What makes
for a great digital magazine
It's the best of online and also of print publishing
By Diego Vasquez
Mar 23, 2010
Digital magazines remain a relative curiosity among both media sellers and media buyers. Up till now, the folly of many magazines has been to try to replicate for their digital edition what they have on their web sites or in print. But a new study from Smarter Media Sales, a site that helps strategize media sales, finds that the very best thing a digital magazine can do is really be its own product with its own ad format. The study was conducted by SMS president Josh Gordon, who contacted dozens of digital magazine publishers. He found that the most successful shared several qualities, including encouraging interaction between readers and the publication, formatting pages specifically for the screen on which they're shown, and creating engaging ads that get readers really involved in the text. Gordon talks to Media Life about what goes into building a smarter digital magazine, how print and digital editions should differ, and why some publishers need to change their current approach.
What's the most interesting or surprising thing you learned?
I guess the most decisive finding was that the reason advertisers come back to these particular magazines is all about the interactivity of the ad. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see why this is true.
The first reason is the size of the ads. If you put a display ad on a web site, it takes the form of a standard banner ad and it runs on the periphery of the screen. But in a digital magazine it can take up half the screen.
But there’s something else going on too. When you format an online reading experience in a magazine style, it attracts a reading audience.
A lot of web sites are designed for grazing, or search-driven content finding.
You want to know the percentage of whales in North America, and so you search until you find it. Whereas if you subscribe to a digital magazine on whales, you have more than a passing interest in the topic. You’re part of the subscription base, you expect to receive content about whales every week, so you expect a reading experience.
The third element is it’s digital, so you can place interactive components on the ad. You combine these three things, and you have something unique that doesn’t exist in any other online media.
I just saw an ad for a movie that had a click-to-play area for the movie, it had a link to a place where you could buy a ticket, and it had another place where you could join a loyalty club to get special offers. So when you think about the advertiser, that’s three ways they’re interacting with a reader.
Typically when a banner ad runs on a web site—say you want to run a contest--it will direct readers to “click here for contest details.”
Well, if you have half the screen, you can do it all right there. You don’t have to click anything. The reader turns the page and there’s the details of the contest looking at them in the face. So that’s a fundamentally different kind of ad opportunity that doesn’t exist anywhere else online.
But here’s what surprised me about all that. What I found was the basic reasons digital magazines work are the basic reasons magazine have always worked. It’s an active reading environment. If you look at traditional print media and upgrade it for digital, this is pretty much what it looks like.
What is the main flaw in the current model of digital magazine ad selling?
Well, I think the main flaw is the expectation that you can make a straight digital replica of your print magazine and send it out over the internet and expect it will have the same impact and presence online as it did in print. It just doesn’t.
I think that in print magazine publishing a lot of the way these ads have been sold traditionally has been about delivering eyeballs. You push the issue out, and people read it.
But when you go online, the expectation is different. In print, when you talk about reader engagement, the whole idea of engagement is you’ve got great editorial and a great package, and the reader reads the content.
But when you talk about engagement to online media buyers, that’s not the expectation at all. They’re expecting an activity--a click through, a registration, a download, an opt-in. There are measurable metrics, and that’s how it’s evaluated. The minute you go online very often you’re competing for online dollars, not print dollars.
They’re evaluated differently and the expectation that you’ll make a lot of money putting a print replica online is troublesome.
What are the fundamental differences between a really good digital magazine and a print one?
The very first thing is that digital magazines compete for online readers, print magazines compete for print readers. And online there are more distractions and more elaborate ways to interact.
One part of the study looked at digital extras like video and flash animation being embedded into interactive digital magazines. If you’re in a market where the web sites you’re competing against have these components, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.
Sometimes digital magazines play to the attention span of the online reader—less type per page, more graphics, shorter editions that come out more often—but not always.
Every market is different, there are no rules. There are great online digital magazines that have long copy, etc., but in general with the online reader, it’s harder to fight for their attention.
You find that interactive magazines contain ads that readers can interact with. Why are these so engaging, and what's an example of one type that worked?
There’s a great example from Europe.
Monkey magazine held a contest for Wilkinson Sword shaving blades. To enter you had to go and buy the product and shoot a video of yourself shaving in an extreme situation. They got all these wacky videos and posted them online, and tons of people bought extra Wilkinson Sword blades to enter the contest, lots of people viewed the videos.
It was great fun and its sales that week were up 23 percent nationwide. A huge success. And it was all about the interactivity, coming up with creative ways to engage readers and let them participate.
How different are the audiences for digital magazines and offline ones? For example, is the digital edition from Sporting News magazine the same as the print one?
First of all, the print edition comes out twice a month, and the digital edition, called Sporting News Today, comes out daily. Often digital audiences expect more frequent content delivery.
On the other hand, Premiere Guitar has both a digital magazine and a print magazine, and they found that the biggest difference between the two was the preference of the reader. It tends to be that younger people prefer digital, but it’s not always the case.
In their digital edition they embed a lot of audio, and if you’re a guitar player, audio is what speaks to you. So if you prefer the audio you’ll go with the online edition. But some people do prefer the print version.
The answer is all over the place. Some publishers say the audiences are that different and it’s a matter of personal preference. But others say there’s a big skew, and others have no print component at all, just digital, so I don’t think there’s a good answer to that question at this point. I’ve heard things all over the place there.
What's the most important things media buyers and planners can learn from this study?
The great buzz out there that everyone is interested in this stuff because of the iPad and e-readers.
The magazines I studied, while just about all publishers expected this day [of e-readers] to come, they’ve been successfully doing this for a couple of years now, even before Steve Jobs stood up and said, “I have this cute thing.”
But don’t think the success will only be based on the fact that these devices are in the market. It will expand circulation and all these great things, but a lot of these already have good circulations. So it’s not about the devices, it’s about the format and the content.
Everyone I talked to about this said the advertisers and buyers who are most successful create ads appropriate for the medium. The fact you’ve got half the screen to play with, if you just put flat static content, you’ve wasted an opportunity.
But if you create a half-screen kind of digital playground where the user can interact in a variety of productive ways, you can create a very involved brand experience for readers.
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