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Embattled publishers got some good news: Amazon’s launch of a new service selling online subscriptions, including digital magazines and newspapers, gives publishers access to its vast online retail customer base as a potential audience.
The new marketplace, “Subscribe with Amazon,” allows the subscription seller to create a customized detail page with product images, offering digital subscriptions, with the option for tiered pricing schemes where necessary.
The seller can also offer inducements, including free trials or introductory prices. Under the terms offered at launch, subscription sellers receive 70% of the sales revenue for the subscriber’s first year, rising to 85% for each subsequent year.
According to a Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) study, magazines deliver the highest return on advertising spend (ROAS), with an average return of $3.94 for every dollar spent on advertising.
The study, which was presented today at the Advertising Research Foundation Audience Measurement 2016 conference, revealed the next closest media platform is display advertising with a ROAS of $2.63.
“Over the past year, there has been a preponderance of evidence to prove the effectiveness of print advertising and the power of magazine media to both tell and sell,” stated Linda Thomas Brooks, president and chief executive officers of MPA – The Association of Magazine Media....
Implications - Adding a more engaging aspect to print, campaigns are integrating 3D visuals and interactive elements for allure. Transforming magazines and posters into activities that require participation, marketers are helping to bring campaigns to life, adding an immersive quality to traditional print.
Evan Williams sees Medium, the blogging platform that he and Biz Stone launched last year, as a modern-day magazine. When Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone launched Medium last year, their goal was for it to be a collaborative publishing tool that connected writers to a larger network. But that vision also hinges on quality, curation and, in some ways, a higher barrier to entry than platforms like Twitter. “We’re going to be a great place for professional writers to write,” Williams told Wired senior writer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference in New York on Tuesday. “The magazine is the analog for what we’re doing.”
In 1953, writers George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, and Peter Matthiessen banded together to found The Paris Review, the famed magazine that gave voice to literary giants like Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. Today the formidable institution is celebrating an impressive 60 years in operation....
It is understandable that publishers want to take what works in one medium and replicate it as closely as possible on another and then hope to duplicate the business model minus a good chunk of the costs. But it is a strategy unlikely to be successful because it takes an antiquated view of our reading behaviour, namely insisting the magazine formatted reading experience is as relevant as it was 15 years ago when clearly it is not. Take the research coming out of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a collaboration with The Economist Group, which shows that while 77% of tablet owners use their tablet daily, and 53% read news on their tablet every day, only 14% have paid for content on their tablet....
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It's a challenging time for magazine publishers, right? Of course, because it's a challenging time for anyone in the business of creating content and attracting audiences -- even (or especially) pure-play digital companies. The truth is, there are countless Silicon Valley startups, propped up by venture capital, that would kill to have the revenue of any of the magazine brands on our 2016 Magazines of the Year list. Starting with The New Yorker, which is the Magazine of the Year (read our storyhere), and followed by the diverse range of titles (presented below in alphabetical order) that round out our list, these are modern content brands that are mastering print and digital. They're iconic, they're beloved by readers and advertisers and, get this, their bottom lines are about generating actual revenue. --The Editors...
I looked at my first tablet magazine in 2010. With a few exceptions, the ones I look at today aren’t all that different now than they were then. For the most part, they are magazines that look and navigate like print editions with some “enhanced” elements – an interactive graphic here, a video there. Phones get bigger and digital audiences keep growing, but magazine publishers can’t seem to create a digital product that people want to pay for.
Four years in Internet time is forever. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all launched within less than a four-year period, and none of those sites looked or worked the same for very long. Yet tablet magazine innovation sputters. I spoke to some industry experts to determine where magazine publishers got stuck. (I tried to talk to publishers too, but they were not as responsive to my queries about why their digital editions sold so poorly.) Here’s what I found....
Beyond distribution and a better user experience, being web friendly fits into the Flipboard business plan. The company has begun selling full-page ads mixed in with regular content like what you might see in a high-end print magazine. Larger professional publishers, including the owners of this publication, currently have revenue-sharing agreements in place for their own magazines, but the company plans to expand that to other content and curation creators.
Around two million magazines have been created since the March launch of the DIY tool, and many of the top ones are being curated by enthusiasts rather than pros — photography, maritime shipping, beer, and GIFS are some example themes. There’s a lot of additional reader attention to sell against.
But what about the publications trying to figure out their online (and mobile) business models? Why should they want Flipboard to get a piece of their precious few remaining ad dollars via alternative destinations like native apps and now its own web links?For some of them/us, the answer is going to be that they don’t have the resources to build good web sites and mobile apps anyway. For others, it’s that they can build their own products but don’t know how to monetize them well....
Thanks to text messaging and social media sites like Twitter that have reduced much of today’s communication to a mere character count (if not simply a picture), it could be argued that people are growing weary of long-form content... Well, now there’s a site that helps you find just that. Launched today by the creators of Someecards and HappyPlace, The Gist gives a comedic take on the day’s top news in as few words as possible – usually just a sentence or two! With sections for politics, business, sports, tech, entertainment, nation, world, and big picture news, The Gist seems to have all its bases covered. Both informative and funny, The Gist strikes a winning combination for wannabe news junkies with too little time to get fully caught up on all of the day’s hot topics and who have grown accustomed to the easily-digestible, 140-character Twitter messages. In a recent conversation with Dave Kornfeld, editor-in-chief of The Gist, he noted that what inspired him most to launch the site was the chance to mimic the hectic pace of the news cycle in a funny, yet highly abbreviated way that people might possibly get real information from..?
Storytellers are the most influential members of our society. I’m not talking about just authors, journalists, bloggers, editors and screenwriters. I’m referring to anyone who tells stories to an audience for a living. In today’s digital world, that also includes brands, marketers, advertisers, publicists and chief executives. Every piece of content created for the purposes of expressing an idea, sharing an inspiration, promoting a product or entertaining a consumer has a narrative behind it. Marketers are now editors. Advertisers are journalists. Authors and bloggers are marketers. The result is that consumers are told hundreds – even thousands – of stories each day. That means storytellers need to know how to make their narratives rise above the noise....
Is integration of the personal narrative helpful or harmful in reporting? Just like the magazine industry itself, reporting styles are evolving. Aggregated and link journalism is plentiful; yellow journalism will most likely never go away; long-form journalism holds a nostalgic power, despite increasingly Tweet-ified attention spans; and now, the era of “me” journalism appears to be here for the long haul....
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Will Amazon help or hurt publishers by selling digital subscriptions? In a small margin industry, losing 30% off the top in addition to discounts or incentives, may be painful.