When selling ads in digital magazines think "Website"

Digital magazines have all of the advantages of print magazines except they are online. Right?

In addition, readers have instant random access to content. Everyone wins. Right?

Wrong. Advertisers can lose. If a reader takes a random access skip  over their ad, that ad is not seen.

Although digital magazines may look more like a print magazine than a website, the random access feature asks us to sell ads more like those on a website.

You will do better to sell positions in a digital magazine that offer adjacency to content that a reader may take a "random access" skip to visit. It is helpful to offer stats on which pages or sections get the most traffic. In short, use some of the same approaches you would use to sell fixed position ads on a website. 

Above, a slide from a Penwell survey documenting the challenge

Download the entire Penwell survey

Comments

[Marcus]

Thought-provoking post, Josh, though I can think of many ways that digital editions ads are very different than website ads:

* Click-through rates tend to be much higher.
* Engagement time is generally much longer (since there's more copy on an average magazine page than an average webpage)
* Screen real estate tends to be much greater

Also, print magazines have the same "random access" features as digital magazines. Every week, I use the TOC to read the book and movie reviews of People and hand it off to my wife who reads it cover to cover.

From what we're seeing - and the definition from the mediaIDEAS guys kind of suggests this - the digital magazine is a different experience from either the print magazine or the website and requires different rates and metrics than the other two.

[Asics Shoes]

5. The driver was drunk and drove the doctor's car directly into the deep ditch.

[Hermes Birkin Bag]

Wow. This is a wild study. Kind of makes you think twice about click through metrics.