishing revolution, we are drawn to the positive stories coming out of the digital publishing environment. We share these stories with you, because as publishers, this information can impact the way you present your content and change the way you think about your business.
The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) released its “Top 10” magazine brands on Jan. 7, along with its most current industry numbers from November of 2014. The findings, compiled by recently created MPA metrics arm Magazine Media 360°, are encouraging.