Wondering what’s behind the Time Inc. digital surge? Data-driven publishing, directed by a new chief data officer; plus, new hires, apps, and redesigns …

Big data is a big term, but there’s not a lot behind the concept itself, and no need to complicate it – collect the information that consumers provide and use the information that consumers provide. It’s that simple. Brands can take this mandate in cynical directions, but they can also improve user experience by personalizing products and tailoring content for enthusiast audiences. Data-driven publishing puts digital magazines in a prime position to do just that, and Time Inc. digital is making a push to become the best in the business, especially after hiring Chief Data Officer JT Kostman.

MinOnline recently ran a fascinating interview with Kostman – let’s start there today!

JT Kostman on Data-Driven Publishing at Time Inc. Digital

Kostman is one of the first CDOs in the publishing industry, and the first to hold the position at Time Inc. after being hired in May. How is he doing so far? Let’s hear what he has to say.

“Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp has put data at the heart of everything we do. Every decision we make and every action we take. … Thanks to his experience at AOL and in private equity, Joe has developed a rare capacity to not only appreciate but to fully understand the extraordinary opportunities that can come from optimally leveraging data assets, particularly at a company like Time Inc. When Joe became CEO, he was struck by the fact that, despite the extraordinary data-driven insights we should have access to as a consequence of the brand-first focus Time Inc. had maintained for 93 years, we weren’t taking advantage of the synergies that could be gained by taking an integrated, holistic, multi-dimensional view of our operations or our audiences. Joe created the role of Chief Data Officer as a focal point for integrating all that extraordinary data and creating a means for identifying additional data sources and partnerships,” Kostman told Kelsey Lundstrom.

“First, we want to know everything about our audiences. Who, what, where, why, when and how they access our content, love our coverage and are loyal to our brands. We want to truly listen to our readers, understand our visitors, appreciate our event attendees and accurately and deeply describe the preferences of all our audience members. We want this information so we can better serve our internal clients in editorial, marketing and consumer services – as well as our advertisers’ clients. … Second, our group is now in the business of leveraging the insights we gain to continually develop new products, services and capabilities that delight our audiences, bring additional value to our customers and collaterally provide additional data to help us know everything about our audiences, creating a virtuous data cycle.”

Mobile App Gets Back in ‘Shape’

Shape’s Love My Shape mobile app has been redesigned with an ecommerce content strategy, MinOnline reports. The Meredith property has partnered with BlueSoHo on the relaunch, which also includes new video capacity, social integration, and geolocation services, according to MinOnline.

T Magazine’s Digital Redesign

The New York Times’ T Magazine has also been redesigned, MinOnline reports, with a focus on a streamlined layout and improved useability.

Hires at InStyle and Men’s Fitness Mag

Patrick Connors has been named the new publisher at InStyle after leaving Men’s Fitness, so who’s taking his place at the latter? David Jackson, formerly of American Media Inc., MinOnline reports.

Is data-driven publishing the answer to audience development challenges? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

To read more about data-driven publishing in the news, visit MinOnline.

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Breakthroughs in digital magazine pricing and contrast pricing yield startling results

A few years ago, we were still huge fans of universal pricing for digital, print and website subscriptions.

We still like it. We just don’t like like it.

Universal pricing, in which the subscriber gets access to your content on all of your platforms, certainly has its advantages. First, the subscriber who buys your tablet edition gets access to your entire website, which allows you to build a long-term relationship, increase brand loyalty and sell your other products.

And we still believe, as we did in March 2013, that it’s critical to get your print audience engaged as quickly as possible in your 21^st century platforms – your website and your digital edition – with as few hurdles as possible.

But as with everything else in digital magazine publishing, this type of pricing has become somewhat overshadowed by the success of a new strategy. Even the pioneer of the universal price, The Economist, has abandoned it.

By setting a single high price to cover all of your products in one package, you may get more revenue per order, but you’ll also depress orders and overall revenues. That’s not a strategy we recommend going forward.

Contrast pricing

While some mega-publishers like Time Inc. still employ the universal price strategy, The Economist, like some forward-thinking publishers, has moved on to our new favorite digital magazine pricing model, contrast pricing – also known, less politely, as decoy pricing.

Contrast pricing takes advantage of the psychological phenomenon in which human beings, when asked to make a choice, tend to rely on the relative value of things compared and contrasted to other similar things. This theory has been beautifully illustrated in depth by Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, in his New York Times bestseller, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

It’s the same phenomenon, Ariely notes, that causes our headaches to persist when we take a cheap pain pill, but magically alleviates them when we take a much more expensive remedy. As long as we have something to contrast a purchase with, we’ll choose the one that seems most valuable by contrast.

Ariely most famously examined The Economist a few years back, before digital magazines, when it made this offer:

• $59 – Subscription to the website
• $125 – Subscription to the print edition
• $125 – Subscription to the website and the print edition

The decoy price was the middle one: $125 for the print edition alone, when you could have the print edition and the website for the same price, was undesirable, and only served to establish the higher value of the last offer. That’s what I call maximizing your revenues!

Although we don’t have any numbers from The Economist to show how well it worked, Ariely ran a test by asking students to choose which offer they’d prefer. Unsurprisingly, the decoy worked beautifully, driving consumers to the highest priced offer:

• $59 – Website only: 16%
• $125 – Print edition only: 0%
• $125 – Website and print edition: 84%

Next, he removed the decoy price that made the last offer seem to be the most attractive. The results changed dramatically:

• $59 – Website only: 16% 68%
• $125 – Website and print edition: 84%32%

The lesson? Bundle that digital magazine with at least one other product, and make sure you have three offers to drive more buyers to the highest price point.

Even if you do embrace contrast pricing, you have to be careful which prices you use. If you don’t calculate a decoy price whose purpose is to drive subscribers to the highest price point, you’re still leaving money on the table.

Consider these price points for pricing a magazine, website and combo package:

• $20 – Magazine: 70%
• $30 – Website: 10%
• $45 – Combo: 30%

Our experience shows us that the price in the middle is just too far below the highest price you want subscribers to choose, so it doesn’t serve as a decoy. Instead, buyers just opt for the cheapest price – 70% of them, in fact, but at just $20 each, revenues are tepid.

Instead, to make the middle price a genuine decoy price, lower the combo price at the top to make it a smaller financial leap for the consumer. This strategy sends revenues through the roof:

• $20 – Magazine: 20%
• $30 – Website: 10%
• $35 – Combo: 70%

That $5 price increase to the top is just too appealing to ignore!

For another look at how this can be done, here’s the case study for Hidden Gardens magazine from our future publishing company, Green Gardens Network. The concept is the same, only this time we’ve made the first two prices the same, and we’ve repeated that modest $5 jump to the highest price:

• $29.97 – Hidden Gardens print edition and website/archive: 30%
• $29.97 – Hidden Gardens digital edition and website/archive: 20%
• $34.97 – Combo for web, print and digital magazine: 50%

Once again, you can see we’ll drive more orders overall, as well as more orders at the highest price, generating total revenues significantly higher than we would get with the $20/$30/$45 model.

Don’t believe the model? Consider the real-world 2013 numbers from the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) that we wrote about in the past.. BAS has a digital magazine price for Biblical Archaeological Review (BAR), a digital library of back issues, and a combo package of both.

• $19.95 – BAR digital magazine: 19%
• $29.95 – BAR digital archive: 22%
• $34.95 – BAR digital magazine + archive: 59%

Once again, the highest price is only $5 more than the middle price. Five dollars more to get $20 worth of the digital magazine is simply a no-brainer for the consumer. The combo offer alone earned BAS $97,000. Digital magazine sales brought in $17,616, and the archive generated $32,017.

Discreet pricing

Finally, many publishers opt for discreet offers with no bundles. (We’re looking at you, Hearst.) This is a more traditional approach, but we don’t think it’s well suited for multiplatform publishers. It might look something like this:

• $19.97 – Digital magazine
• $24.97 – Print magazine
• $29.97 – Website/archive

We fear that publishers use this pricing strategy not because it’s multiplatform- or customer-friendly, but because their technology limits them to it. The consumer won’t perceive any extra value for the $24.97 or $29.97 prices. The only reason to choose anything but the lowest price is if the consumer is one of the vanishing breed who prefers print, or would rather consume content sitting at a desk.

What do you think of contrast pricing versus universal pricing or discreet pricing?

This article was originally published in 2013 and has been updated.

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With the right color palette for your website, you’ll achieve online marketing success by drawing in a new audience

If you take a close look at the most visited sites on the Internet, you’ll see an interesting phenomenon: they all seem to use the same four colors.

It’s true. Many websites use the same basic color scheme with slight variations. Usually, those colors include blue, white, gray, black, and a color that pops. The last color could be yellow, red, or orange. White is the predominant background color with pale blue coming in second.

Could using the “right” color palette lead to online marketing success? Well, maybe. Nobody thinks Facebook took over the Internet because their site was blue. And Netflix hasn’t taken over digital video just because it’s red.

Choosing the right colors for your website and target audience is what’s important. Are you going to create a relaxed vibe? Do you want to make the viewers feel a sense of empowerment?

The color palette you choose unconsciously sets the tone for your audience. Not only will these colors lure your viewers onto your web page, but it will also be a kind of “mood ring” for them, too.

Think about some of the most popular websites today, and the ones you visit the most. Which one attained high online marketing success? What colors instantly come to your mind when you think of these pages?

A few examples for your reference

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Yahoo!
• Wikipedia
• Amazon
• PayPal
• Twitter
• Netflix
• CNN
• Google

There’s no coincidence. Many of these sites use similar color schemes because their publishers have discovered which designs work best on the Internet for attracting visitors and keeping people interested. Or maybe they were flukes. What we do know is that if you’re currently in the process of picking colors, there’s a lot to know about what each one can tell your audience without any words necessary.

A popular website should attribute these colors to their online marketing success

1. White

White is predominantly the background on websites–because it represents simplicity. Think of Google. The home page background is all white, except for any text. There are no images (unless it’s a holiday), pop up ads, or any other overwhelming visuals. Google’s simplicity has attributed to its online marketing success. Easy access to the page invites internet users of all levels to visit and use Google.

You might have heard that Google just updated their logo last week, being touted as their “biggest change in 16 years.” But the one thing that hasn’t changed: it’s still the same multi-colored logo on a white background. The text shape has changed, but not the colors.

2. Gray

It may not be the most obvious color to pop out of the screen, but it’s certainly a crucial one to grab online marketing success. Gray supports a website, unlike any other color. It’s neutral, but it’s not completely blank (unlike white). Gray fills in the blanks and also compliments vibrant colors like red, yellow, green, etc.

3. Black

When you think of chic edginess and elegance, think of this color. When used properly, black makes a great counterpoint to white and gray because it, too, represents simplicity. However, unlike white, black draws in a heightened level of sophistication. Using it as a background color accompanied by very little details (a simple white font, maybe a neutral-colored border) is a classic online hit.

4. Blue

The color blue carries many meanings–depending on the situation. That could also be the case when used on the internet; however, it makes sense to say that blue is the color of relaxation and security for most websites. The majority of the social media outlets today (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) use blue as their main color of choice. Simply, it’s an inviting tone, which is partially why these social media websites have attained a staggeringly high rate of online marketing success. Blue’s calming tone attract more people to the website–it momentarily takes them away from their reality.

What you might not know about Facebook’s blue logo is that Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind to red and green, which is initially why he chose blue. However, a few years ago, Colour Lovers found that blue is the most popular color for the top 100 websites in the world. Red is in second place. All the way back in 2003, Wired ran a similar study that printed in their magazine and found the same exact results. Blue and red have been winning the Internet for a long time.

5. Red

Red reigns supreme as the most outstanding color (even if it’s only on a small fraction of the page). It makes sense that news related websites like CNN would use red as its main color theme because it emotes a sense of urgency and instantly draws attention. Red is a color that must be used carefully and tastefully, so readers aren’t turned off by reading the content that’s on the website.

One of my marketing heroes, Louis Cheskin, founded the Color Research Institute. Mr. Cheskin was the packaging genius who created the Gerber baby, designed the 7-Up label, and put the spoon on Betty Crocker packages.

He also made margarine yellow—it was previously white—and the McDonald’s arches golden.

Mr. Cheskin discovered that the four characteristics of colors—visibility, retention, preference, and association—are sometimes different for men and women.

For men, blue rates low in visibility and retention, but high in preference. Men associate blue with the words “reliable” and “intelligent.”

Do you think it’s any coincidence that IBM’s nickname is “Big Blue?”

However, for women, blue also rates low in visibility and retention, as well as low in preference. Women associate blue with the words “depressing” and “professional.”

Nevertheless, when asked, more people of both genders site blue as their favorite color.

Mr. Cheskin was fond of saying “perception is reality” and wasn’t interested in what customers thought about the packages he created. Instead, what was important to him was how colors and packaging made them feel about the product.

Food for thought: How do the colors of your website make your customers feel about your publishing company and its products?

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Ad engagement is one of the great challenges for digital magazines – and brands in general – but signs point to positive trends taking shape

Despite the proliferation of platforms, channels, and technology, ad engagement hasn’t exactly gotten easier for publishers and brands. Whether it’s the ad blocking craze that seems to be taking over the Web or cross-device targeting concerns, viewability issues or unreliable metrics, connecting consumers with meaningful ad experiences that can sustain digital magazines and satisfy marketers is becoming more complex even as access levels are as high as they’ve ever been.

However, things are looking up, according to a few recent articles from Digiday. Mobile advertising in particular, which has so flummoxed publishers, is showing indications of finding a rhythm, while the Atlantic, always a leader, is showing publishers how it’s done when it comes to maximizing time spent on native advertising content. On top of it, LinkedIn has found a way to parlay its event marketing into digital ad revenue.

Read on for some encouraging news!

Are Digital Publishers Starting to Master Mobile Ad Engagement?

A new study from PubMatic shows that publishers are making more headway when it comes to mobile advertising, Digiday reports, with rates growing and opening up a lead on desktop.

“The publishers are doing a better job improving their mobile Web designs and building responsive websites,” PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel told Garett Sloane. “We’re getting a version of the Web that is built to the expectation of mobile devices, and the ads and ad engagement are higher.”

According to PubMatic data, CPMs in the last quarter were 34% higher on mobile than desktop, while mobile ad growth is up 12% year over year. While social channels like Facebook are pushing a significant portion of this success, mobile web and app performance is up also.

Publishers’ efforts to provide better user data, private marketplaces, and a gradual move away from quantity (in the form of banners) toward quality (in the form of native ads) are cited as drivers as mobile ad engagement matures.

The Atlantic’s Native Ad Engagement Success

Speaking of native advertising, Atlantic readers are averaging more than four minutes per native ad, which is outperforming BuzzFeed and Mashable, Digiday reports. In addition, the content is getting shared widely across social media. How are they doing it?

“It’s a lot of things at once,” Atlantic Publisher and Vice President Hayley Romer told Lucia Moses. “The redesign was focused on the reader; that’s paid off. We also rethought how we integrated native into the site. We’ve absolutely increased our emphasis on utility, making it something they do want to engage with.”

Can Events Drive Digital Advertising Revenue? LinkedIn Says Yes

Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s 16 events this year are aimed at an unlikely revenue stream – advertising, as opposed to ticket sales and sponsorships, according to Digiday.

“The model is to invest in our customer in the most efficient way possible,” said Alison Engel, vp of global marketing for Marketing Solutions. “There’s a power and opportunity to bringing people together in the same sector. It gets them thinking about how to work with LinkedIn differently.”

How important is ad engagement to your multiplatform publishing success? Share your story in the comments!

To read more about ad engagement in the news, visit Digiday.

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MoMe15 covers digital content monetization from all angles, including subscriptions, consumer data, mobile, and the future of web advertising

Just think if you could take a master class on digital content monetization with executives from the likes of The Economist, Hearst, Salesforce, and The Guardian.

Well, if you were in London last week, you could have, by attending the Monetising Media conference event, which, like our Mequoda Intensives and Summits, brings together publishing professionals to take stock of the industry and give shape to its future with presentations, best practices, workshops, and more.

If, like us, you weren’t able to make it last week, luckily, The Media Briefing has it covered. Let’s take a look at what they learned, so that we can learn from it!

The Economist on the Superiority of Freemium Strategy

Economist Vice President of Digital Solutions Robin Raven believes apps are a waste of time and paywalls for online content are misguided, The Media Briefing reports.

“My first recommendation is – don’t build an app. I’m serious. This is direct from Benedict Evans … his rule of thumb is ‘if your brand is not big enough for your user to want to put on their home screen of their mobile phone, don’t build an app,’” Raven said at MoMe15.

“If you genuinely believe an app can be a self-sustaining funnel, marketing-wise, and make some revenue, then you’re probably a games company. You might be a very high-end publisher that’s going to do in-app purchases and so on. For us, almost all of our apps are in the funnel of a subscription to the Economist. Everything tries to drive back to a subscription at the Economist.”

“Freemium, in my opinion, is the only way to go. I fundamentally disagree with [The Times' hard paywall]. I think it’s insane. You need to be able to get your content out there and people need to be able to sample it,” Raven said.

“What we’re trying to do is build habit-forming products. The most engaging apps out there are habit forming products. … I think this is an incredibly exciting time. It is exponentially easier to reach an audience that is larger than you could have ever imagined fifteen years ago. And if you focus on that quality in product then the opportunities are there.”

Hearst on Mobile Digital Content Monetization

Hearst Vice President of Strategy and Product Management Lee Wilkinson advises publishers to know your audience, master the changes in distribution methods, and emphasize quality content to better monetize mobile, The Media Briefing reports.

Salesforce on Data-Driven Publishing

The “Disrupt or Be Disrupted: Driving 1:1 Relationships in Media” session at Monetising Media featured Salesforce Global Director of Media Solutions Steve Sobel focusing on consumer data, The Media Briefing reports. The key is personalize and engage with, for instance, events. Sobel told conference goers that data analysis is a worthy investment regardless of the cost.

The Guardian on Digital Advertising Trends

Finally, Guardian Global Revenue Director Tim Gentry feels that publishers were short-sighted when it came to ad gains, and now they’re paying the price with ad blocking programs and viewability concerns, The Media Briefing reports. But he also believes the trend can be reversed if publishers come together to improve the process.

“The option to provide native advertising that is served via the CMS rather than ad-tech. It should – til the adblockers catch up – allow a way for advertisers to communicate with the audience. This solution doesn’t really harness the opportunities that exist around audience data,” Gentry said.

“No one part of the industry can offer a solution, it has to be a collaborative effort from all of us. We saw the IAB announce LEAN, but it’s fundamentally about providing the user with a lighter faster experience and a code of practice we can adhere to. … We need a change of focus, on value rather than cost.”

Looking for more on digital content monetization? Download our free Subscription Website Publishing Handbook today!

To read more about digital content monetization and MoMe15, visit TheMediaBriefing.com.

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What is a digital magazine really? Is it clickable, scrollable, web-accessible, or all the above?

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, and it’s not necessarily just an online magazine, although it could be!

Digital magazines and their many mobile formats

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.

When a magazine goes digital and becomes an app, it becomes alive. And that’s scary for some publishers. Suddenly, ads become more valuable to advertisers because they can be clicked. Content becomes more rich because it can also be hyperlinked to references and authors on the web. Live content can be embedded into a magazine so the editorial content doesn’t stop at the final publish date.

And if you’re not ready for that kind of transition or development project, then your magazine has suddenly become ancient.

Many publishers in this situation, hurrying to keep up, launch digital replica editions. These editions are simple digital mockups that subscribers can read and download onto their mobile devices, in many cases they are PDFs. In our recent survey of digital magazine readers, this was the least desired format to read a digital magazine because their most desired feature is scrollable text, whereas most replica editions require readers to pinch and zoom in order to read the text.

The more desired digital magazine formats include a replica plus and reflow plus.

Digital magazine subscription websites

A digital magazine may also come in another shape and size: a magazine subscription website.

A magazine subscription website archetype is set up to build subscriptions for a related print or digital magazine and to provide access to issues of the magazine online, often in an HTML format. I Like Crochet is a magazine subscription website, and TIME and MetroParent both have web magazines in their magazine susbcription websites (click those links to see them). All require registration for full access to the site; both offer their magazine content online; and both are organized by issue. We recently reviewed all three to determine the best features of great magazine subscription websites.

A magazine website is only a magazine website if the user can view or download an issue of a magazine—one that is linear and periodic, has pages and a regular frequency, and can be viewed in HTML, downloaded as a PDF or downloaded to a mobile device.

Many people refer to any website that carries a legacy magazine brand and magazine content as a magazine subscription website; however, if the content is not organized in a magazine format and issues cannot be viewed or downloaded, it doesn’t meet our basic criteria of being a magazine subscription website. It is, instead, a periodical subscription website.

As you may read in our description of the perfect digital magazine website, we think every publisher should offer their magazine in print, mobile, web and library formats. In addition to the traditional digital formats, we suggest the addition of an archive of back content organized by topic (what we refer to as an online magazine library). All together this forms a magazine reference website.

What is a digital magazine to you?

Don has noted that the combination of a magazine’s attributes make it desirable and “survivable” for some part of the reading population and that, paper or tablet, the essential attributes of a magazine will not change.

Consumers who love magazines are not going to let publishers change the characteristics of a magazine that have made the medium so successful over the years. However, there’s always room for improvement in format and accessibility.

When you think of the term “digital magazine,” what do you think of? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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How to sell digital magazines as demand for many platforms rise

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.

In fact, publishing entrepreneurs who have launched from scratch with print, digital and website simultaneously, and even established websites with no magazine at all are beginning to create their own magazines – multiplatform publishing run backward, so to speak.

But even as they become part of the norm, everyone is still trying to figure out how to sell digital magazines in this brave new world of ours. Sometimes the newest and hottest ideas are just that – ideas. We’re focused on strategies that have actually been executed and demonstrated to work.

So here are 8 strategies we’ve compiled for selling digital magazines, and as always, we welcome your ideas in the comments below.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 1

Track device users: If you’re making even the smallest effort at online audience development, you’re getting a sizable number of unique visitors to your website. You should always identify those visitors who arrive on a mobile device, and deliver a floater with a digital subscription offer they can’t refuse.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 2

Keep the whole pie: At Mequoda we always build a subscription website as a companion to our clients’ magazines. Beside the obvious benefits of audience development, subscription websites are vital in selling digital magazines, because you can do so directly from your website.

Take the money yourself, send them to Apple for fulfillment, and you don’t owe Apple a dime. Why? Because Apple’s primary interest is selling iPads, and as long as your subscription website isn’t a competitor retail site, the company is happy. Bonus: You get to gather the customer’s data, which Apple doesn’t willingly share and is a sore point for many publishers.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 3 

Leverage your back issues: There’s gold in them thar archives! One of the product bundles offered by Scientific American includes print, digital and the incredible archive that SA fully digitized – a whopping 150,000 articles, dating back to the magazine’s first issue in August 1845 and including contributors such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison.

And while few publishers have an archive as old and rich as SA’s, most legacy publishers have older content that their subscribers would love to access. For instance, Mequoda Gold Member Biblical Archaeology Society has digitized back issues of its current magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, along with its retired titles. Bundling that archive with the digital magazine (and leveraging decoy pricing) consistently delivers more sales and revenue than the digital magazine or the library alone.

BAS, by the way, combines Best Practice 2 with Best Practice 3 for a profitable two-fer!

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 4

Sell on Apple: Having discussed selling digital magazines on your own subscription website, we certainly don’t mean to imply that you should bypass Apple altogether. It’s by far the best deal you’ll ever get in a newsstand or agency, brick-and-mortar or virtual: Every sale Apple makes for you means 70% of that price in your pocket.

Remember, in the old days, the average remit from a newsstand for your print sales was 18-40%. And this is beside the fact that Apple is one of the most beloved brands of all time, resides on the best-selling tablet of all, and has far more magazines available, making it the most widely-shopped digital newsstand available to you.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 5

Get noticed: While it’s unclear anymore how much influence smaller niche publishers can have on getting themselves featured on mighty Apple, there’s still hope for standing out on other newsstands. Google Play, for instance, enhances its customer experience by providing free content supplied by publishers. In this way, I discovered Itsuxtobefat.com in the Health category, a modest little blog I’d never heard of, but which is right there surrounded by big players such as Self, Shape and Women’s Health. 

It might not be the Apple Newsstand in scale, and for that reason you might make this lower priority, but Google Play continues to grow, perhaps because of the lower cost of Android devices. Its revenue growth, though below Apple’s, is tracking similarly to Apple – up. 

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 6

Sample issue: As I’ve mentioned before, some publishers give away sample issues in their app to entice customers to buy something. Self offers an actual archive issue; Consumer Reports offers what looks like an old issue, but could be an issue compiled specifically for the purpose. A case study noted that for Popular Science, when they tested a specifically-designed sample issue against a free trial, the sample issue, showing off the best of the digital edition, easily bested the free trial offer. (Don’t hesitate to run your own similar test, though. Free trials are classic marketing techniques for a reason!) 

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 7 

Low-tech paper: There’s no excuse not to market to your existing print subscribers. Include a special offer for them when you have to send a renewal or billing notice anyway, and the cost is minimal.

How to sell digital magazines, Best Practice 8

Promote them: This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s shocking to us how many publishers (and we’re talking big players) have elaborate websites hosting subscription pages to build print circulation … but their digital products go unmentioned. On the platform where they’re most likely to find their tech-savvy readers! For heaven’ sake, sell your digital magazine on your website! Don’t hide your digital editions under a barrel!

What about you? Got any tips or tricks we should include in this list? Selling digital magazines is an area where we could all use new ideas, and one that’s changing daily.

This post was originally published in 2013  and is regularly updated.

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A year that promises to be big for native advertising trends starts with a new FTC policy in place; plus, the best of branded content in 2015

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 state-of-the-art ad blocking defense systems.

Branded content, as it’s also known, has been gaining steam for a while, even if it just has a fancier name for advertorial. We’ve been watching closely, and so, too, has the Federal Trade Commission, of course. Now, finally, we have official guidelines from the FTC, just as the demand for sponsored content, yet another iteration of native, is reaching unprecedented levels.

AdAge covers that development and much more in several recent articles about native advertising trends.

FTC Releases New Native Advertising Rules and Regulations

Toward the end of the year, right before the Christmas holiday, the FTC debuted its latest policy on native advertising. As expected, deception is the big no-no, but this time around, directives to avoid violation are more explicit, AdAge reports.

“In evaluating whether an ad’s format is misleading, the Commission will scrutinize the entire ad, examining such factors as its overall appearance, the similarity of its written, spoken, or visual style to non-advertising content offered on a publisher’s site, and the degree to which it is distinguishable from such other content,” the FTC said in its policy statement.

“For example, disclosures that subsequently inform consumers of a natively formatted ad’s commercial nature after they have clicked on and arrived at another page will not cure any misleading impression created when the ad is presented in the stream of a publisher site. … Although digital media has expanded and changed the way marketers reach consumers, all advertisers, including digital advertisers, must comply with the same legal principles regarding deceptive conduct the Commission has long enforced.”

Scripps the Latest to Launch In-House Branded Content Agency

Getting in just under the wire during the year of the in-house branded content lab was Scripps with its new Lifestyles Studio, AdAge reports.

“The amount of that content creation really requires a dedicated effort as opposed to asking the people who create linear programming for us to also create that. It’s becoming too big a need and too big an opportunity,” Scripps Networks Chief Revenue Officer Steve Gigliotti told Tim Peterson.

“We’ve been doing that kind of as a one-off production, and the appetite for that is bigger and bigger. … We’re a major player in the food category, but an adjacent category could be health.”

The Huffington Post Undertakes Data-Sharing Native Advertising Content Campaign

The Huffington Post and Sleep Number are exchanging consumer data to craft an ambitious sponsored content campaign, AdAge reports.

“It’s native advertising but a much more sophisticated model,” HuffPo Vice President of Content Partnerships Lauri Baker told Peterson. ”If someone’s standing outside of a competitive store, we know we can serve them a Sleep Number ad that’s specific to that user based on what they’ve read and what we know about them.”

What Were the Hottest Native Advertising Trends, Campaigns of 2015?

But will the HuffPo-Sleep Number effort be among the best in the business, joining the likes of Netflix + The Wall Street Journal, Nokia + Wired, Tabasco + Thrillist, Mini + Fast Company, Clorox + the self-same HuffPo, Cathay Pacific + Mashable, Ford + Hearst, and Hulu + Gawker from 2015? Only time will tell!

Which native advertising trends are you tracking in 2016? Let us know in the comments!

To read more about native advertising trends in the news, visit AdAge.

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Three subscription pricing strategies that work

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 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.).

While the above is new, an Excel spreadsheet can help you map the right solution easily. The tougher decision is deciding how to position subscription versus single copy or limited access. It would be nice if there were a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. There’s not. Depending upon your brand, delivery channels, and publishing economics (user, sponsor, or some hybrid of the two), one of these three solutions might be best for you.

Traditional pricing

You’ll find that those who aren’t bundling products through Universal Pricing or Contrast Pricing will be best served by the guidelines below:

Be fair and balanced: If you want to neutralize price in the subscription versus single copy decision-making process, use the fair and balanced approach. Assuming you’re selling either a monthly issue or monthly access or both, set your price ratio at four-to-one. For a mass-market consumer brand it might ideally be $19.97 per year or $4.97 per month (issue).

Encourage sampling: Consumers don’t like commitment. When considering the purchase of an information product with which they’re unfamiliar, they largely prefer to buy one. If you want to encourage this behavior and thus maximize your single copy or monthly access sales, price your annual subscription at $19.97 and price monthly access or single copies at $2.97. This pricing strategy still provides a powerful incentive to take the annual option, but will result in a much higher percentage of people that take the single copy or monthly access price. It’s worth noting there’s a huge difference in the long term economics of selling monthly access to a subscription website for $2.97 on a recurring basis, than selling a single magazine or newsletter issue through a subscription application for $2.97 on a non-recurring basis.

Push the subscription: If your overall economics favor selling subscriptions, consider what many now call “no-brainer pricing,” which sets a ratio of about two-to-one. Assuming we’re still talking about a subscription priced at $19.97, this strategy would dictate a single copy or monthly access price of $9.97. Note: In all the above cases I am avoiding avalanche price barriers like $10 and $20. You should, too.

While many magazine and newsletter publishers have avoided building subscription websites and thus avoided the above decision matrix until now, the rapid growth of tablet computers and the sale of tablet-based app subscriptions is dragging them to include digital subscription marketing in their core long-term publishing strategy.

If you’re not bundling your services, follow the guidelines above.

However, as publishers begin to include website access in their long-term publishing strategy, they’re beginning to discover other ways of bundling web access into print and digital packages. The first, Universal Pricing, bundles platforms at a discount, but the second, Contrast Pricing, we’re finding is more profitable and gets consumers to pick higher priced bundles.

Universal pricing

Universal Digital Access, as a policy, creates an environment where subscribers can safely sample different platforms without fear of being left behind. From the publishers point of view, a subscriber is a horrible thing to waste, and anyone who subscribes to content on any platform, in any edition, is given premium access to their subscription website.

Contrast pricing

While some mega-publishers like TIME Inc. still employ the universal price strategy, The Economist has moved on to our new favorite pricing model, contrast pricing – also known, less politely, as decoy pricing.

Contrast pricing takes advantage of the psychological phenomenon in which human beings, when asked to make a choice, tend to rely on the relative value of things compared and contrasted to other similar things. This theory has been beautifully illustrated in depth by Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, in his New York Times bestseller, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

It’s the same phenomenon, Ariely notes, that causes our headaches to persist when we take a cheap pain pill, but magically alleviates them when we take a much more expensive remedy. As long as we have something to contrast a purchase with, we’ll choose the one that seems most valuable by contrast.

Ariely most famously examined The Economist a few years back, before digital magazines, when it made this offer:

• $59 – Subscription to the website
• $125 – Subscription to the print edition
• $125 – Subscription to the website and the print edition

The decoy price was the middle one: $125 for the print edition alone, when you could have the print edition and the website for the same price, was undesirable, and only served to establish the higher value of the last offer. That’s what I call maximizing your revenues!

Although we don’t have any numbers from The Economist to show how well it worked, Ariely ran a test by asking students to choose which offer they’d prefer. Unsurprisingly, the decoy worked beautifully, driving consumers to the highest priced offer:

• $59 – Website only: 16%
• $125 – Print edition only: 0%
• $125 – Website and print edition: 84%

Next, he removed the decoy price that made the last offer seem to be the most attractive. The results changed dramatically:

• $59 – Website only: 68%
• $125 – Website and print edition: 32%

The lesson? Bundle that digital magazine with at least one other product, and make sure you have three or more offers to drive more buyers to the highest price point.

More subscription pricing data on the way

Every week I hear from a colleague or client who has new data about the best pricing and promotion strategies for their digital subscription websites and digital apps. In many cases, they hadn’t even considered how single copy or monthly access pricing should play into their overall marketing and pricing strategy. That’s changing quickly. As new data and case studies appear, you can count on us to cover them here, and in our upcoming live events.

Happy testing!

This post was originally published in 2014 and has been updated regularly.

The post How to Choose the Best Subscription Pricing and Single Copy Pricing Strategy for your Subscription Websites and Subscription Apps appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

Publishers are making magazine ecommerce a part of their strategy; plus, video ad viewability and a traffic push from Time Out

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 potential subscription bundling opportunities.

But it’s not a chip shot, either. Magazine ecommerce isn’t always a perfect fit, because selling stuff beyond articles and white papers and videos might not come naturally to content creators.

Digiday covers the recent trend of publishers bringing magazine ecommerce in-house despite any drawbacks. Let’s take a look at what they found out!

Digital Publishers Handling Magazine Ecommerce Themselves

Affiliate links are one thing, as Gawker and The Washington Post use; institutionalizing magazine ecommerce as part of your operations is another challenge altogether, as Digiday reports.

“Women’s lifestyle site PopSugar made the jump into commerce in 2012 with Must Have, a $40-a-month-subscription box that today accounts for 20 percent of its revenue. The twist: Rather than outsource the entirety of the operation to third-party vendors, PopSugar handles all of its merchandising, marketing and customer support in-house,” Ricardo Bilton writes.

“Condé Nast’s Allure took its Allure Beauty Box operations in-house six months ago, giving the publisher more control over what made it into the boxes and giving it a more direct relationship with readers. ‘We’re running all the procurement, marketing and manufacturing, but we also own the customer data,’ said Allure publisher and chief revenue officer Agnes Bogdan Chapski. Its subscription-box business has 30,000 subscribers, a 40 percent increase since last June. Food52 has also pushed closer to being a retailer in its own right.”

Time Inc. Digital Doing Magazine Ecommerce With Beauty Site

Hey, it’s Time Inc. digital doing something again! This time, it’s transatlantic, with the U.K.’s Powder focusing on magazine ecommerce and data, Digiday reports.

“At launch, Powder is only available in the U.K. Sutcliffe is tight-lipped about how much revenue it’s hoping Powder will bring in to Time Inc., though through its testing period, it has amassed enough users for brands to be interested,” Lucinda Southern writes.

“It opens out revenue streams through sponsored products, native content and – starting next week – video, affiliate e-commerce and eventually events. It’s also entering the crowded beauty box market with its personalized offering via a third-party provider, Latest in Beauty, that is handling all the logistics.”

Publisher Video Preferences Include Autoplay … but What About Advertiser Preferences?

Autoplay is attractive to publishers for digital advertising purposes, but what about for digital advertisers’ viewability purposes? Digiday explores the conundrum.

“Looking at how many videos were played is no longer enough, because [with autoplay] a lot people are doing that,” Horizon Media Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Digital Charlotte Cochrane told Sahil Patel.

“We’re making sure that we’re having those conversations, where whoever we’re working with will give deeper metrics to show who has actually viewed the ad.”

Time Out Efforts Will Focus on Reaching 350 Million Uniques a Month

Time Out is taking all avenues in setting its traffic goals, Digiday reports.

“[New Board Director Christine] Petersen refers to Time Out as being ‘the city in the pocket’ of consumers, herself having been a fan of the listings site since it launched in New York. Time Out already has an e-commerce proposition. Site visitors have been able to purchase things like tickets, offers and hotel reservations for years, but Peterson thinks there is a lot of room for growth, though the company wouldn’t break out specific figures,” Jessica Davies writes.

“‘Ten years ago everyone was “going to go digital”; five years ago it was about expanding digital; now it’s pre-eminent digital,’ she said. ‘But you have to ask what your customer wants and then translate that into each channel.’”

What are your thoughts on magazine ecommerce? Let us know in the comments!

To read more about magazine ecommerce and other news, visit Digiday.

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This content business model drives interest in live events while also driving revenue from attendees and sponsors

Who would have imagined in the internet age that people would still yearn for live events?

The appeal of hearing, seeing, and speaking with actual people and touching real-life objects has never gone away, and thus the event business is not only surviving, but thriving in an otherwise digital era.

The internet still plays a role, however: Now an event publisher can promote and sell tickets to an event in living color on a website. And a very successful content business model it can be, even for publishers who only added events to their legacy offerings in recent years.

Unlike subscription-based business models, event content business models are retail websites that are purely transactional, and must be paired with a content-rich portal subscription website to attract traffic.

Alternately, an event website may pay for website traffic using third-party media such as display networks, text ad networks, and other publishers’ email newsletters and websites.

These sites are not the same as event promoting websites that allow users to post their own events.

Our longtime client and fellow Boston-based organization, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, is an excellent mentor site for anyone launching a niche media event site.

PON has offered courses on negotiation and mediation for many years, ranging in length from one day to a complete semester. However, in 2009, at the height of the recession, PON was forced to cut back the number of its programs in the hope of increasing the number of participants. Both attendance and revenues continued to decline, however.

It was the addition of a well-designed event website — as part of the introduction of the Mequoda Method — that pulled PON back to prosperity.

Today, PON’s revenues have grown by more than 63%, its programs are filled to capacity and they’ve added new programs as well. Meanwhile, the cost of marketing via direct mail was 32% of the budget; today, their total marketing spend is a mere 7%, with all event tickets now generated from their own Mequoda portal subscription website (pon.harvard.edu) and their email list.

And one of PON’s  improvements highlights the most profitable advantage of event websites: exponentially increased global reach. Before the internet, international attendees comprised 20% of PON’s total customer base, while today it’s grown to 50%. Because PON is paired with a Mequoda portal subscription website and a newsletter subscription website, this makes them a portal / event / newsletter hybrid.

For a mass media site, look no further than the Consumer Electronics Show, which also dominated its niche long before the arrival of the internet. It, too, has grown exponentially thanks to the power of the Web.

This annual event is a week-long extravaganza of consumerism, and because it only happens once a year, it offers news and blog posts to keep visitors engaged the rest of the year. CES has no affinity website to drive traffic organically, so it must pay for advertising and links on other sites to build its audience.

Examples of event content business models

Taking a look at PON, we can see many of the quintessential characteristics of an event content business model. Its home page promotes all of its varied events, with buttons for browsing through them down the right rail, followed by the promotional copy. Click on one of those buttons, or on a specific tab in the navigation bar, and you can browse through all of PON’s seminars and its Negotiation Institute courses.

On each separate event page, there’s a related OFIE (order form in navigation) promoting the brochure, so even if the visitor doesn’t sign up for an event, once he or she hands over an email address, PON can continue to promote its events to that person via its daily email newsletter.

The Consumer Technology Association’s event content business model is the mighty Consumer Electronics Show, currently held once a year in Las Vegas for professionals in the industry. Although it’s awash in “consumerism,” the role of this expo is to advertise companies’ high-tech wares to consumers via journalists.

At $100 to $200 per person, that’s a lot of cash to attend an expo. CEA also attracts more than 3,000 exhibitors, all of whom pay $20,000-$100,000 to rent booth space. Clearly the draw of seeing, hearing and touching fancy electronics (and, of course, the ubiquitous “booth babes”) hasn’t waned in the digital era. This home page promotes the next event.

Given that the event takes place just once a year, the publisher has taken pains to add new content of other kinds throughout the rest of the year. If you scroll down the home page past the invitations to register or exhibit, you come to the news, which will bring you to the association’s Portal content business model for free content.

All other content on the site, accessed via the navigation bar on the home page, is about the upcoming CES. The site is carefully designed to keep visitors engaged throughout the 12 months between shows.

Characteristics of an event content business model

The event content model shares a low amount of user-generated content with all but one of its premium website siblings. After that, it’s pretty much a unique creature.

Who pays: The content on an event page is free to all users; however, both users (attendees) and sponsors (exhibitors, if any) are paying for that content with the cost of their tickets or sponsorship fees. The site benefits attendees by giving them information on who, what, where, when and how, while it benefits sponsors by advertising the event/s where they’re exhibiting.

MIU: The minimum information unit of an event website is an event. This can be a single, short event such as a three-hour workshop, a five-day summit, or a major exposition such as CES where attendees don’t just sit in chairs and take notes, they can come, go and wander throughout a vast exhibition hall or halls.

Frequency: Publishing frequency at an event site is low. PON posts informational and promotional content for its most frequent event six times a year, and for an event publisher, that’s considered high frequency. Both the mass media and niche sites can actually only have one event per year, which is why sites such as CES offer news and/or blog content to keep things interesting.

User-generated content: As noted above, the event site is similar to the magazine, newsletter, library and classroom business models with very low user-generated content. Only the retail premium website differs here, with a high level of user-generated content in the form of product reviews. The only user-generated content at an event site itself are testimonials or videos by attendees.

Number of authors: There is typically only one author at this site, that is, the event producer. Any user-generated content that does appear is heavily moderated by that producer.

Browse or Search: An event site is organized to allow users to browse through its content for a single event or for events with multiple courses or tracks. At the CES site, you might visit the blog to see what’s new, but you probably won’t be searching for “smart phone ear recognition app.”

Home page: The home page of an event site, of course, exists to promote the next event, that is, what’s new.

Video: Event websites sometimes offer video, but not all. CES has plenty, and PON will be adding video promotions to its site shortly.

If you’re still selling your event tickets by direct mail, what are you waiting for? The internet lives to make you more profitable. And if you do have an event website, do you have any thoughts about our characterization of such sites? We’re always interested in publisher experiences and especially business or information architecture we haven’t considered. Let us know in the comments!

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Listing this year’s best new magazine launches; plus, the future of Men’s Health and how The Atlantic handles changing social media patterns

Healthy print brands make for healthy multiplatform publishers – that’s a core Mequoda tenet. Today, we’ve got some examples of that: the 30 hottest new magazine launches, a big staffing move for Rodale’s Men’s Health, and The Atlantic’s adept social media strategy. Let’s get right to it with some recent articles from minOnline.com.

Samir Husni’s Top 30 Hottest New Magazine Launches

We look forward to this every year as a nice barometer for the publishing business: Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni‘s 30 hottest new magazine launches (this edition includes Mequoda Master Bryan Welch‘s well-deserving B). Head over to minOnline.com for his full column leading up to the min Awards on December 8.

“In reaching my decision on what makes a magazine ‘hot,’ by far the number-one criteria point is the audience’s reaction to that magazine. How did the overall marketplace react and how did its intended audience respond to it? And, just as important, how did the industry behave toward it? These questions are the first thing I ask upon selection of the Hottest 30. Then, once I’ve answered those initial questions,  I really get down to work. Remember my mantra: Audience First,” Husni writes.

“So without further ado; here are the 30 Hottest New Launches for 2016 in alphabetical order: B Magazine, Bake From Scratch, Beekman 1802 Almanac, Celebrity Page, Classic Sewing, Color Magic!, FabUplus, Forged, Galerie, GQ Style, Hola!, Interior Design Homes, J-14 Decorate!, Jarry, Kazoo, Live With Heart and Soul, Living the Country Life, Lonely Planet, Misadventures, My Herbs, Pallet, Permaculture, Providence, Southern Cast Iron, Spoonful, SwimSwam, Tablet, The Clever Root, Tread, Women’s Golf Journal.”

New Men’s Health Editor on Future of Magazine’s Brand

Matt Bean is returning to Rodale after a successful stint at Time Inc., and minOnline.com has a great interview with him.

“Men’s Health is a powerhouse brand, which I’ve known for years. What clinched it for me was meeting (or re-meeting) the core leadership team that Maria [Rodale] has put in place. Nobody wants to follow the same old script. Everyone wants to move quickly. The new folks there get it, and everyone else I trust and know well. In a period of industry-wide transition, trust and vision are the two most important ingredients. Rodale is small enough to allow change to happen more quickly, where risks can be embraced. You need to shake it up and take chances, and it feels like we’re willing to do that now, and we have the team to do that. It matters to me that we have a different perspective, from the top down. Maria’s the only female CEO among the major magazine publishers. That’s incredible. She’s proven that she is willing to make bold moves. And Beth Buehler, who just took on the COO role, is phenomenal. She and her team will be crucial partners as we move ahead,” Bean tells Caysey Welton.

“Finally, we need to add new voices to the mix of writers and experts. I’ll be reaching out to many of the best and brightest minds to help us build the pipeline. The brand’s perspective has never been more relevant, but we need new voices in the fold to help it take shape and evolve along with the reader.”

Atlantic Senior Editor on Social Media Strategy

Highly recommended and relevant minOnline.com interview with Atlantic Senior Editor Caitlin Frazier on how the magazine adjusts to shifting social media patterns.

“There’s more competition for the social user than ever before. And a lot of those competitors are appealing to the identities of their users, whether it’s publishers targeted at women, men, Millennials, progressives, conservatives, parents, singles, etc. It’s impossible to think of the social media user as any one thing. Because today, it’s everyone. But that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. How can we cut through the noise and build an audience of core readers? That’s the real reward,” Frazier tells Jameson Doris.

“I’ve been doing social and audience development work for almost five years and online audiences have become much more sophisticated. You can’t just serve everyone the exact same thing in the same way. A reader needs a reason to follow your main Facebook page, and your politics-focused page, and your Instagram account. And tailoring all those things and understanding the nuances of the audience takes more work and more staff.”

What are your thoughts on these new magazine launches? Any you would add? Let us know in the comments!

To read more about new magazine launches and other industry news, visit minOnline.com.

The post The 30 Hottest New Magazine Launches From Samir Husni appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

These audience development models create marketing-qualified leads through freemiums that build larger, more monetizable email lists

“Audience development” is one of those terms that many people instinctively understand, but usually underestimate. Although media professionals have worked with the term for years, most have not bothered to define all the things that go on when executing an audience development strategy.

And at its most basic, that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s about building an audience for your products. But this encompasses many distinct activities, and each one needs to be understood and carefully executed to achieve the goal.

Publishers have a long history of building audiences around specific topics, or niches. But the Internet economy changed the audience development model significantly. Many of the traditional practices still work, but the digital economy requires a more expansive, and agile, approach than ever before. Luckily, new tools and methodologies are developing all the time. Publishers have to decide which tools are right for them, and then conceive, develop and undertake a strategy to use these tools to build their audience.

Previously, the only purpose of building an audience was to sell print subscriptions. Now, publishers are looking to sell digital subscriptions, develop leads for sponsors, increase memberships, and build communities. As the uses for your audience have expanded, so have the tools to build it.

When you are a Mequoda publisher, the goal of audience development is to get people on your email list. You will use that list to eventually sell them a product or monetize them through a sponsored message. The strategies we use rely on acting as a completely free resource of information – that’s how you build an audience.

Below we describe Mequoda’s seven audience development models. To make it easier to see how this works for a real publisher, we also discuss how the example might fit into the business plan for Rose Harper, CEO of Green Gardens Network. If you’re new to Mequoda, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with Green Gardens Network (GGN), our composite case study, and CEO Rose Harper, the embodiment of all our clients whose “example” we use as a teaching tool without revealing real publishers’ names or data.

Seven models for audience development

• Search
• Social
• Syndication
• Email
• Retail
• Paid Advertising
• Direct Mail

Search Audience Development Model

Building an audience by driving search traffic is a fundamental component of Mequoda’s audience development strategy. For most publishers this means focusing on Google searches, the main search engine of the United States, and also the world.

A lot has been made of search engine optimization (SEO) over the last decade, and although a lot of has changed, SEO has continued to be a valuable tool to drive traffic to your web site. Optimizing your content for search isn’t always easy, but it pays off when your goal is to get more people to find you on the web. If an editor wants a new audience to find her or her content, they must learn to work with Google and other search engines. Good editors will strive to understand what people search for and ensure their content relates to those search terms and provides quality for the reader.

At GGN, we have used the Google Keyword Planner and identified 24 primary topic categories of content, and found hundreds of keywords for each topic. In total, this represents more than 10,000 keyword phrases relating to Rose’s content. Those terms are searched more than 137 million times each year – 137,454,720 times, to be exact.

But the Google Keyword Planner does not reveal every keyword phrase that is related to primary topics. The tool reveals only those terms that have been searched for at least 10 times per month during the trailing 12 months, and as you may know by now, Google pairs together single and plural search terms.

Our research has revealed that the long tail for organic search is very close to a standard long tail distribution. The keyword phrases Google reveals represent only about 20 percent of total search volume in the United States for a given cluster of keyword phrases. This means 80 percent of the search traffic which will arrive at your web site will come using long tail keyword phrases that are used less than 120 times each year. So, to determine the size of the entire search universe, you multiply your known keyword universe by four, a number we call the long-tail factor.

Using this methodology, we take Rose’s initial keyword phrase universe — 137,454,720 – and multiplied the number by four, equaling a long-tail search volume of 549,818,880. When added to the initial phrase list, we determined that Rose’s keyword universe size is closer to 687,273,600 searches per year.

To tap into this universe, Rose’s Chief Content Officer will work with the editorial staff to ensure all content is optimized for search. With some old-fashioned editorial hard work, GGN’s content will be found more often by people searching the web.

Once someone finds the GGN content, they will be offered a free report – aligned with the topic that brought them to the site – in exchange for an email address. Converting visitors into email subscribers is a fundamental method for growing an email list and building an audience.

Read more about the search audience development model.

Social Audience Development Model

At Mequoda, we’ve found that social media followers convert better into email subscribers than anyone else. At its heart, social media is about communicating and building a community. People with a common interest – whether in business, hobbies, activities, or anything else – share information and advice and soon build a presence around each other. Best of all, these people are usually active participants, and not just lurkers.

Using social media to share valuable information will grant you access to those communities, and allow you to become a trusted source. If you really want to get your audience invested, give them things like a peek behind the scenes. You can give them a sense of your day-to-day process, and let them have a say in what you produce.

Managing social media can be time consuming. Rose from GGN will be publishing 4 pieces of content per day, and most Mequoda publishers are publishing at least three times per day. When it comes to managing the social that goes along with each post, we find that most online editors don’t have a system, and are typically scheduling social on the same day each article publishes.

That approach takes much more time than necessary, and can leave social media languishing when the editor goes on vacation or calls in sick. At Mequoda we recommend a long-term social media strategy for evergreen content that we call the 12x12x12. The premise is this:

• For every article you write, write 12 unique twitter posts and two unique Facebook posts.
• Schedule your Tweets out once per day for the first 12 days.
• And then again once per month for the next 12 months.
• Schedule your first Facebook post (which can double for Google+ or LinkedIn) on the day the article publishes.
• Schedule the second Facebook post for six months later.

When evergreen content and blockbuster posts are recycled, we recommend giving these posts the same treatment (in Rose’s case, some of those 12 are recycled and blockbuster posts).

Additionally, we recommend aligning your email promotions with your social promotions. It will help you remember not to forget these very imporant posts are part of your regularly scheduled program.

Of course, social media platforms differ, and not every one may be right for your organization. Facebook seems to work for both B2B and B2C audiences, although it tends to work best for B2C. Some topics, especially in B2C, lend themselves to photos or how-to videos (Pinterest and YouTube), while others, especially in B2B, are better for sharing thought leadership or providing a forum for more comments and sharing with others (Twitter and LinkedIn).

For GGN, the social media audience development plan involves sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. The things Rose shares drives people back to her website where they are offered a free report in exchange for an email address.

Read more about the social audience development model.

Syndication Audience Development Model

Content syndication refers to the process of pushing your content out to third-party sites, either as full articles, portions, snippets, or just headlines. These relationships have to be approached carefully, but have proven benefits for getting your content distributed and building a bigger audience. Your content is essentially riding along with similar content to reach more people.

Many ad-dependent websites need good content to keep people interested, and to satisfy advertisers’ traffic goals. So, they need strong, informative content, preferably that is optimized for search, and some will even pay to use it. The market can be ripe with opportunities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful.

Don’t forget that your goal is to build an audience for your brand and your website. Make sure your content is properly identified and that the path back to your site is clear.

Publishing duplicate content across portals can bump down your own pages in search results, and give priority to the sites you’re syndicating on. That’s why when done manually – for example, when you publish on Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, or other user-generated syndication methods that are popular right now – you choose a different title, and you use a snippet of the content, not the content in its entirely. You also include a link back to the original article, and when possible, make it canonical.

Publishers should remember to only syndicate content to appropriate sites. Examine and evaluate the portals in your market. Does your content fit there? Can you do anything to make your content stand out, like including a chart, video, or infographic

For Green Gardens Network, there is not a huge amount of opportunity here outside the social channels above. Unlike categories of content such as travel or food, there aren’t a lot of big portal websites about gardening, however outside of syndication, Rose could reach out to the About.com Expert on About.com’s gardening channel and ask to write a guest post that links back to GGN (About.com doesn’t allow duplicate content, either).

There are also a few magazine websites, such as finegardening.com, that feature blog posts from contributors. The American Rose Society also features guest contributions. To the extent Rose knows of these sites, and knows her audience seeks them out, she would try to get some of her content listed there, with a link back to her own portal.

Read more about the syndication audience development model.

Email Audience Development Model

Email is an integral part of Mequoda’s strategy to Attract, Capture, Engage and Monetize an audience. We want to attract an audience through methods such as optimizing content for search and then have appropriate architecture on the website to capture a visitor’s email addresses in exchange for a valuable piece of free content.

But what are you going to do now that you have these email addresses? Simply sending them one marketing message after another will lead to unsubscribes. And those who don’t unsubscribe will stop opening your email and devalue your brand if all you do is market them a product with every email.

To maintain an engaged audience and keep your email list numbers up, publishers should send regular content-based emails with more valuable free content. Sending regular email keeps your audience engaged with your brand, making them more likely to think of you first when it comes time to buy.

If you fail to keep your audience engaged, they will drop off your email list and you will never have a chance to monetize them. They will be gone. Maybe forever. So, keep the good content flowing.

Whether or not your efforts are successful can be determined by your email metrics. Is your unsubscribe rate increasing or decreasing? Is your email click-through rate increasing or decreasing? Is your open rate increasing or decreasing?

In order to keep her metrics positive, Rose Harper at Green Gardens will keep her audience engaged by sending content emails 7 days a week. Monday through Saturday she will send the Green Gardens Daily, an email packed with content taken from the free portal website. On Sunday, she will send Green Gardens Weekly, an email listing all the content posted in the daily emails during the week.

Each edition of the Green Gardens Daily email will be a stacked email (more on stacked emails here) with four feature headlines and snippets. In between the snippets will be sponsored text ads, as well as magazine and tour reviews to drive the audience to those parts of the web site. Over the six days, all of Rose’s 24 topic areas will be covered.

On Sunday, the 24 headlines and snippets will be divided into 12 segments of two stories, with spaces in between filled by sponsors text ads, magazine reviews, tour reviews and a text ad for another free report.

Read more about the email audience development model.

Retail Audience Development Model

Most people associate newsstand sales with revenue generation, but it can be a significant channel for building an audience. Generally, newsstand sales aren’t a major source of revenue compared with subscriptions and sponsorships, but they will help create brand awareness, contribute to audience development and drive subscriptions.

There are two types of newsstand distributions – print and digital.

For print, newsstand distribution flows through two distinct channels: wholesale or direct. Wholesale goes after the entire range of distribution opportunities, including major retailers and airports. For example, WalMart is the biggest retail outlet for newsstand magazine distribution in the United States. Getting your magazine into WalMart and other mass distribution stores requires going through a wholesale distributor. Generally, wholesale distribution is used by larger publishing companies such as Hearst and Meredith.

Many smaller, or niche publishers, choose the direct distribution option. This channel includes bookstores and specialty channels (such as Whole Foods, and Home Depot), outdoor stores, craft stores, and garden centers.

Many publishers who are sinking a lot of money into their print quality consider direct distribution because it is a lower risk, and a lower draw, as a way to begin distribution. The remit rate and efficiencies are markedly higher, but you are going to miss the important distribution channels such as WalMart.

For publishers launching a mass market title that relies on advertisers and rate base, going the wholesale route is necessary. Independent publishers who want to grow organically are better off starting with direct distribution.

Digital newsstand sales can also provide some benefits. If someone with a tablet wants a magazine, they are almost always looking for it on a digital newsstand or app store.

Being on a digital newsstand gives publishers a marketplace that 20% of their subscribers find them on. That’s a percentage to take seriously. The most popular digital newsstand is from Apple (technically now their app store since they dissolved the newsstand), but Amazon (Kindle) and Google (Play) also have digital newsstand options.

In the case of Green Gardens Network, for print distribution, Rose Harper will be using a direct distributor. Her strategy is to get the Green Gardens magazine into specialty bookstores as well as garden centers and even places like Home Depot that sell many garden tools and products.

In digital, Rose will be offering single copies for sale through all the newsstands. This gives her the best opportunity to be found by readers who prefer a tablet experience.

Read more about the retail audience development model.

Paid Advertising Audience Development Model

Paid advertising opportunities come in all shapes and sizes. Advertising on the web has become commonplace, but that doesn’t mean consumers have stopped responding to traditional advertising either.

Although we at Mequoda are big proponents of organic search, there is no denying that paid search also can provide direct benefits to a publisher. If you have a relevant offer that gets clicked, a paid listing can drive a lot of traffic to your web site and your product offers.

One of the most common types of paid advertising used today is a Google pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. For a Google PPC campaign, the publisher pays Google however much they wish to have them list ads at the top of organic search listings. When someone clicks on the ad, the publisher pays the current Cost Per Click from their account. Google stops running the ads when the funds are depleted.

Twitter and Facebook both offer cheaper versions of PPC on their platforms. Although it may not have the same reach of a Google campaign, generally social media brings more highly qualified prospects because you have more specific demographics and consumer behavior you can tap into when targeting ads.

Paid ads can be used to offer someone the ability to click on an ad that leads directly to your Rapid Conversion Landing Page (RCLP), subscribe to your email newsletter and then be upsold to a paid product later. Publishers also can buy ads that lead directly to a product – although many publishers believe they can sell more ads to an email subscriber over time than they can a one-time web visitor who is meeting you for the first time via an ad.

Of course, publishers also can pay for ads on other web sites. Most other websites charge a flat fee for a paid ad, for a period of time, based on some implied number of impressions. Larger website advertising networks will actually charge for the number of impressions delivered on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis.

At Green Gardens’ Network, Rose’s strategy is to develop a Google PPC campaign, and use it for direct sales of the magazine and her tours. She also will utilize social as a PPC option as well. Rose is already fully engaged with her audience on Twitter and Facebook and social media followers are more qualified prospects.

Read more about the paid advertising audience development model.

Direct Mail Audience Development Model

Direct mail is a traditional marketing channel for publishers, but it also has a lot of value for audience development. Although the ROI for direct mail will be lower than for some of these other sources, it often provides the most valuable audience members in terms of annual spending per subscriber. When combined with the ability to mail large volumes to lists that are not available through other channels, direct mail is still a great way to drive website traffic, build email circulation and sell products.

Direct mail traffic that arrives on your RCLP will convert at the highest rate of any source we’ve measured. So, try leading with a free report and push people directly to your RCLP with an easy, vanity email address.

Rose Harper sends a lot of direct mail to promote her magazine. Occasionally, as a test, instead of promoting her magazine directly, she promotes free reports so she can capture more email addresses and promote the magazine, tours and classes later through email.

Read more about the direct mail audience development model.

Traditional publishers, like Rose Harper, have a tremendous opportunity to build their email list and develop a dedicated audience. Mequoda’s seven audience development models can help any publisher create and maintain a list to monetize over time.

Remember that free, valuable content is the best way to build an audience. Using that content to entice visitors to provide an email address is the most effective way of building your email list – a list you will use to eventually sell a product or monetize them through a sponsored message.

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The paywall model comes in many shapes, sizes, and flavors and all can be profitable for publishers when the content is good.

A recent article from Mediapost claims 40% of millennials personally pay for news (print or digital). Pay for news, you say? We think, when looking at the ratio of print to digital, that many of those millennials are probably subscribing to digital news, but we can’t say for sure. All we know is that digital ad and circulation revenues have doubled, and print ad revenues have, well, not.

Back in 2012, 9% of all people paid for digital news, according to the Reuters Institute at University of Oxford. In 2013, that number rose to 12%. How far can this number climb in the next five or ten years? Soon enough, 100% of millennials and all users will pay for media content in one form or another.

The best way to attract subscription revenue and get users to pay for content is with the paywall model.

There are two types of paywalls, a hard paywall, and a soft paywall (and varying degrees in between, as we’ll get to next)

A hard paywall model requires users to pay to access all content. There is no content available to read without registering first, whether registration is free or paid. SEO, as you might imagine, is poor for sites who have hard paywalls. Some circumvent this issue by giving away at least 300 words of each article before the call-to-action which suggests the subscribe. However, news organizations aren’t known for their search optimization savvy, so we generally don’t see a hard paywall as an SEO-friendly option, and they’re often done poorly.

A soft paywall model, which is typically a metered paywall, may come in different levels of “softness” but refer to content that may be accessed up until a point. For example, a reader may get three articles for free before they are asked to subscribe. This is the way our client Yankee Magazine operates their paywall.

Back in 2014, Peter Marsh, from Newscycle, polled 45 newspapers who found 73% were charging for content. He found 40% using a hard paywall, and had a retention rate of 15-20%. He found the remaining 60% using a soft/metered paywall had a retention rate of 58.5% (up to 90%!) As I said, hard and soft paywalls are light descriptions, there are many variations of each. Here are a few of those not so black-and-white ways publishers are using paywalls.

How publishers are generating revenue with different paywall models

Throwing the gate up during crucial moments.

The Financial Times has a metered paywall that allows you to read three free articles. An article from Mediapost explains how FT uses relevant moments to build subscribers. “During Brexit, a major financial event for the U.K., the newspaper opened its paywall, yielding a 600% rise in digital subscriptions. While its average readership age is 50, 20% are millennials. Its high engagement rate enhances attractiveness to advertisers.”

Publishing enough free content to keep readers and advertisers happy.

The New York Times offers 10 free articles, and as the Mediapost put it, “[It] seems generous, but a meter lets people try content. Even if readers visit your site monthly without buying, you’re ensured continual inventory for advertisers. That’s the beauty of this tactic.”

Gating content while it’s fresh.

After 7 days, UK The Times will release content into the wild for free, so they bank on exclusivity of the content. This is a common tactic, however the trouble is that when headlines are available, topics can be Googled and brought to a competing site to find the same news. If you excel in superior content, your loyalists will want to hear it from you, but strangers may just pass on by. The Times says 55%-60% of readers subscribe.

Gating content after it’s expired.

Another tactic used by many publishers including those we work with, is to release content after a period of time. Say, 14 days if it’s news, or 90 days if it’s evergreen content. The value here is in search. If a paywalled page is properly optimized with enough copy and a good headline, your stories can be found months and years later, and a compelling enough headline on a single article could prompt subscription.

Slowly dripping content.

The Economist offers only to free articles per week, and they say 87% of users subscribe. They have an app called The Economist Espresso they call a “morning briefing” which sends content 6 days per week, but if you’re not a subscriber, you only get access to 1 article per week.

Pay as you go. 

Some publishers choose the more complicated method of paying as you, or pay-per-article. We don’t usually recommend this solution because it’s a heck of a lot more work to get one-off buyers than to renew subscribers. Subscribers are automatically billed and have no barriers to entry. There’s no frustration when they realize they can’t access an article, they just log in and get access to everything.

On interesting example of kicking off a paywall with a bang was back in 2014. Esquire launched a new paywall featuring “The Falling Man” from 2003’s story of the September 11th attacks, reported The Huffington Post. The story, written by Tom Junod, was the main focus of the new paywall. Esquire asked for a donation of $2.99 for readers to continue reading through the entirety of the article. Readers don’t have to pay to access all of the article’s content, but if they did choose to donate, the money would go to a good cause. “The money will go toward the James Foley Scholarship Fund, in honor of the American journalist who was beheaded by the Islamic State militant group in August,” stated The Huffington Post.

How does your paywall operate? We’d love to interview you for a future post, just leave a comment below.

The post The Many Shades of Publishers Using a Paywall Model appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

The Sun uses Facebook to combat traffic loss from the paywall that sunk their organic traffic

Last November The Sun dropped its paywall, and according to Digiday, has learned a whole lot.

After the paywall came down last year, Dominic Carter, managing director of commercial at News U.K. said they planned to double their sales team to supplement the paywall being taken down. He told Digiday about what he learned from behind the paywall at The Sun and The Times:

“Having had logged-in users, we understand more the reasons why people churn and also how they like to engage with brands. We can use that and apply it to how we shape the products. We need to be more sophisticated with data and put data at the heart of everything we do, which we probably haven’t been. There is a lot of insight we have collected, from The Sun and The Times paywalls. We know how they respond to ads; we know things like time of day and device preferences. But what we haven’t ever done is turn that into usable data for advertisers, and my intention is to ensure we do in future.”

As you might imagine, they took down the paywall because it wasn’t improving revenue and it was hurting site traffic. I should mention that paywalls don’t need to be SEO-unfriendly (see Paywalls vs SEO – How to Win at Both) but in the case of The Sun, they saw a decline.

Fast-forward almost exactly a year, and there’s one thing the team didn’t know but they do now: they had “zero search equity,” reports Jessica Davies from Digiday. And so, they’ve had to lean into Facebook in a big way to bring in traffic to the site. Davies says, “The Sun is working hard at getting its organic search back to its pre-paywall levels, but it’s been Facebook which has helped the publisher get its traffic back on track so fast.” They now have “ 20 million monthly visitors (compared to a couple million last December) — just 7 million shy of Mail Online in the U.K., according to comScore.”

But it wasn’t all fun and games, they worked to get their traffic back after a paywall lull. “Those numbers are reflective of a busy year for The Sun: After relaunching its site, it began publishing to Facebook Instant Articles, coded its pages for Google AMP, released Messenger bots, and became one of the first publishers to create a large, dedicated Snapchat team. Instagram — being natural extensions of the Facebook “engine” — is also a priority.” And it’s a good thing they’re keeping their social portfolio diversified, because Facebook is never on the side of the publisher, only on the side of the user and what they “think” a reader will want to see.

So what’s working for them on Facebook? News UK chief customer officer Chris Duncan explains:

“When prioritizing what content to run on Facebook, The Sun opts for one of three approaches: make people laugh, get them angry or make them sad. “All the extremes,” said Duncan. Short videos that do well on Facebook tick both the branding and attention-grabbing boxes, like a video in which The Sun gets a pole vaulter to jump into a moving Sun-branded bus. It got more than 900,000 views on Facebook. Typically, its videos on Facebook range between 200,000 and 1 million views.

The Sun does its fair share of Facebook Live videos — the latest being an interview with pop-rock band The Vamps by the publisher’s associate editor Danny Wootton — which are consumed within Facebook. But the goal is always to drive people from Facebook to its own properties where they can read another article, watch a video or read the sidebars.”

They’re not immune to ad-spending, but they say most of their budget goes to organic content and traffic.

Words of advice from Carter?

“To stay on top of your game, you must be in the process of constant self-improvement. You can’t have people sit back and think, ‘I know my stuff.’ So those are probably some of the mistakes. I’ve had to bring in new ad-ops people in the last few months because the world has changed.”

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A series of voice-focused trends are beginning to evolve within Hearst’s magazine arm

This week at Hearst, it was announced that they will be using a new Food Network persona to diversify their magazine brand by giving them their own magazine, a trend we expect will grow with more Food Network personas. Women’s Wear Daily writes:

Hearst Magazines and Scripps Network Interactive have entered into a joint-venture deal to launch The Pioneer Woman, a new glossy with Food Network star Ree Drummond.

The first issue of the magazine will debut in June and it will be edited by Food Network Magazine editor in chief Maile Carpenter. Hearst said it will introduce two issues in 2017. It could not be determined what the frequency will be long-term, but in previous magazine launches, Hearst tends to test out the glossy before ramping up full-scale.

The magazine is based on Drummond’s web site, The Pioneer Woman blog, which she started in 2006. The site picked up steam and Drummond found herself working with Food Network to launch her own show, also of the same name, in 2011. Her popularity has led to a cookware, dinnerware and home products line with Wal-Mart, which opened last month. She also recently opened The Mercantile, an eatery, bakery and general store near her ranch in Oklahoma.

WWD notes that “Hearst entered into a partnership with Scripps in 2008 and through that relationship, the companies have launched Food Network Magazine and HGTV Magazine.” But the formula is tried and true for Hearst, “which has also developed magazines around Oprah Winfrey with O, the Oprah Magazine…and Dr Oz: The Good Life. The company inked a deal last year with Lena Dunham to distribute her newsletter called Lenny Letter.”

This next move in the play for leveraging personal brands as magazines comes after Good Housekeeping’s Jane Francisco has been put at the helm to head up Hearst’s LifeStyle Group with the goal of modernizing women’s magazines. Her new role will really come to fruition with a new team in January, but it’s clear that everything above and below is related to a new branding shift and expansion into more defined female voices.

According to another article in WWD,

“Under the new lifestyle group, Francisco will oversee Meredith Rollins, Redbook editor in chief, and Woman’s Day editor in chief Susan Spencer. Francisco told WWD that her “mission” is to work with the current teams and create her own group that will “deliver content that has a distinct voice.”

“I think those other brands have a distinct personality that has evolved,” Francisco said of Redbook and Woman’s Day. “When Elle Décor, Veranda and House Beautiful [the design group] were put together, they had one marketing team…they had very specific direction from each of brands. Hearst was able to be more efficient and reduce overlap and create more unique content for each of the three brands.

We’re seeing more and more magazine publishing companies grow their brands with new products, and Hearst is certainly taking a tried and true route of putting popular brand personas front and center.

The post Hearst Takes Voice to Heart & Gives The Pioneer Woman Her Own Magazine appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

By all means, launch many content business models and diversify your publishing portfolio. But start with your magazine experience through your magazine subscription website.

We’re in a recession. Maybe you’re feeling pretty good right now personally, but publishers are in a recession. Big time. Last year was a recession especially for newspapers, according to Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2016” report. Weekday circulation dropped by 7% while Sunday circulation dropped 4%, which was the largest since 2010. Print and digital advertising both dropped, as did newsroom employment.

News magazines, on the other hand, were all over the board. Losses were less significant than newspapers, as were gains, such as the Atlantic who had the largest gain, which was a 2% boost in circulation.

In order to combat these numbers, magazines have spent 2016 coming up with new revenue streams that go beyond their print and digital publications. Vogue started a VIP membership, Southern Living opened a retail store, and Men’s Health launched a quarterly subscription box.

Meredith is another multiplatform publisher who is seeing the fruits of their labor. They saw a 4% increase in revenue for the first fiscal quarter of 2016 with 3% growth in advertising revenue. Meredith owns 17 TV stations and chairman and CEO Stephen M. Lacy gave credit to  “strong political advertising at local TV stations and double-digit growth in digital advertising at both the national and local levels for the company’s impressive results,” according to Subscription Insider. But Meredith has been making headlines with new products too, that are connected with their magazines. TV programs, apps, an apparel line called SHAPE Active, and a line of foods called EatingWell frozen entrées are all part of their enormous and growing brand wheel.

The New York Times has also launched something called nytLive, an event content model that will roll into 2017 with new events. “Leveraging the emotionally-charged election, the New York Times planned an exclusive election night event – Election Night Live. For $250 a person, engaged readers could watch the election returns with Times’ staffers including executive editor Dean Baquet, senior editor for politics Carolyn Ryan, managing editor Joseph Kahn, editorial page editor James Bennet, and op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, as well as U.S. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, U.S. Congressman Steve Israel and the New York Times Company president and CEO Mark Thompson, among others,” describes Subscription Insider. 2017 events start at $1,115 per person.

While this is all well and good, we think one thing most publishers miss is the most basic business model of all. A really good magazine subscription website. We don’t know a lot of general interest consumer mega-magazine brands who have decent magazine subscription websites. A place to log in and update account information. Maybe, if you’re lucky. But a place where you can get access to the magazine in a magazine-like format, with access to all back issues, right from the comfort of your desk or mobile device? Lots of fails in this realm. And while we absolutely applaud the mega brands for all their effort in multiplatform publishing, we find that the little niche guys are the ones growing in circulation year over year.

And part of that is because they focused on nailing down their magazine experience first.

When it comes to mentor sites for magazine subscriptions, our Mequoda niche example is I Like Crochet, where Mequoda created for its innovative publisher and longtime client, Stuart Hochwert, what we believe is the first-ever actual website magazine. We’ve since built similar magazine websites for Metro Parent, Forester Media, Dark Intelligence Group, LMP Media Network, Countryside Network, Yankee Magazine and others. I Like Crochet magazine is available both as a web edition, complete with page-by-page navigation and a linear, magazine reading experience available on any platform or device with Internet access and as a tablet edition. If you want to know how to build a subscription-based website for your niche magazine, look no further!

An excellent mass media example is Time.com, where the venerable news magazine once upon a time tried very hard to compete with CNN in a news portal approach – soundbites, videos, tiny bits of unsatisfactory content scattered across the landscape. Back in that day, we at Mequoda thought they could do much, much better. And thankfully the frenzied CNN news approach has now given way to a streamlined website focused on the legendary magazine – long-form, detail-rich investigative content published at a magazine website.

If you want to improve your magazine user experience online, learn more about best practice magazine subscription websites. If you have more questions or need some help, set up a time to chat with us.

The post Nail Down Your Magazine Experience and Combat the Publishing Recession appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

Multi-platform content can be easy to create and profitable to publish – you’ll see!

When we talk about multi-platform publishing, some publishers think we’re talking about the difference between laptops, desktops, and tablets. But those are simply the devices we deliver content through.

We’re talking about content repurposing, on many platforms.

Repurposing content is a core tenet of the Mequoda Method, but we can’t take credit for inventing the tactic. Rather, any publishers worth their salt – whether print or digital – have always run some variation on this theme. Why? Because it rewards your best work, saves you from excess work, gives you a ton of versatility, and will make you money while you sleep.

Content can be published and distributed on many platforms – a Portal, an online directory, free white papers, paid handbooks, print magazines, digital magazines (including a web edition, an Apple edition, an Amazon edition, and a Google edition), live events, digital events, membership libraries, and more. If you’re wondering “Shouldn’t email and social be on this list?” – that’s a good question – we consider email and social to be marketing platforms not publishing platforms even though we are huge advocates of using those channels to deliver high quality content, not just promotional messaging, in order to keep subscribers and followers engaged. If you’re also wondering “Shouldn’t mobile be on this list?,” that’s another good question – no, we consider mobile a device type instead of a publishing platform archetype. You can view any type of multi-platform content on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Publishers everywhere are creating multi-platform content. Ed tech is hot, and it fits nicely into a multi-platform content approach, enabling as it does online archives, subscriptions, events, and video.

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 works for their hard-won audiences.

When Rodale launched RodaleU.com, it fared nicely. The $9.95 three-week Transformation Challenge helps consumers get in shape, and it saw 5,000 sign-ups in it’s first week, Folio: reported.

Slate’s Slate Plus is a membership predicated on premium content. This model is gaining in popularity among digital magazine subscriptions – The New York Times, Ars Technica, and The National Journal launched similar membership products in recent years. The product certainly holds its own when it comes to digital magazine subscriptions. A $5/month or $50/year Slate Plus membership gets you (on top of the magazine’s standard offerings): an exclusive podcast feed, members-only articles and newsletters, early-access to high-profile content, and other advantages.

Podcasts have come in and out of vogue over the years, currently on an upswing. “Podcast creators, increasingly publishers like Slate, FiveThirtyEight, and Vanity Fair, struggle to reach new listeners because podcasts can be difficult to discover online, often isolated from the constant stream due to the limited shareability and SEO traction of audio. This makes it challenging for podcast creators to grow their audience beyond their most loyal followers,” Ellen Harvey writes on PubExec.com.

Alternative Press, publisher of music magazine AP, CEO/Owner Mike Shea says “Events and multi-platform/advertising and sponsorship packages are our #1 high-growth revenue stream.” These include music events across the US.

Generous, but not overly so. A clear effort to give members something they wouldn’t get otherwise. Note that a couple of the key features represent a movement toward multiplatform experimentation, with Slate Plus itself serving as a sort of proving ground for content.

Does the premium content get recycled? We assume so. That’d be the smart thing to do, even if they’re just recycling it much later to non-paid members, or using it as sample content to gain more subscribers.

But even these modern examples of multi-platform publishing are not exactly what we’re talking about when it comes to creating multi-platform content on the cheap.

Taking one product and making it many products

Want to go cheap? You can go cheap. And you can produce a lot of content and profit that way.

You don’t even need a whole new content department, just some savvy editors. Magazine publishers who recycle content strategically are building giant multiplatform publishing businesses by recycling content like so:

There are, of course, many different versions of this cycle depending on what you’re publishing, but the premise is the same: Take one thing and turn it into many things.

Create the most accurate content by compiling first-person knowledge from reputable sources and making it available to your audience through various platforms.

1. Start with a magazine article.
2. You can then use that content to create other products. At this point, you simply ask one of your designers to add the article as a chapter to the latest handbook you’re developing.
3. And while he’s at it, he can turn it into a downloadable e-book. No need for other content.
4. From there, you can break it into three portal posts.

But the best part comes after:

1. Each of those portal posts promote the free ebook.
2. And that free ebook promotes the handbook.
3. And that handbook promotes your magazine.

There could also be podcasts, videos, or special edition magazine apps that come out of this transformation.

The circle of content life – isn’t it beautiful?

If you want to get stealthy, live events are the best high-fidelity user experience, with the highest price point. You can turn research, stories and photos from your articles into slides in a powerpoint deck. And then turn around and use your speaker decks and transcripts to create articles for your site.

Most publishers will be most comfortable producing downloadable media, like books, special reports, or video pieces. Or, if you’re like The New Yorker, you ask the article writers to record their pieces and offer them as an audio subscription.

How do you recycle content? What’s your strategy? Let’s chat in the comments.

The post How to Create Multi-Platform Content Quickly and Cheaply appeared first on Mequoda Daily.

Some helpful hints on generating revenue through online advertising

What comes to mind when you think about revenue models online? Is it a relatively new model that was designed specifically for the internet? Or do you think of traditional business models that have transformed from the physical world to the digital world?

That may have been a trick question, but if you answered “both,” you are correct. The internet offers an array of revenue models, which in turn have their own subsets of revenue-generating models. This means revenue can be generated in many ways. As you read on, the intricacies should become more understandable.

The core of online business models

Online business models can be first broken into two main categories: conventional business models adapted to the internet and internet-specific business models.

There is an array of conventional business models, ranging from direct sales to the brick and mortar business model. These businesses may have started in the physical realm, with many ending up online. These models did not develop on the Internet, although they have transitioned to this medium.

Internet-specific business models are ones that did not, or could not exist without the internet. Many of these revolutionized the way online businesses generated revenue as many traditional business models operating on the internet also adopted some of these internet-specific models.

The following examples are of internet-specific revenue models that are valuable components of online advertising strategies.

Eight Internet revenue models

1. Web and email banner advertising

These images can be included on websites or in email newsletters. They should have attractive copy and inviting imagery in order to get viewers to click on the advertisement, which links back to the advertiser’s website.

These banners can come in an array of shapes and sizes and can be placed in different locations on a website. Leaderboard banners typically run across the top of a website and are seen as soon as users enter the site. Skyscraper banners used to be an ad of choice, typically running along the sides of the screen, but they have been replaced by their more successful counterparts - medium rectangles.

Countryside is one such publisher (and also a Gold Member client) that sells advertising on their website and in their newsletter. You can see a banner ad at the top of their free Portal, and to the right, including ads for their free and paid products mixed in. You have to love this example, because an article on beekeeping aligns with the advertisers and also for their own internal beekeeping guide freebie.

2. Sponsored downloads

If you are following Mequoda Best Practices, then you are engaging in content marketing by offering free downloadable products in exchange for a user’s email address. Free, downloadable products are intriguing to visitors due to the associated price point, and therefore, are downloaded often.

Sponsored downloads are also common. Download forms are typically longer, requesting lots of information from the user, as the user data is then provided back to the sponsor. We recently wrote about Prime Publishing’s sponsored ebooks, which have been incredibly successful for them.

3. Sponsored webinars

Webinars are popular these days because business professionals can learn emerging practices and theories without having to constantly travel around the country or across the world. Webinars are typically educational while using a medium that incorporates both audio and visual enhancements.

Due to the popularity of webinars, sponsorships can be offered. Some companies avoid charging customers to view the webinars and instead operate a sponsorship model.

Sponsors could be sought for paid webinars as well, but in that instance it’s important to take into account the amount of external promotion for the sponsor. It’s important to not over-promote if you are charging viewers. This could irritate them and cause them to question the content’s credibility.

4. Resource directories

Metro Parent is one publisher that has sponsored directories. They have a directory for schools, party vendors, doctors, dining and other family services. For example, if you click on the Camps and Classes directory, you’ll find an abundance of local venues, including highlighted sponsored or “featured” listings that those venues and vendors have paid for with premium placement.

5. Job Boards

Laurel Touby started MediaBistro in 1997 in the dot-com heyday with the goal of creating a community for journalists. “We weren’t really sure how we were going to make money,” she confesses, “we just wanted to bring media people together.” While this may not sound like an auspicious mission for a profitable business, MediaBistro has developed some very profitable income streams, all of which flow from this community, and all of which provide content models easily adopted by traditional publishers.

MediaBistro’s largest source of revenue is its media job listings, access to which is free to registered visitors. The site currently features some 688 job openings, which cost employers $297 each to list for 30 days. Do the math: Bistro’s job listing operation has got to be pulling in around $2.5 million a year. The whole listing and payment process is automated, so expenses, aside from developing and maintaining the job listing function, have got to be minimal.

6. Sponsored channels

One version of native advertising involves paid ads that appear to “own” a channel, or category of a website. They can be banners, articles, snippets and  links that are assimilated into the design and flow with the platform functionality, so viewers feel the ads belong on the page and are related to the content. The publisher sells total sponsorship of a single category of the site, and pay more for it.

7. Sponsored content

The best native advertising examples offer fantastic editorial content that doesn’t turn off the reader as being too promotional or non-contextual. Although the FTC is currently updating their guidelines every day, we think sponsored and custom content is a great way for publishers to increase revenue using their existing staff and while improving the reader’s experience with good content, rather than distracting them with animated ads, or otherwise interrupting the content digestion experience.

One of the mass media examples of native advertisement styles we’ve seen is produced by none other than the New York Times. In this example from Capital One, the content speaks to small business owners and their financing struggles, while using quotes from executives at Capital One to help and support their pain points. Meanwhile, the design is outstanding, while still clearly labeled as sponsored throughout. It’s more than an article, it’s a work of art that any reader would enjoy reading. It’s broken up into sections, animated, with pull quotes and graphics that bring readers from beginning to end. It’s produced by NYT’s internal team, called BrandStudio.

8. Custom Newsletters 

Many publishers include custom sponsored newsletters and promotions as part of their advertising packages. For example, if you subscribe to Mr. Food, you might get a special newsletter from one of their gourmet food sponsors. There’s a nice little disclaimer at the top of the newsletter explaining that these promotions help pay for copious amounts of free content they create for their subscribers daily. A fair trade off, we’d say.

If you’d like to discuss these online advertising revenue models, or come up with even more creative solutions, I’d love to chat. Set up a call and let us know where to reach you.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2010 and is updated frequently. 

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Multiplatform publisher news for keeping up with a changing industry

We begin today’s multiplatform publisher news with a look at Condé Nast, who is making a big move by eliminating the role of publishers. minOnline has the story, who says “The reorganization — anticipated even before the cross-title combination of creative, research, copy teams in October — adds new capabilities to the publisher. These include the division of sales between brand-specific and industry-specific teams, and the creation of a new events and experience business. It also eliminates the Condé Nast Media Group (CNMG), which previously oversaw ad programs spanning multiple titles.”

“The new structure comes as publishers across the industry look to consolidate resources and find more efficient ways to bring in revenues. Similar overhauls at other magazine companies, including the elimination of publishers at Time Inc., have eliminated brand silos while giving advertisers simplified access to multiple magazine titles.”

The article continues by discussing how publishers have been repositioned into new roles. “Six publishers were repositioned into the newly created role of Chief Business Officer, a multi-brand position that focuses on revenues and client relationships at set titles…In addition to the business officer role, Condé Nast has added industry-specific ad sales, under the leadership of Chief Industry Officers. This position is much like the “category sales” created by Time Inc. in a similar restructuring last July.”

Next, we’re looking at Salon Media Group, which has received an investment from Spear Point. Folio: has the story. “Spear Point Capital Management has invested $1 million into Salon Media Group. The deal, which closed last Friday, gives the public-equity firm 29 percent of the common stock for the 22-year-old publicly held web magazine.”

“Spear Point isn’t new to the media game. The activist hedge fund, which invests primarily in publicly traded companies with less than $2.0 billion in market capitalization, holds about 5 percent stake in TheStreet.com, according to New York Post.”

The article continues with news on some new management from Spear Point. “Along with the investment come three new board members — Spear Point managing partners Ron Bienvenu and Trevor Colhoun, and Dick MacWilliams, who will serve as chairman.”

On the topic of staff changes, we’re seeing news out of Meredith Corp. Folio: has the story. “Just one week removed from a quarterly earnings report touting “record-breaking” company revenue, Meredith Corp. has laid off 40 staffers, a company spokesman confirmed to Folio:.”

“The cuts represent just over 1 percent of the 3,800 employees at the women’s publishing giant, whose brands include Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, and Shape, among several others. The company declined to provide specifics on which roles were eliminated in this latest round of restructuring — which arrives about 15 months after a similar culling of around 40 staffers in late 2015 — but did note that half of those let go are located in Meredith’s New York office, where much of the Des Moines, Iowa-based company’s sales and marketing talent is concentrated.”

The article continues by considering the current positioning of Meredith. “The reorganization comes at a time of heightened speculation over a potential Meredith-Time Inc. merger, rumors that helped drive both companies’ stock prices to 52-week highs in recent weeks. Bloomberg reported on January 5 that Meredith had officially approached Time Inc. to express interest in such a deal, but both sides have remained tight-lipped since.”

We wish the best to all of these multiplatform publishers making moves.

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