Part 2: A recipe for a successful online magazine
Sitting on the couch with your favorite magazine in your hand. The moment for yourself.
In my previous article ‘The Magazine is dead, long live the magazine’ I discussed the transition of print to online and how print magazines still seem to be the heart of the magazine in many cases. But there are other very successful publishing models for magazines that take it beyond the print or even leave print out. Online is the center of these publishing models and I'm very excited about the way they work.
What’s left if you have no physical product, when you can't hold it and feel the pages sliding through your fingers?
I think the strength of both the print and online magazine lies in:
- Periodical character and repetition.
Every month, week or day you know the new issue is coming. You get accustomed to the routine. It’s like a soap series you wait for, or the facebook you keep on checking for updates. The more repetition, the more addicted you get. - Brand community and authority
You easily grow attached to the brand, you trust it. You build a relationship you cherish. You are proud of being a part of the community. - Entertainment When you have a magazine, you know you're going to spend about 15 minutes to an hour reading it, depending on the magazine. It’s a an activity you can ‘close’, when you’re done you feel some satisfaction.
Online publication models for magazines and newspapers
What makes an online magazine or newspaper different from a traditional printed issue? What does it take to succeed online?
Let’s look at the key ingredients of the success for 3 different brands where digital channel dominates the print and even completely excludes it: The Financial Times, Medium and Flipboard.
The Financial Times
Award-winning global business news
The Financial Times is an award-winning global business news. The Financial Times brand with its 125 years history works like a quality stamp. You trust every word they say. The content is the core.
The Financial Times has already reached 60% online subscribers. I bet a significant percentage of visitors comes from social media. Only Facebook has more than 1,5 million followers. As reader you can enjoy quality content for free as long as you don’t read over 8 articles a month. I am not a paid subscriber yet, but I am sure I will be easily convinced to subscribe once I reach my limit, because I already read it a lot. Subscription benefits include: unlimited access to all FT.com articles via desktop or mobile and tablet apps, personalised email briefings and alerts.
The Financial Times main ingredient is specialized quality content which you can’t read anywhere else. If you would take that out, there wouldn’t the Financial Times, but just an average newspaper.
Medium
A perfect place to read, write and comment.
Medium is just 1 year old. The reader is the author here and everyone is welcome to write. The experience of content creation is so great that I wouldn’t mind to pay to write and publish my content with Medium. When you publish with Medium you know you will reach far bigger audience than if you would publish on your own site using for instance Wordpress.
The articles on Medium are gathered by topics, and form collections, which you can follow, a kind of online magazines. Because of these collections you know articles you read will be worth your time.
The content is perfectly presented on any device. The words are central. No sidebars, no menus, as little distraction as possible. A perfect place to read, write and comment. For instance commenting on a word, sentence or paragraph level, instead of the whole article, influences the type of comments readers give and encourages reader to comment more. The comments on a specific part are also much more relevant and interesting.
Medium content is free of charge. And some paid subscription brands are even moving to Medium and ending the paywall for readers. For instance Readmatter.com, with its highly valued long-form stories, is moving all of their publications to Medium.
Medium’s main ingredient is a completely reinvented distraction-free reading, writing and commenting experience. If you take this experience out, there will be no Medium, but just a regular blog platform like Wordpress.
Your personalized social magazine
Flipboard was the first one to come up with a concept of Social magazines, a News Reader application for the tablet and mobiles, that has the visual appeal of a print magazine. Flipboard enables its users to build and manage magazines of their own, like add, rearrange and delete items, set covers and share your magazines with friends. Millions of people use Flipboard to read and collect and curate their favorite stories into magazines on any topic imaginable. Recently Flipboard launched shoppable catalogs, a new category which allows e-commerce brands turn their online stores into flippable magazines. Flipboard ads are also doing well with 3% to 12% clickthroughs. And once people tap into an ad which takes them to a magazine, 10% of the time they end up subscribing.
Flipboard’s main ingredient is putting customers in charge of their content selection and enabling them to become the publishers. If you would take a social aspect of Flipboard out, there would be no Filpboard anymore, but just a simple RSS reader.
A recipe for success
For a magazine to succeed, the right ingredients are essential.
Try the following:
- Start with your user: Listen and observe them, know their interests, connect and move with them, empower them, reach them. When customers really love you, the business model will come. Flipboard started with the customers’ wish to build their own social magazines and in 3 years has grown to 20 million active users and 3 billion flips per month.
- Focus on quality: be the best at what you do. For the legacy magazines and newspapers this is their content. The content readers love and want to connect with. The Financial Times content has an daily readership of 2.2 million people worldwide (PwC 2011). FT.com has 4.5 million registered users and over 600,000 paying subscribers.
- Invent on behalf of your customers: adapt to the new possibilities, imagine the better ways to interact. Try things out. Invent the better places to read and write, like Medium did.
One thing I learned is that you can not translate print to online one to one. To succeed online you should think online and take a full advantage of online possibilities.
I mentioned just three successful online publication concepts, but there are plenty more to be inspired by and to learn from. What was the wildest idea yesterday is a new standard today. I am very excited about how fast our expectation and habits are changing. Like for instance I never read printed magazines anymore. My journey to a magazine article mostly starts from a Tweet or a Facebook post. From a digital magazine I expect a much more rich media experience than a copy of a printed issue. All of it I would never imagine 5 years ago.
I would love to hear how you read your favorite magazines? What you think the online magazine is going to be in a 5 years? What is your big idea?
