Online audience development development is heating up. The skills required are SO different, and require SO much more work than traditional circulation. Yet if we master them as publishers, it opens the door to profitable online media.
With this in mind, two years ago I volunteered to run an American Business Media task force (on the Digital Media Council) whose mission was to ferret out the best practices in online development. I interviewed a bunch of smart folks, collected a lot of great information, then promptly disappeared down a rabbit hole as things at my day job blew up.
We righted the ship, turned it around, and I started climbing out of the basement, careful to make sure the bright sunlight didn't hurt my eyes.
I began attending conferences again, including the recent Folio: conference in Chicago and the American Business Media's Digital Velocity event in New York (both in March). I began picking up more information on audience development, and finally, instead of facing two weeks of unchecked email, I instead decided to sit down and write the damn white paper, as much to organize my own thoughts as anything esle.
I'm not even sure my task force exists anymore at ABM, as I haven't actively participated in ABM's Digital Media Council for well over a year. But before I release this to the wild, I'm posting it here so that I can get feedback. Please post your feedback right to this blog. I'll incorporate the feedback into the official version. Thanks to all who contributed.
Friday, April 06, 2007
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5 comments:
It's Easter Saturday evening, so even though I just read your white paper, I don't have a lot of time to write specific comments. A couple of general thoughts. (By the way, I thought you were on vacation. You're worse than me!)
The more I study the more I learn that content is key. As an editor (also as a reader in my day) I'm not partial to unadulterated marketing stuff like pure press releases or white papers. These things do seem to draw people though.
There are two things that bring people. First is archived, searchable content. This class of people come mostly through search. (By the way, your work on our new Website has turned the corner. Searches used to just show my blog rather than the AW Website, but now AW is getting better recognition.)
The second thing is daily updates--blog style news with personal perspective. This draws daily visitors. Or RSS feed readers who may click and visit. By the way, you can place ads in the RSS feed.
You've got a ton of ideas. I don't think anyone must do all of them to succeed. But do some, for sure. But it's more important to target an industry segment that has people. There are a lot of comments floating on the Web about the demise of Infoworld, but I think that there are just not many companies left to advertise in the IT realm. And maybe not as many readers as there were once.
Dave, did you ever post the final draft? I'd love to read it. Thanks.
Javier, yes, it is posted in the right column of my blog. Look for "Audience development white paper".
Thanks for the quick reply. I saw that link. Did you ever get enough comments to post a final draft?
I'm particularly interested in strategies for digital editions of a print title. I see many B2B titles with controlled circulation in print, but the digital edition is open-access to all web site visitors, with no registration required. What gives? How do they hope to get subscribers, to either print or digital, if the digital version is there for all to grab?
Along similar lines, I have always been mystified by what seems to be standard procedure of B2B publishers (including my own company) posting all their magazine content online. I'm sure we have many site visitors that read the articles online without as much as giving us their email address. For those who want to access previous months' issues, they have to fill out a site registration. But now they have access to all our content, and still are not part of our print or digital subscription database. So our print (and digital edition) advertisers do not benefit from their eyeballs. Please help me out... Thanks!
Javier,
A couple of thoughts:
1. I did not get any written feedback from the folks I sent it too, mainly because everyone was too busy with their day jobs...understandable! (One of the main reason my blog has so few posts!)
2. My gut feeling is that digital editions will never occupy more than a niche position in a publisher's portfolio for one main reason: Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to read an 80-page monstrosity in their email inbox. People barely open 1-page e-newsletters (witness open rates of 20%). Unless your readers are overseas, or you publish daily or maybe weekly, digital editions won't be in much demand by readers. I haven't seen digited edition figures ever exceed 20% of a publication's total readership, and actual figures are closer to 5%-10% for most pubs.
3. I agree that publishers should require registration to access the digital edition, though a sample copy (maybe 6-mo old) should be available for free for inspection by potential subscribers.
4. Regarding the posting of content online, the conventional wisdom seems to be to post all the mag content without requiring registration, and use that as search engine food to attract visitors and build up as much traffic and pageviews as possible for advertising, but require registration for premium content such as white papers or videos. That's the approach we've taken, and it's worked well.
Javier, feel free to contact me directly at newcorn@packworld.com for more!
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