Ad Sales Blog

Digital magazine ad sales success story

Having a tough time selling ads into your digital magazine? You are not alone. While it is near impossible to sell ads into digital replicas of print magazines, there is a thriving new breed of digital magazine originals blowing away the conventional wisdom that digital magazines are an ad sales death trap.

These digital original publishers are doing things very differently. One of true pioneers and success stories is Monkey Magazine, a “lad” book from the UK's Dennis Publishing, with an impressive 270,000 weekly ABCe audited circulation and robust ad sales. 

I was honored when Eoin McSorley, Monkey magazine’s Editor agreed to answer some questions:

Josh: What about length? Monkey magazine is only about 30 pages per issue?

Eoin: We’ve played around with this. When our digital magazine arrives if it seems dense and people think they don’t have time to read it, they might not open it. So we keep it short and make it seem very easy to digest.

Josh: As a digital magazine you kept the page turns. Why?

Eoin: What we liked about the idea of a page turning magazine was that it has a beginning and an end, so it looks like it takes only take a little chunk of time to read. When you’re surfing the web, the only time constraints are ones you set for yourself. With Monkey we take a little chunk of 25 or 30 minutes each week and cover all the aspects of what young men would be looking on the web for anyway.

Josh: How was the start of selling advertising?

Eoin: Like any new thing, people were very tentative when we were starting to sell ads. One problem was that advertisers didn’t know where to categorize us. Are you a website or a magazine? Also, one of our biggest questions in the early stages was, “Who are we going to speak to?”

Josh: That was two years ago. Now you have a successful, ad supported, digital magazine. When you call on an ad agency do you call more on print buyers or online buyers?

Eoin: It varies from agency to agency. A lot of agencies are getting wiser to digital magazines now. But a traditional standard flat page in Monkey doesn’t work as well as one that has video content so we tend to be going more to online media departments now. 

Josh: How do you handle click through reporting?
“We have a very open policy about letting people know exactly how many click throughs and page views they are getting. We generate great results. The results have been very good and I think our transparency has helped us a lot. 

Josh : Do you have any advice for people starting an ad supported digital magazine

Eoin: You need to start with a list. If you’ve got a decent list then you can find out what they really like and what they don’t. Just keep it very honest. Then we react to what is happening on the net and add a little bit of structure. It is the same way that  magazines like “The Week” condenses all the news for you. We condense all the fun stuff for young men.

I cannot tell you how impressed I am with Eoin McSorley and the innovators at Dennis Publishing. They started with a clean sheet of paper, took what really works in web based magazines, shed all preconceived notions about what is "supposed" to work about magazines, and created a successful business model.

The Media buying community has started to take notice:

Media Life on Monkey

“Online Guide” concept helps publishers compete for search dollars

There is a new strategy for publishers looking to capture ad dollars heading for "search. " This is very important now that "search" accounts for 41% of all online advertising dollars.

The idea is for content publishers to build websites that act as search magnets by targeting an individual product category. Publishers then sell sponsorships to advertisers who are targeting that category. By mixing editorial and advertiser content into one heavily optimized website, enough information is aggregated that search engines, looking for key words unique to a product category, cannot resist it.

The effect is that content posted on the site, including the advertiser's content, rises on Google searches, and the sponsoring content publishers have a search service to sell advertisers.   

The Marcomm Group which created the first prototype calls it an "Online Guide." The first targets the professional television camera product category at www.HDCameraGuide.com. As part of their service package Marcomm also creates video content for site sponsors. This site was so successful that content from it has found its way to page one of Google's organic search results in less than six weeks. Marcomm hopes to repeat this success by helping content publishers build sites for product categories in their markets.  

Bill Blaney site developer at Marcomm Groupsays, “Our concept is a ‘deeply-built information guide’ that presents its information using a wide range of online media tools, and is highly optimized for search engine results." 

Visit HD NetGuide

Marcomm group's site 

The power of one question

  Sergio Zyman, was VP of marketing at Coca-Cola during 1985 during one of the biggest marketing flops in business history, the introduction of New Coke. 

Zyman recalls in his book, The End of Marketing As We Know It, that it all came down to failing to ask a single question as they interviewed test customers:

"We gave them samples of various reformulations of Coca-Cola and tested them against the old Coke and also against Pepsi. We also asked them: ‘What would you do if we gave you a product that tasted better than Pepsi, but still was a Coke?’

They told us, ‘I would buy it.’

‘Would you like it?’ we asked.

‘Sure I would like it,’ they said.

The problem was that even though we were asking them the right type of research questions, we didn’t ask The Question.

In truth, the only question we really needed to ask was:

‘If we took away Coca-Cola and gave you New Coke, would you accept it?’"

When "New Coke" came to market, the public answered that question with a responding, "NO WAY!" and sent a multi billion-dollar corporation stumbling down a rocky path.

On your next customer visit, think about the questions you ask. One question can make a huge difference.

Are blogs the new buyers guides?

In previous posts I have stated the conventional wisdom that blogs are a tough sell as ad sponsored media goes. Unless you have a celebrity blogger or are blogging against an important event, ad sponsorships are hard to sell. In those cases, it can be argued, the celebrity and the event are bringing in the value, not so much the blogging itself. 

But now comes evidence that blogging may have value in it's own right. A study from BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch that focused on the behavior of heavy blog readers finds them relying on blogs for information previously thought to be in the benefit list of search and buyers guides. From the study:       

"Blog readers do not appear to rely as heavily on search as a means to find new blogs as compared to consumers of traditional online media. According to the survey, one in five general blog readers (defined as consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months) use blog links to discover new blogs. Further, the study suggests blogs are not consumed in isolation, but experienced as part of a connected conversation – nearly half (49 percent) of blog readers and 71 percent of frequent readers read more than one blog per session. Key findings include:
•    Links more powerful than search: For frequent readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who voted for Web search.
•    Links signal trust: For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39 percent of survey participants). 
•    Blog search not yet mainstream: Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6 percent of general readers and 11 percent of frequent readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.

Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence
•    Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
•    Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.
•    Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
•    Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).

It’s Buy Time: Where Blogs Sit in the Purchase Cycle
According to the study, blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.
Blog readers also replied around blogs’ influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
•    Decide on a product or service: 21 percent
•    Refine choices: 19 percent
•    Get support and answers: 19 percent
•    Discover products and services: 17 percent
•    Assure: 14 percent
•    Inspire a purchase: 13 percent
•    Execute a purchase: 7 percent

This story has some traction, here is a link to a short summary of the that study ran in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/22drill.html?_r=1

Read the entire Buzz Logic press release:

 http://www.buzzlogic.com/press/news.html?postdate=1225203064