Do magazines “get” the web?

There’s a good article over at The Big Money (from Slate) that asks the question, why can’t magazines get the web? It’s primarily in response to recent decisions at Condé Nast to lay off a sizable chunk of online staff, and what that means for the future of its web properties. Some key points:

On making money online:

Many magazine editors seem to believe that digital is the future but are grappling with how to make it viable in the present. The burning question: How can crown-jewel publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair be made as profitable online as they were as peak-performing print publications?

The predominant—and unhappy—answer is that it’s probably not possible, at least not right away. While advertisers are increasingly interested in online platforms, an Internet-ad dollar is still not the same as a print-ad dollar.

On web content:

“You live and die by the quality of the content you create,” says Jellinek. “If you’re just a magazine clone, you’re never going to attract an audience. The failure of [Condé Nast's] Web sites is a failure of vision and ability to translate the DNA of their titles into an online environment.”

The conclusion? Magazine websites have great potential, but they have to have their own goals – separate from the print product, and certainly not only pushing print subscriptions – and they have to get creative and move beyond display advertising if they want to truly profitable.

Maintaining the ad/edit divide online

In print, there is a long-standing tradition – even guidelines – of the boundary between what is often called church and state, or editorial and advertising. The point is to always make it clear to the reader what is editorial and what is paid content. Many – including me – believe that it’s this separation that builds the trust from readers that magazines are known for. And it doesn’t seem to be hurting the ad business – after all, readers are very responsive to magazine ads, not only because the magazine is a trusted source but also because unlike television ads, magazine ads are unintrusive: they don’t shout at you, they don’t interrupt what you’re reading (for the most part), and they can be skipped and returned to later.

There are some who believe that this ad/edit divide is more flexible online. I think this is something we all need to be very, very careful of.

Think about it: your brand is your brand. If you confuse or deceive a reader online, they will associate that event with your print product. If you annoy your online readers with invasive advertising, they will associate the annoyance with your entire brand, not just with your website.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be creative with online advertising: far from it. Being creative is the only way we’re going to make our websites profitable. But make sure not to betray the reader’s trust: don’t disguise advertorial as editorial, and hold your online editorial to the highest standards possible. It’s not worth making short-term sacrifices if they have a negative impact on your brand, across platforms, in the long run.

Do unique visitors matter?

As I discussed in an earlier post, there are many ways to measure web traffic. The question is really how valuable those measurements are and what they mean to interested parties – which usually means advertisers. As with all statistics, you can twist the numbers any number of ways. First, let’s look at probably the most common site measurement, unique visitors.

Unique visitors (UVs) is the number of different people who visited your site, usually measured within a month (e.g., a site quoted as having 50,000 UVs translates as having 50,000 different visitors in that month). The value of UVs is your site’s (and brand’s) reach: how many people are coming across it and seeing who you are and what you do?

UVs have been the industry standard in measuring traffic, to a great degree because it’s a simple measurement and easy to compare. It’s meaningful in the sense that an increase in UVs means your site is being seen by a greater number of people than before, and probably that it has greater exposure across the web.

However, there are some flaws in using UVs as a single measurement. For example, a high number of UVs doesn’t necessarily translate into “quality” traffic: readers who actually read and interact with your content. It also doesn’t mean your whole site is getting a high amount of traffic: 50,000 UVs could mean 30,000 UVs over three top articles and the rest of the site going virtually unread. It could even translate into those three top articles being clicked on from elsewhere but having a high bounce rate and low amount of time on site and never actually being read at all.

Another problem with UVs is that a focus on them as a major statistic means that your web team will be concentrating all of their energy on raising UVs, which isn’t necessarily the best goal for the site’s overall development. There are many strategies for increasing UVs that create traffic spikes (such as if you have a compelling link on a prominent site or blog for a single day) but no conversions into repeat visitors. If 10,000 of your 50,000 monthly visitors are from a single link in a single day to a single story and they never come back, is that 50,000 really a quality measurement of your site’s readership? (This is a common problem with social media/bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter.)

The key to quality site development is to pay attention to UVs but not make an increase in UVs your only target. Make sure your traffic-driving strategies include a focus on converting those new visitors into return visitors, such as by encouraging them to sign up for newsletters or RSS feeds. In order to have a well-rounded site, you have to have a number of different goals and strategies in mind.

The pros and cons of digital editions

Canadian Magazines recently posted the news that the New Yorker is launching a digital edition, available to subscribers (print or digital-only) first thing Monday morning, when the issue comes off the press and before it arrives in most people’s mailboxes. (If you’re interested, you can register for a free preview.)

And this raises the question yet again: why have a digital edition? By digital edition here I mean a “virtual” magazine: the full magazine in digital form, typically complete with ads and even pages that turn, which I assume is what the New Yorker is featuring (I’m not a subscriber so can’t view an example).

I’ve never been a fan of digital editions, but I know some people are, so I thought I’d flesh out some of their pros and cons as opposed to integrating content into your site as a whole. Let me know your thoughts as well, and if your magazine has offered a digital edition, please share your experience.

The pros:
• Full artistic control, including quality full-size images (especially important for some kinds of magazine)
• Full print-style ads (ad sales people, tell me: would advertisers care as much about a digital edition-only subscriber as they would a print subscriber?)
• Control of distribution and easy paid distribution
• Can be quite easy to make and cost-effective
• Eco-friendly

The cons:
• Annoying to read (in my opinion, at least)
• Not indexed for search or linkable; not cross-linked to older/newer content
• Can be hard to read; requires zooming in and out
• May add layer of confusion for readers
• Short shelf life

The bottom line? If it’s part of your business plan and you think your readers will respond, go ahead and produce a digital edition. But remember, it’s a different version of your print product – it’s no substitute for a well-designed and well-executed magazine website.

Weekend links: November 8

• What the heck is an HTML? (Web Editor Canada)
• Online display advertising may go negative in 2009 (New York Post)
• Mourning old media’s decline (New York Times)
• Turn your favourite blogs into a personal magazine (Six Pixels of Separation)
• How to change the world using social media (Copyblogger)
• How to edit Wikipedia (Wired how-to wiki)

Protect your brand online

There’s now a ton of social media sites to sign up for, more than anyone can ever use. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still create an account. Who’s to say which site will be the next Facebook or Twitter? And when that time arrives, don’t you want to own your brand?

I just came across a site (thanks to the Bivings Report) that will check your chosen username across various sites (I counted 68 today, but they’re adding more) such as Flickr, Friendfeed, even eBay, and tell you if it’s available. It’s a good thing to check with both your own name (if you’re interested in owning it across the Internet) and your magazine’s name. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for as many of the popular sites as you can using the name of your magazine, even if you don’t plan to use it right away or perhaps ever – if you don’t do it now, it might be unavailable when you do want it. And above all, keep a list of the sites, usernames and passwords somewhere in the office where the next person to take an interest in such things can find it, if you ever leave.

Otherwise, when the next big site hits the mainstream, you may end up joining it as CanMag12345.

How links work

Links are extremely important online, and not just for the purpose of sending people around the Internet – Google takes them very seriously, too. Head on over to chrisbrogan.com for a good primer on links and why they’re so important. (And if you’re not linking out from your website, what are you waiting for?)

Newsletter subject lines, revisited

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about clickable newsletter subject lines and gave examples of what it takes to get me to open a newsletter (not much, in reality, but your regular readers will be a tougher audience). But today I want to step back and take a broader look at newsletters.

I’ve already discussed why I think every site should have them, no matter how small-scale – there’s no better way to create a connection with your readers than to create a relationship with them through their inbox. (Hardcore RSS users might disagree, but they’re still a minority for most sites.) And ideally, that’s why your newsletters exist – your site’s readers feel connected with the site and are impelled to sign up so they don’t miss anything that happens.

There are three ways to measure success with newsletters. The first is the size of your active list – the number of people who are actually receiving your messages. Every list will have a certain number of bounces (returned emails) and it’s the job of your technical team to keep the list trimmed, but you should be able to measure the number of messages that get through. The second is your open rate, or the percentage of recipients who open the message. And the third is the click-through rate, or the amount of people who not only open the message, but click through to the site as well.

The key to a good open rate is a subject line that encourages readers to click. And this is where it can get tricky – as I have said before, many sites opt for the sexy subject line, promising secrets and expert tips and sex and rock ‘n’ roll and, above all, numbered lists. What can I say – people just can’t resist them. But another option is to go for the simple, even boring: just the name of your newsletter, perhaps with a date. The same subject every time. Kim Pittaway drew my attention to one like this, from Harvard Magazine: “Editor’s Highlights: November-December 2008″. It’s not sexy at all, but for an engaged audience, it’s one that probably works well – after all, don’t you want to know what the editor of Harvard Magazine thinks are the top picks online this month?

And now, to test out wordpress.com’s new poll tool (and official worldwide election day, right?), the question of the day. (Do you like the skulls?)

The easiest way to add blogs to your site

Yes, it’s nice to have blogs integrated into your site architecture. But if you’re low on budget and still want to launch a blog (or many), the cheapest, easiest option is to do what American magazine VegNews did and create blogs on one of the excellent free platforms out there (for instance, they use Blogger; I use WordPress) then just link to them from your home page.

Their three blogs (Café VegNews, Press Pass and This Just In!) are featured in a block on the home page (pictured above) but link out to their own Blogger pages. It’s really a great idea: not only is it an easy and cheap way to add blogs to your site, it’s a low-investment way to experiment with blogs, decide what topics work for your audience and find out how well the blogs perform.

Weekend links: November 1

• Emily Post, Miss Manners and social media (The Harte of Marketing)
• Google Analytics releases advanced segmentation (Occam’s Razor)
• The importance of pillar articles and why Obama and McCain are idiots (Problogger)
• Guardian launches full RSS feeds (Publishing 2.0)
• What does it mean for the Christian Science Monitor to go web-only? (Techdirt)
• Slow feed movement: 7 tools to filter the RSS flood (Mashable)