The Winding Road to Digital Magazine's next phase

Remember your magazine's first website?

For most publications it was a simple copy and paste job. We copied content from the magazine and pasted it right onto the the new website. The big question of the day was, "Should we hold off posting the web content, as it might hurt readership of the identical print content. Then something unexpected happened that changed everything:

Nothing.

That's right, nothing happened. Because we discovered that no new web content meant no new web visitors, and as result, no new ad dollars. The dialog abruptly shifted to how we could develop fresh content for the magazine's website and how to monetize it.

That was ten years ago. OK, so why are so many publishers having the same discussion, right now, about digital magazines?   

I've heard it all over the magazine industry, "We tried publishing a digital magazine, but nothing happened." How soon we forget...no new content equals incremental new readership and incremental new revenue.

But what if you put new content into digital magazines? What if they were not just a duplication of your magazine but an extension into niche areas unprofitable to service with print? What if they were utilized as a new content platform, not just a means of digital distribution? What if they were created to function as graphical, upscale newsletters in industries or categories where graphical appeal counts?

The trend has already started. The people at "Winding Road" is a digital only car magazine that gets over 180,000 unique readers viewing an average of 22 pages every month. Click on the link below and take a look. It could be your future.   

View Winding Road

Article on the launch of Winding Road

PS: Why no industry association has not taken the time to research the basics of how digital magazines work as an advertising platform is a mystery to me. I'd like to help start that discussion with anyone willing.

Comments

[Tom Martin]

Thanks for noticing.

In the process of developing Winding Road, we've learned a lot about the huge difference between a true digital magazine and a digitized print magazine. Format, platform, ad model, layout, story assignments, timing, photography, cost structure -- I could go on and on, but practically everything is different. I would predict that it will be much easier for web publishers to do digital magazines than for print publishers to do them (successfully, that is).

For readers interested in the subject, we also have a digital magazine covering music, movies and consumer electronics called Playback (www.playbackmag.net).

[Josh Gordon]

Thank you Tom.

Your pioneering efforts should be an inspiration to everyone in the magazine publishing business. I regretfully agree with you that traditional magazine publishers will find it harder to succeed at digital magazines than digital starts ups.

This goes back to Theodore Levitt's classic "Marketing Myopia" piece where he shares how the deeper marketing mission of any organization needs to be rooted in market need not company function. As example, the all powerful US railways of the late 1800's failed because they thought hey were in the railroad business, when in fact, they were in the transportation business.

We are not in the magazine business. We are in the periodic content business. Digital magazines are an inevitable stop along the way of our inevitable evolution.

I posted this before but in closing … In the late 80s while managing the sales and marketing staff of CableVision magazine I saw magazine myopia at its worst. As I watched, first hand, the rapid growth of many new cable networks I wondered how the opportunities they represented had slipped by my publishing peers:

Why didn't someone at Sports Illustrated start ESPN?
Why didn't someone at Time or Newsweek start CNN?
Why didn't someone at Rolling Stone start MTV?
Why didn't someone at National Geographic start the Discovery Channel?

The list could go on...but I fear history is repeating itself, this time with digital magazines.