Tag: print magazine

Creating an abundance of value within your subscription products is the key to subscription marketing and transforming your publishing business in the digital age
From time to time, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about the value proposition you provide prospective buyers in your subscription marketing efforts. When you are running a Six Sigma

How to use the principles of economic behaviorism, contrast pricing, and Six Sigma marketing to maximize magazine membership revenue and renewals
Earlier this week, we discussed how savvy publishers are combining their legacy magazine subscriptions with magazine libraries to create magazine memberships using the Internet.
Now we’ll we take a look at how publishers can use contrast pricing and the principles of economic

Would you like to triple the response to your current email promotions and sales pages? Because that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen when publishers stop promoting their magazines and start promoting their web library.

When we look at the most successful multiplatform publishers we know intimately, like our publishing partners and close colleagues, we are usually able to determine what sets them apart from publishing companies that struggle.

Even within our own Mequoda ecosystem, we have more than 60 special interest media websites, serving more than seven million daily email subscribers. Each month, our network welcomes more than 40 million website visitors. But these websites don’t all run the same. Just like Ferrari, we can build the same car for everyone, but some win a lot more races. So why is that?

In 2017, all major publishers and most independents have a website portal. What 95% don’t have is a web magazine. But those who do are flourishing.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains why he thinks the web edition is the best edition.

Premium newsletters and advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription marketing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that are much higher than magazines.

Web magazine consumers like to read their magazines like they read their news – online.
Users are becoming more accustomed to viewing magazine content in the form of web magazines. Web editions are built like web pages, so they can be displayed on any mobile or desktop device, and users are as familiar with the interface as

Mequoda ran its first ever digital magazine consumer study in 2014, polling US adults with Internet access. At the time, the biggest finding was that 20% of respondents reported currently reading or subscribing to digital magazines on their tablets. Back then, 20% was a huge number.

In 2015, we conducted another study with triple the sample size

A multi-platform website enables a publisher to create dynamic content on multiple platforms. Some of these platforms might be online streaming through a membership library of training videos, or it could be a web magazine—formatted for, and read on the web.

But multi-platform website doesn’t just refer to the number of ways you recycle content across text, video, graphics and other mediums. It also means your website is responsive and will show visitors these different types of media, no matter what device they use: desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, phablet, whatever you’ve got. More thoughts on responsive design.

A couple of years ago, Don outlined the attributes of a premium content subscription: not a website itself, but the thing that customers buy – the content subscription.

In updating this post (as we often do with our website content – a Mequoda best practice), we decided to give you an actual example of the perfect premium content subscription, and we settled on CooksIllustrated.com, the companion website to Cook’s Illustrated magazine from America’s Test Kitchen.

Deconstructing the phrase “premium content subscription” is a helpful exercise for getting this discussion onto the right track. Let’s take a look at each of the three words individually.

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 recommendations in January.

Here’s our latest (opinionated) look at the magazine software landscape.

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 survived the last 50 to 100 years.

Do you think a 24/7 online encyclopedia of information is a product people might subscribe to? Would they be willing to pay more for a subscription to your magazine if it included access to all your archived content? The latter is usually the reason why publishers decide to create a digital archive of their back issues,

In his bestseller, “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell stated that it takes 10,000 hours, or approximately ten years, so become an expert at something. That means there are very few digital product development experts out there in the universe, even in the publishing world. Let’s consider some of the digital products we interface with regularly today.

I Like Crochet has improved upon their already best-practice web magazine with collections, clubs, and previews.
It’s genuinely thrilling to be in the publishing industry at this moment and time. Think about how one of the defining factors of millennials is that they have been alive to experience life with and without immediate access to the

Multiplatform publishers expand their content offerings based on the markets, their audiences, and their capacity to deliver high-quality products of value. Today we’re looking at a variety of expansion within the industry.

Many brands use multiplatform publishing to amass a larger audience. We’re seeing this trend continue as some popular publishers and brands and expanding their content offerings through more channels.

2018 Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study predicts digital magazine readership as a percentage of all magazine readership will break 40% in 2020.
BOSTON, JUNE 15, 2018—Mequoda ran its first ever digital magazine consumer study in 2014, polling US adults with Internet access. At the time, the biggest finding was that 20% of respondents reported currently reading or

As preferences for digital magazine consumption go digital, here’s a list of all the ways you can improve your multiplatform editions.
Last week we published this year’s 2018 Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study. We’ve been running this study since 2014 to analyze digital magazine adoption, and have come across new interesting findings each year:

In 2014, 20% of respondents

So you want to know, how do online magazines generate revenue? The answer is clear: they go multiplatform.
If you’ve considered starting an online magazine, or are a legacy print magazine considering going digital, you’ve asked this question: How do online magazines generate revenue? And the answer is that the successful ones use a multiplatform approach.

Some of the most successful publishers let their users generate more than 99 percent of their content. The publishers that can do this become masters at building communities that draw users to both read and post.

Out of the nine subscription website business models, the community subscription website archetype is the only one where the publisher relies on its community to create the content. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, and three affinity (free) archetypes. This is one of the three free ones.

Subscription website publishers are honing their subscription offerings to generate greater revenue and utilize the subscriber data file that they already have. This process is not new, but some of the directions that major publishers are taking is new for these organizations, and the focus of today’s news stories.

How these innovative publishers built web magazine libraries that are comprehensive, user-friendly and make an easy up-sell from print.
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

If your goal is to generate advertising and sponsorship revenue from a free newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

Today we’re looking at three multiplatform publishers that have taken to the strategy of recycling and repurposing content to build larger audiences.

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Mequoda Systems empowers multiplatform publishers to grow audience, revenue, and profits by integrating web, email, and fulfillment systems into a seamless Customer Experience Management System (CXMS). Mequoda clients routinely double, even triple, their profits in five years or less by using our proprietary software platform, Haven CXMS™—the only customer experience management system created by publishers

Back in 2014, we partnered with Prime Publishing to launch America’s first web magazine. Since then we’ve launched more than a dozen and have learned a lot. Prime’s web magazine, I Like Crochet, is a linear, finite edition of a magazine. Readers progress through the magazine the same as they would an app or print magazine, except the pages are built in HTML and read like a webpage.

If your goal is generate paid subscriptions and revenue for a premium magazine business with a robust subscription website, keep following along.

In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains how other publishers have used Haven CXMS to do just that.

Subscription website growth in the digital publishing industry continues as major publishers see increased results and added attention to their cause of increasing subscriber numbers.

Publishing websites have experienced significant changes over the years as subscription websites have evolved along with technology. Digital publishers making strides to provide the best website to their audience keep their eyes to what’s working and the opportunities that become available.

If your goal is to generate advertising and sponsorship revenue from a free newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

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 getting into the business of publishing, then an online magazine probably isn’t on your mind. To be clear, an online magazine is a web-friendly version of your magazine. It’s in HTML and works like a website. It cannot be held in your hand, unless you’re in the web browser of a tablet.

Our top-read multiplatform publishing posts of last year talk about creating strategies to increase revenue and value for everyone involved.
Multiplatform publishing strategies were a hot topic in 2017, and for good reason. Publishers are always looking for unique ways to increase revenue, and our top-read posts from last year include comprehensive information about each

New offerings and products are often utilized by publishers working to increase numbers of digital subscribers. Today we’re looking at two publishing that have been placing added focus on their digital audience.

Don’t scoff—we truly believe that web magazines can be the ultimate platform for periodical content for most magazine publishing brands. The problem is that, as we’ve covered in prior weeks, most web magazines aren’t living up to their potential. We are very close to destroying magazines as a medium by the way our industry is transporting them to the web.

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, when he asked me “what exactly is magazine media?” See, in the niche magazine publishing business, you’ll find that many of your colleagues are niche industry experts, but as this client reminded me, not all are inherently from the magazine business.

Major subscription website publishers at The Atlantic, New York Times Co., and CNN are putting more attention into subscribers
We’re seeing some of the biggest subscription website publishers reaping the benefits of new memberships and growing circulations. In fact, we even have a story to share today that involves a new paywall being utilized by one

For every publisher who dreams of creating a subscription website, choosing the right subscription management software can be a daunting task

When we set out to launch the I Like Crochet digital magazine website (the first of its kind) and tablet edition, we knew we wanted to build a state-of-the-art publication management system. We needed subscription

The magazine industry has lost their way.

It’s been a long time since the dawn of digital publishing and publishers bringing their content online, but at this point we hoped that the industry would catch on and be rigorously testing their digital products.

Unfortunately so much has stayed the same, and while many magazine publishers seem to be working towards putting together web magazines, most have failed, as we’ve explained in recent posts documenting our journey through more than 300 magazine websites and what they think are web magazines.

Now that so many publishers are issuing digital editions, it’s time to take a look around and quantify some best practices that we’ve noted in researching apps and digital magazines.

First, let’s do some definitions. Terminology is changing daily, as it always does with new technology and new products, but for now we should at least attempt to clarify a few things. Some of these definitions come from outside Mequoda, but others are our own preferred definitions that serve to clarify some of the confusion in the industry right now. Your mileage may vary!

If your goal is to generate subscriptions and advertiser and sponsorship revenue from a free or controlled-circulation magazine with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

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 know of it as the “contrast effect.”

Recently Google publicly told publishers that they strongly encourage flexible sampling with their paywalls, through the use of metered paywalls and lead-in. You’re likely familiar with metered paywalls where the user gets to access a certain number of articles before being asked to subscribe, and the lead-in paywall shows some content of an article but not all.

Today we begin with a look at Working Mother, which has seen a big growth in traffic since a recent digital strategy adjustment. Folio: reports, “Working Mother’s new digital strategy appears to resonating with its audience; according to data from Omniture, its website saw an 84 percent increase page views in August compared to the same month a year ago, and a 155 percent increase in unique visitors.”

Learn how to write more effective native content advertising for a sponsor and start getting paid more for content

According to Business Insider data, the amount advertisers are spending on native advertisements has risen from $4.7 billion in 2013 to a projected growth of $21 billion by 2018.

Consumers have always disliked ads that are disruptive to their user experience,

How do your digital magazine features stack up to users’ expectations?
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.

Users are

When you think of a magazine platform, you probably think print and digital. They seem like black and white, but there’s actually a whole lot of grey on the digital side of things. A digital magazine, as defined by the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly ABC) defines a digital edition as distribution of a magazine’s content via electronic means. The digital edition must maintain the same identity of the host publication by maintaining the same brand characteristics.
 Mequoda agrees with this definition.

Varying experiences from publishers that made the switch to digital-only magazines and portals (and came back to tell the tale)
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

Take this information to the bank … 2016 Mequoda American Magazine Reader Study & Handbook & Handbook polled 3,241 U.S. adults with internet access and found that nearly 42% of them are reading digital magazines, up 13.8% from 2015.