Some Thoughts on Digital Editions
A last minute conflict kept me from my panel seat at CMFC, but just a note on one of the proposed questions from the moderator who was going to ask me about the “digital edition” of Ebony and whether it was effective as an alternative to print.
The sort answer is yes - and no. But it brings up a broader point.
Digital editions are really for a specific audience. Generally a subscriber who is tired of paper but still wants the magazine. Is web-friendly but not web-centric, and has never gotten quite used to the jumble of content in a web format and still wants a page by page experience. In short, most likely a future Kindle candidate.
Digital editions don’t net you much, their biggest attraction is that they count as circulation and probably retain some subscribers who might otherwise get lost. But again, it’s a different audience from Google Books, who we have a deal with for our archives. And different still from the crowd that looks for us using Ebsco. Different people, different points of access.
And that’s the broad point of doing things in new formats.The ultimate goal of any content producer these days should be to make their content available on every format that is feasible. Publishers should start belly-aching about paid walls and instead start looking to broader points of distribution - most specifically devices that work on a paid app and subscription model.
We should also all be looking for non-ad based revenue. That means less of a focus on content than trading on the goodwill of the brand to create direct transactional opportunities - shopping channels as one example.
Companies should also look to be media companies, not publishers. How much of your content stands alone as intellectual property. And then how much of that can take other forms via TV, radio, digital film, other formats with more established pay models.
That gets to another question proposed about aggregation - something I just don’t support as a long term strategy. It may net you eyeballs now, but in ten years, what do you own? If you don’t own the content, you can’t feed it through new platforms to come. It’s a losing proposition ultimately. –Eric Easter, VP Digital and Entertainment, Johnson Publishing
1 comment
I agree with so much of this–especially the exhortation for producers to “stop bellyaching” and get their content out their widely across platforms.
Aggregation need not be a dead end. In terms of future, paid aggregation services, people would be paying for the service, not the unowned content.
As well, networks like HuffingtonPost and ChicagoNow enter into agreements with contributors that uphold bloggers’ right to their own copyright while allowing these networks to use the content posted there for other (potentially future) marketing uses.