Tag: tablet

Last week I was emailing back and forth with my friend and colleague Jack Edmonston, who often sends interesting news my way with some thoughts to pontificate on. This time it was an article from Politico by Jack Schaefer called, “Do Readers Own the New York Times?” Although the article is about newspaper and not magazine subscribers, it’s an interesting concept to think about for our industry, too.

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

If you struggle with determining paywall pricing and strategy, you’re not alone.
In recent years, publishers have been testing paywalls, and for good reason. Hearst, for example, tested a paywall that changed based on what the reader was consuming. Instead of letting editors choose which content was free, and which was premium, the habits of first-time readers predict

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.

If you think that your website should be the main driver of your revenue, think again. Email subscribers are responsible for between 60 and 80% of all digital revenue generation, while passing website visitors and social followers make up the balance.

Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t immediately turn into buyers. They simply remain

When most people think of digital magazines, they narrow their focus on digital magazine apps that can be found in a digital newsstand or app store, but data shows that apps aren’t where users want to digest premium magazine content.

At Mequoda, we have the privilege of marketing more than 200 premium subscription products including magazines, newsletters, and memberships that spark a myriad of ideas on how to create value.

A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best multiplatform membership website models are built.

I was speaking with a colleague recently who had crossed over from the magazine industry to newspaper publishing and back, about consumer marketing trends. We noted that it will be interesting to see how lessons learned from the newspaper industry move into the magazine industry over time. Daily newspapers are both financially larger than the average magazine

12 subscription marketing offers you can test with your existing email subscriber list
Think selling magazines is hard? Look at Netflix. They’ve been able to get customers to pay $9+ per month as a membership website. Meanwhile, magazines have a hard time getting people to subscribe for $10 for a whole year. Netflix is also currently worth

Why would you give away content for free, in order to make money? Sounds crazy, but that’s how the smartest publishers we know have grown at an exponential speed.
Selling magazine subscriptions and memberships is part of a four-step process that begins with giving away free content.
By giving away free content, like downloadable reports, you can build

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

How to use web editions, collections and libraries to double your revenue 
Are you still selling your magazine on one platform? Sure, print magazines smell good and even look good on a coffee table, but the most successful subscription and membership marketers we know are leveraging more than paper to increase profits.

What are they doing exactly? They’re

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

In the summer of 2014, we launched what we believe to be the first-ever web magazine, I like Crochet. I Like Crochet was Prime Publishing’s first foray into premium content, aimed at readers looking for a higher level of access to unique and exclusive patterns and advice. The web magazine provided this access through fully

When you think of the top magazine companies, you probably imagine Time, Cosmopolitan, or Better Homes & Gardens. If you publish a magazine, try to instead think of the magazine media companies in your niche. Comparing a niche magazine to a general-interest publication will leave you empty-handed in the idea department.

Since most magazine publishers are competing for these dollars and losing the battle, the need for revenue from subscriptions increases every day.

Whenever we work with a new client, there are four words they become familiar with very quickly.

In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how these four words will change how you approach your business, and how you can learn more about them when you download our new FREE report, How to Increase Audience, Revenue and Profits with Multiplatform Publishing.

Slow loading web pages can mean turning customers away from your landing pages and ultimately from buying yor products.

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.

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.

The most effective blow-in cards of the 21st century aren’t made of cardstock, they’re digital. And since offering a sample of your magazine is less effort for the user when it’s done online, you have more opportunities.

In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to accommodate a user’s desire to sample, is just one key to selling more subscriptions. From there you can download How to Use Contrast Pricing to Increase Subscription Revenue to learn more about pricing your print and digital magazine subscriptions.

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.

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 the same as the homepage of a magazine, where content is freely distributed, unless that content is metered by a paywall.

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

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 magazine from a digital magazine. What could possibly separate the two other than terminology?!

As someone who’s looked at your website every day for a long time, you probably have no business reviewing your own website. There are probably things in the back of your mind that you’ve kept a mental checklist of – items that need to be optimized, altered and updated. Have you been writing these things down? Often, when we finally get the chance to update our websites, it’s months after we’ve discovered the original issue.

That’s why I’m going to give you a quick little checklist, based on our internal website design scorecard, to remind you of the items you should be paying most attention to. While these guidelines are by no means the complete list of website design practices, they are essential to sound, effective website design. We’re sure that implementation of these practices will result in happier, more satisfied, readers.

What do you think are the essential elements of the perfect digital magazine?

If you think back to Gutenberg and the printing press, magazines are still being produced the same way now as they were then. We have a long way to go. The technology necessary to fully utilize the Internet as a principal marketing and distribution platform is available

How often do you read something digitally? If you’re reading this, then you’ve done it at least once today. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t your first time.

In digital marketing, you might have been told “free” is a dirty word. In subject lines, it could get you blacklisted (it won’t) or in social media, it’s over-used (free is still better than paid). However, giving away something for free is one of the best ways to start a relationship, and when it comes to selling products, this strategy has proven to be a huge asset to the marketing mix especially when the free product is assigned a value.

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

As tech industry observers like to note, the world of apps is wild and wacky. There are almost two million apps in the Apple and Google app stores. If you pick up or click to pretty much any tech publication these days, you’re guaranteed to see at least one app review, to help bewildered consumers navigate this crowded field.

Of course when you read those articles, you’re getting a lot of personal opinion, and in tech land, much of that turns out to be excitement over flashy technology – no surprise there. So what kind of apps do people want, really? For magazine publishers, the answers are fairly simple.

Any time your website drops in Google, it’s scary. But the one thing to know is that any drop in SEO traffic will be uniform. You won’t lose traffic in one zone of your website, it will be across the board. The ebb and flow of traffic is normal and not an algorithmic hit, it’s just the price

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

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.

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 their way across the site in a matter of seconds. There is no true table of contents, although there is arrangement in the form of categories, topic pages and related articles.

So what is a digital magazine? It’s a bit of a hybrid.

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

The essential core characteristics of a magazine are those that define the user experience.

In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how the attributes that define a magazine are not necessarily better or worse than those that define other media — movies, books, etc. They are simply different in terms of the user experience.

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via the Apple, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble digital newsstands is based on remit and the cost of delivering a digital issue paid to your digital publishing software provider (Mag+, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, etc.).

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.

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 to bounce around among hundreds or thousands of articles is not a linear medium. What’s more, humans desire closure, which magazines provide. A reader can say “I have read the April issue of Vanity Fair. I finished it on Sunday.”

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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

Your magazine SEO efforts will determine how much traffic arrives and eventually converts into subscribers – what are you doing to find and plug any holes in your website?
Google is the business we all love to hate. If you run a big website, one of your jobs is magazine SEO for your website. There will

B2B subscription sales are beyond the age of phone sales and the most successful subscription marketers we know are selling them online through effective pricing and copywriting strategies
Arthur C. Clark, a futurist, writer, inventor and philosopher said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s exactly how some publishers look at us when we

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.

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.

Our top-read digital magazine publishing posts of last year showcase ways you can start a digital magazine from scratch and how to ensure it’s success
We’ve studied digital magazine publishing efforts and found what works. These reader-favorite posts from the past year help publishers approach the business with confidence. There is advice on starting your magazine

When you charge a fee to access the content within a subscription website, the site needs to provide specific and immediate benefits to your subscribers. Are you doing that?