3D Issue Blog, digital magazine and publishing news

30 June 2010

Qmags (www.qmags.com), have recently released the results of their 2010 Annual Digital Magazine Readership Survey which gives insights into the readership habits for digital magazines. They surveyed 170,000 readers, who had been digital editions subscribers for at least a 6 month period.

Overall the survey found that the vast majority of digital magazine readers were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their digital publications.  The key reasons for the preference of digital content over print editions were cited as being timelier, easier to save, environmentally friendly, and more searchable.

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29 June 2010

John F Kennedy once said. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.  In the changing world of digital publishing, many industry leaders believe that this concept of focusing of giving rather than taking,  is vital to the success of your social media campaigns.

Tim O’ Reilly, Of O’Reilly media, talked about this principle at this years “Tools of change for publishers”. The core of his message to publishers is not to think about you can get out of it but what you can contribute.

“The future of digital publishing is not  about creating the coolest new enhanced digital editions. Don’t hang your hat on the bet that the cool features are all that you need. The ugly stuff will always need to be done”

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28 June 2010
It seems like every day we are hearing news of another publisher shutting down the print version of their publication due to diminishing ad revenue but continuing with their digital editions. Its nice to see one company bucking the trend.  In San Francisco last week, one local news portal  marks a change in direction.

An online non-profit news portal called the San Francisco Public Press yesterday launched their first print newspaper, based solely on content from their website . This 28 page edition is just a market tester but they aim to release it as a quarterly publication.

The site writers / contributors are all professional journalists working as volunteers and freelancers, creating original news content between 2 and 5 days a week.

The content covers a diverse spectrum of local interest news in San Francisco such as budget cuts at state universities to public responses to federal funding.

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23 June 2010
The success story of the iPad continues this week after Apple announced yesterday the iPad has now reached 3 Million sold – in just 80 days.

Since the launch of the iPad, Apple have seen demand exceed all expectations. Steve Jobs announced on the 3^rd May “One million iPads in 28 days — that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “Demand continues to exceed supply,” he claimed, “and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

This incredible rate did not slow down, as became evident 28 days later on 31^st May when it was announced that the 2 million mark had been reached and the device was about to be shipped to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. This has since accounted for a faster escalation in sales which has resulted in yesterday’s announcement of now 3 million iPad sold.

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22 June 2010
One of the toughest things in the digital publishing is protecting your digital content. The the need for fresh content and daily updates is causing more and more companies to just copy articles and repost them to their sites.

It is impossible to wholly protect content that a user can read. Even if you have obfustication techniques such as encrypting the code or ensuring that the text is not selectable, if the user can read it they can easily copy your content.

As it is impossible to protect the written word from been copied, the solution must lay in the digital publishing companies ability to track their blocks of their content to see where on the web their articles are been reused.

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21 June 2010
In March this year The Audit Bureau of Circulations’ (ABC) board of directors approved the change of the definition of a digital magazine so it would include publications for the iPad for U.S. and Canadian consumer magazines.

To be included digital editions are required to include the print edition’s full editorial and advertising, however they no longer need to have an identical layout to the print version.

The ABC still encourage publishers to contact them to understand the new guidelines for digital editions but to assist and clarify they have recently produced an overview document to guide magazine publishers in what to do and not do in order to get their iPad editions included.

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18 June 2010
Twitter has over 100 million users and is growing by 300,000 users a day. That works out to over 8% growth a month. Interestingly, Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, recently revealed that social networks now receive more Internet visits than search engines in the UK. This presents an enormous opportunity for Publishers to utilize this space to engage with a wide audience.

As the social platform becomes more and more widespread it is surprising that some are still dragging their heals when it comes to getting involved and embracing Social Media. The opportunities and coverage are huge not to mention free! Look at one of the biggest publishers – The New York Times. NYT have almost 2.5 million followers on Twitter. They use Twitter as an RSS feed of their website, tweeting updates with the article title and link to the article in full on their website. Timely, straight to the point updates in under 140 characters, published to a massive audience who have all opted in and expressed an interest in what they have to say.

If you are looking to get started with Twitter or simply want to make more of it, here are some great resources to make use of….

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17 June 2010
A recent PriceWaterhouseCooper report shows that online ad revenue for 2009 continued its rise to $24.2 billion while ad revenues from Print fell by 28.6% to $24.8 billion. Based on the percentage growth of online revenue versus the continued decline of online ad revenue it is safe to assume that 6 months into 2010, online revenue has closed and surpassed that gap of $600 million.

Mobile ad revenue is also carving out its corner, PWC expects growth to quadruple over the next 4 years from $400 million to $1.6 billion. I would say it is safe to say that mobile advertising will surpass those expectations also as this report will not have accounted for the phenomenal success of the iPad.

PWC report does offer some hope for print advertising. While they expect print ad revenue to drop by another 12% over the next 3 years, they do forecast a 1% growth in 2013.

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15 June 2010

Early stats from iPad digital editions are  indicating that we might have to rethink how we present our content. Not only in iPad digital magazines but also through our other channel platforms such as our website.

Most online publishers don’t experience the same audience retention rate that they had in print.  ComScore Inc, a leading market research company, released stats that indicate an online visitor would spent roughly 2.1 minutes a month on the Vanity Fair website and 3.8 minutes a month on the GQ website.  Imagine how that filters down to smaller sites and what implications that those low retention stats have on their ability to generate revenue from advertising.

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14 June 2010
Last week I sat in on a talk with serial entrepreneur Jerry Kennely. Jerry was the founder of StockByte and StockDisc. Companies which he sold to Getty Images for $135 million in 2005.

Jerry spoke about tweak.com which they launched last week. Tweak is a tool that will allow any business large or small to get access to stunning advertisements that users can customise online before downloading the high resolution advert and forward to their publisher.

The company have spent five years researching the techniques that are been used by the major design departments in the print industry.

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