Ethnique Media :: Le Blog

To follow up on my last blog post, I came up another article in The Globe and Mail, where author John Barber basically dismisses the iPhone app for GQ magazine as a failure, saying that it destroys the experience of what a glossy print magazine is all about:

The print-edition cover is a classic example of men’s-mag know-how: a gorgeous woman (singer Rihanna), pretty much naked, printed so vividly you can count the lashes on the big brown eyes that reach deep into your soul and beg you to buy. But on the iPhone, poor Rihanna stares dimly from a tiny screen like a little mouse.

and

Reading GQ on a phone is like browsing the Internet, following a succession of disembodied pages who knows where, with pop-up ads ambushing every path. The pages are not much more than snapshots of the print edition rather than proper Web pages.

Clearly making the jump to the digital world isn’t that straight forward. The print magazine is tightly coupled to its technology and platform (quality large print on quality paper) and when transfered to the digital world, if not done so properly, looses these main selling points and distinguishing characteristics. Because the reality is that people that purchase these 10$ glossy magazines do so for the glosiness and the quality of photos and easy of flip-through. The value of magazines isn’t only in their text stories and gossip. These are already available in large quantities and free on the Internet, and if this textual content was the sole value-added of magazines, they would have long ago disappeared in favor of free web-based blogs and sites like TMZ.

The key for magazine publishers is not to emulate the web and make small-rez and hardly-navigable textual versions of their magazines available online. The key is to identify the main differentiating points of glossy magazines, discover what makes them unique and sellable, and somehow replicate or add to this experience with digital tools.

I know, it’s easier said than done.

The Globe and Mail published an interesting article titled The Future of the Magazine, on glossy magazine’s foray into the digital world of the Internet.

I don’t want to paraphrase the article, you should read it instead. Obviously, the main question that the article explores, and drives magazine publishers mad, is “how to make money online”. An interesting approach is to include the digital views in the base advertisement rates: that is count the eyes viewing the digital magazine and include these in the ad-viewership number, which eventually determines ad rates.

A complementary approach is to create what I would call “digitally augmented ads”, that is, ads that provide digital features and charge extra fees for these features. For example, embed in the digital version of the ad a video that users can click on and view or embed a website links such that users can be drawn to visit the site of the advertiser. It seems like this idea is actually already gained ground:

Advertisers can pay extra for digital features, such as a tag the user taps to go to the product website or to watch a video ad. Out of approximately 180 ad pages in the December GQ, more than three-quarters included one of these extras.

The big plus of the Internet is that all these new techniques can actually be precisely measured and monitored. It’s easy to measure the viewership numbers, and it’s easy to measure the number of viewers interacting with these digitally augmented ads. This is one of the biggest strengths of the Internet vs traditional print media, and it is one of the foundations of the business model of Internet advertisement giants, such as Google.

These digital augmented ads are nice and dandy for publishing giants such as Conde Nast, News Corp or our local Rogers, Transco and Quebecor, but what about small independent publishers that don’t have the technical or financial means to implement such online advertisement strategies?

It’s a tough question to answer, and I want to keep that for another post.