We have seen the popularity of the iPad and similar tablet devices within their infancy. We’ve also seen the mobile device market explode. These trends will continue to evolve. In order to utilize the popularity behind these technological advances, it’s important to know who and what you’re really developing your magazine for. Our Digital Publishing Trends posts capture what’s happening in the digital publishing world.
Free Download: Consumers are telling us loud and clear what they want—are you listening? How much would you pay for that information? To find out how you can improve your digital magazine rapport with subscribers, claim your FREE digital copy of our 2018 Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study, today.
For digital publishers not fully reliant on ads – which hopefully is you if you’re aiming for high multiplatform performance – few components are as crucial as your subscription revenue model.
At Mequoda, we’ve spent a ton of time studying and writing about digital subscriptions, because we believe they’re a big part of the future of
Are you a digital media publisher keeping tabs on the competition, looking for success stories, cautionary tales, and cutting-edge intel? Well, you’ve come to the right place, because that’s what we try to provide with our free advice and digital publishing trends every week.
Magazine ecommerce represents a major opportunity for digital publishers, provided you have the tech and infrastructure to pull it off – or can crank it up in the coming years.
Here’s why magazine ecommerce is well-suited for publishers, particularly niche publishers: You have a built-in audience advantage. You have content to shape into product. You have
If you want to drive traffic – and revenue – as a digital publisher, social media for magazines is no longer a religious discussion. It’s a must-have component of your multiplatform strategy.
For those holdouts who consider social media strategy a luxury, frivolity, or optional tactic, we do understand your reservations, to an extent: After all,
Online magazine subscription tactics will key digital publishing strategy in the coming years, as advertising challenges like ad blocking and viewability could force small and midsize, regional and niche, publishers walled off by the likes of Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat to shift to a membership model.
Luckily, Mequoda Members already know that digital magazine subscriptions
Robust and varied platform distribution is, by definition, the bedrock of multiplatform publishing, but the spray and pray strategy isn’t really a strategy at all.
You must pick and choose your platforms with some discernment, playing to your strengths and the desires of your audience, both the existing one and the one you’re going after.
Social media
Going from print to web is no longer the terrifying proposition for entrenched traditional publishers it was 10 years ago, but it’s still an intricate migration that requires you getting all of your ducks in a row (see what we did there?).
Determining the digital publishing products your company can excel with is a key consideration when launching or remaking your magazine business model.
This might seem obvious, but it’s not difficult to take a cursory look around the industry and find digital publishers who try to fit square pegs into round holes instead of sticking to what
Migrating your publishing operations and editions from print to digital might at first feel daunting, but don’t fret: It’s a manageable move – just ask any Mequoda Member – and one that’s more and more becoming a must.
The same principles of publishing apply, but going from print to digital gives you the opportunity to maximize
If successful social media publishers can count on one thing, it’s that they can count on nothing.
Magazines on social media must have a social media strategy in place, but they must also be flexible enough to experiment, pivot, and periodically rethink efforts. Mequoda Members know to diversify their social portfolios, as it were, and to
Welcome to a special all-niche edition of our daily news post, wherein we’ll drill down on the topic of niche advertising, a crucial component of any magazine business model for enthusiast publishers.
Are you publishing podcasts? If so, then you’re leaps and bounds ahead of much of your digital magazine business competition.
But the better question is, are you publishing podcasts and actually making some money off of them? Are your readers actually listening?
If you’re a publisher, tech considerations have emerged as a crucial component of your day-to-day decision-making. This likelihood increases exponentially if you’re creating mobile apps and dedicating resources to serious multiplatform publishing.
While most of us are still ramping up, the early days of 2016 haven’t seen much of a break in the action when it comes to the top magazine publishers’ business moves.
If you came here seeking digital publishing jobs to apply for, don’t be disappointed that you don’t see any listings in this post, because we’ve got something better for you: What digital magazine executives are looking for not only in 2016, but in the years to come.
F0r some publishers, native digital advertising is the next big thing, while others have been perfecting it for years. Still, many have steered clear altogether, and there are more who aren’t sure how to best pull it off to begin with.
Regardless, the native digital advertising backlash has already begun after 2015 saw a huge spike
Since its inception in late 2014, we’ve been paying close attention to the Association of Magazine Media’s 360° Brand Audience Report, an innovative data study of digital consumption, as well as print readership, of magazines.
And we’re definitely not the only ones: With these monthly — or, in this case, yearly — reports, the MPA is
As any compromised comment section can tell us, there are a whole lot of ways to make money on the Internet! Online magazine revenue streams comprise some solid volume in that pool (in the legitimate end, that is). In fact, helping digital publishers generate online magazine revenue is how we generate revenue ourselves.
We do our best work with niche publishers and legacy publishers looking to become digital publishers, but we also like to monitor major magazine publishers’ successes and setbacks, because at the end of the day, they’re still the leaders of the pack and the pace cars for media companies.
They also have the money to experiment
Digital magazine news about multiplatform strategy, increasing website traffic, mergers & acquisitions, and white papers and freemiums is what we love to share with our Mequoda Members and visitors to our website.
Luckily, we have sources like FishbowlNY to draw from. Let’s take a look at some recent articles on industry goings-on, starting with one of
Digital profits are what it’s all about, right? This business is about results, not process, and with a business operating with a small margin of error, the more inroads publishers can make with digital, the better chance they have of staying competitive and rising to the top of a crowded field.
For us, digital ultimately comprises
If it’s 2016, and we’re writing about digital media trends, you know it must at least touch on the topic of ad blocking and/or native content. Today it’s mostly the former, along with a little viewability sprinkled in for good measure.
With all of the coverage on ad blocking — Digiday rightly points out that the
The publisher-advertiser dynamic has always been a fragile one, but it needn’t be a fractious one. After all, it’s a symbiotic relationship, and the success of each, in theory, depends upon the success of the other.
And the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Publishing conferences and publishing events are without question among the pillars of the Mequoda Method, so much so that we host many ourselves during the course of the year.
Events generate revenue, create opportunities, and build relationships. They provide exponential chances to promote your digital publishing brand and for repurposing content.
So, eMarketer certainly doesn’t have to
We’re not even through the first week of 2016, and this is already our second digital publishing trends post on native advertising. That should tell all of us in the industry something about the direction digital advertising revenue is moving in! Today, it’s mobile native ads, specifically.
After Monday’s post on the Federal Trade Commission’s new
We’ve rolled out our year-end retrospectives and looks ahead, which we believe provide a blueprint for modern publishers looking to improve on audience development and conversion via sound but also experimental multiplatform strategy.
But we also like taking a look around to see what other industry observers are saying about the state of digital magazines, especially
Native advertising trends will shape the digital publishing industry in 2016. For one, they represent a more elegant and modernized option for online magazines looking to generate revenue the old-fashioned way — that is, via marketing dollars — while flying relatively under the radar of those big, bad ad blocking defense systems.
Branded content has been
On desktop or mobile, ad blocking has emerged as the defining issue of digital publishing in 2015. This presents good news and bad news for online magazines looking to compete in a crowded marketplace.
The good news? There’s a real opportunity for digital magazines to find out what users want and reshape the way they do
The digital media industry trends dominating the headlines at the end of 2015 share some overlap with the digital media industry trends we started the year with — monetizing mobile and video, for instance — but there are some that came out of nowhere and now have the business scrambling around somewhere between casual concern
For online publishers and visitors to our Free Advice blog, it might seem like digital magazine editions dominate the industry, because they’re all you care about and all we write about. But believe it or not, they’re not quite there yet.
But digital magazine editions are getting there. Quickly. Strong print publications are transitioning to a
Digital media ads are only one part of a multiplatform strategy amid subscriptions, events, white papers, and other products, of course, but they sure can serve as an important 0ne, depending on your magazine business model.
For all but the biggest, most established publishers (and even sometimes they themselves) generating Internet advertising revenue can be tricky
For some digital magazines, the effort to generate online ad revenue can evoke a verse from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.”
Here’s the thing: The money is there to be had. Marketers are ready to spend — are spending as we speak
They might not rival Major League Baseball’s offseason hot stove of free agency and trades, but publishing deals at the end of 2015 are still making magazine industry news in a business that in recent years has seen only one constant: change.
In today’s roundup, relayed from The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today, we’ve got one
For some companies with multiple properties, publisher networks just make sense as a way to centralize operations and standardize content across all platforms for the purposes of more attractive options for digital advertisers.
Now, of course, we realize that not all digital magazines are in this position, but publisher networks are an industry-wide phenomenon that bears
The promise of mobile magazine publishing is no mirage — it’s just not so easy to achieve in the midst of viewability, targeting, and tech issues. Monetizing mobile is the Holy Grail for digital magazines looking to expand and solidify their digital business.
But there are many questions. Mobile app or mobile web? Handle tech in
Online publishing platforms or offline publishing platforms or any platforms in between, it doesn’t matter: We’re fans of a good many of them, and believe in a “more-the-merrier” approach because the right deployment can open up new revenue streams.
Long before multiplatform publishing became an industry-wide buzzword, we were building a strategy to help magazines not
The benefits of online advertising are undeniable, but for better or worse, realizing them can be an exercise in patience and persistence because of the wide-open state of affairs in the industry. The money is there, but so are the targeting challenges shaky digital advertising metrics.
What’s more, when publishers do establish good relations with marketers,
Digital consumers are the end all be all for Internet publishing companies. Everything revenue-related runs through them. Digital consumers click, read, subscribe, and share. They are the goal.
Here’s the good news: Digital consumers are there for the taking. How do we know this? Because we’re digital consumers ourselves. And because we’re seeing print magazines more
We’ve made it clear over the years how much we admire America’s Test Kitchen, practically our neighbor here in the Boston area. We admire them because they’ve achieved great success in the past using their own variation of the Mequoda Method.
While organic search and social media have never been ATK’s strong suit, the
As multiplatform publishing strategists who partner with many different kinds of media companies, we take a fairly liberal view of digital magazine platforms. That is to say, we consider digital magazine platforms to be anything that can help publishers deliver and distribute content.
So, your magazine website portal counts. Your digital magazine apps count. Your social
Tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 3, marks MinOnline’s 13th annual Most Intriguing and Hottest Launches Awards Celebration, while Friday, Dec. 4, marks the entry deadline for its Best of the Web Awards. And late last month, the trade publication handed out its editorial and design awards. Truly, ’tis the season for the best digital magazines to make
Regional magazines can cover several states or be hyperlocal, but regardless of their geographical reach, they operate with a hardwired niche strategy no matter what the topic, based purely on the readers who live in the area.
We like this model. We have many Mequoda Members who are very successful with it. And we love when
Did you know that while many Mequoda Members are niche publishers and regional publications, many others have been legacy publishers looking to transition to creating digital magazines that can compete in an industry that finds niche publishers and regional magazines succeeding at unprecedented rates?
That’s why we have a soft spot for legacy publishers, and why
B2B publishers are some of the most forward-thinking in the magazine media industry. Why? Because you have to be to survive. We count many B2B publishers among our Mequoda Members, and they embrace our multiplatform strategy for the simple reason that it helps them generate more revenue.
Well, it’s official – whatever they’re doing is working:
Apple publishing opportunities have long served as a component of digital magazines’ plans, but toward the end of Apple Newsstand’s run, it became clear that the service was not actually serving publishers as well as they might have hoped for.
Now, enter Apple News, an aggregator app that offers publishers some attractive features when it
Advertisement regulations are ramping up with the proliferation of digital advertising revenue opportunities like native content, programmatic ads, and mobile viewability. In addition, ad blocking programs and data privacy also have legal ramifications. And it’s all happening at once as technologies accelerate and publishers looking to make money attempt to match up with marketers looking
Media Rating Council issues revisions to mobile viewability guidelines; plus, Adobe’s audience development data and a vertical video solution
Ad viewability, especially mobile viewability, is arguably the issue facing digital publishers: As we’ve said before, when it comes to digital advertising trends, all roads lead to viewability: engagement depends on it; ad blocking programs derail it;
Does it seem like there’s been more news about native advertising trends lately? Well, that’s because there has been. Sponsored content has skyrocketed in popularity, and the execution of these ads has gotten stronger and stronger. What’s more, publishers and marketers prefer them because they’re less disruptive to reader experience, which is a big part
ALM, Hearst, Google, Apple, Texture, Time Inc. are the media companies and digital magazines leading the shift in publishing metrics
Much like old-school counting statistics in baseball, old-school publishing metrics like clicks and page views are falling out of favor as key performance indicators that provide a fuller picture rise in popularity. These KPIs deal mainly
With LinkedIn, content marketing, and other opportunities for audience development, brands as publishers are in a position to flourish
Brands as publishers, publishers as brands … given the digital media evolution and the state of the industry, does the nomenclature even matter anymore? We tend to think not, but the fact remains that publishers have been
