If the second day of the event did not constitute an embarrassment of riches, overall the sessions came pretty close. The conference touched on almost everything along the magazine value chain from audience development, to monetizing social, to rediscovering SMS for profit and of course, outsourcing.
I am not a circulation person by training but I listened intently to the panel on Best Business Practices in Audience Development. Bob Kaslik, Aspire, Roseanne Ippoliti, Consumer Reports and Bryan Welch, Ogden Publications were passionate about the importance of data management and mining and understanding the lifetime value of the customer. In a way this session represented the best of IMAG: smart people using technology to monetize content in every conceivable way.
Welch spoke of spending $80,000 to digitize web content that was already available free on the web—on a hunch. Anyway, it was easier than figuring out how to “gate” the web site. His team put this content on CDs and sold enough to cover the initial costs in six weeks.
Kaslik provided a list of his channels and products and the lineup underscores why the company is doing so well: 16 magazines, 300+books, 75 DVDs, 33 web sites, 9 events, 3 PBS TV shows and 9 online communities. But without the affinity newsletters, SEO-refined key word clusters and SEO-based freemiums, sponsored emails, contextual opt-ins and a host of other Best Business Practices, this would be a very different business indeed.
Roseanne Ippoliti’s account of the launch of Consumer Reports Shop Smart was testimony to how to successfully incubate a startup in a big brand company by begging for and borrowing resources, staying under the radar, and radically changing course when necessary. It is not money that kept this product going; rather; it was tenacity and abrupt changes in the business plan when warranted. The product was originally intended to target the young men’s market until focus groups suggested otherwise. Shop Smart was intended primarily as a newsstand title until the publisher discovered this was also a subscription product.
This risk-taking and following of hunches represents the best of IMAG. I can’t recall a conference where attendees spoke as much about their failures and missteps as about successes. “Try and abandon” was an often-repeated mantra and not just from the independents. Rich Covey, National Geographic, spoke of replicating and publishing online vintage maps he assumed would be a winner out of the gate. That wasn’t the case. He tried publishing puzzles on a hunch and after a slow start the online feature is getting 35 million views a months.
During the conference a number of technology companies showed up. Rob Macdonald, Google, spoke about monetizing audience through display and search. Google seems to have fully integrated the DoubleClick platform into the business and has increased its push into display. To this end Google is now able to overlay aggregated data on content to increase advertising yield.
Cheryl Goodman, Qualcomm, introduced mirasol, a new color display technology. She reminded attendees that paper remains the perfect display in its “naturalness.” Mirasol takes on some qualities of nature through a process called “bio-mimicry.”
The mirasol display, has a long battery life, is sunlight readable and video-enabled. Mirasol is most efficient when used on a smartphone though is can be used on all form factors. Goodman positions this screen/device between e-readers and the iPad. In this instance the business model dictates the form factor.
I am very interested in display technologies and devices in general but I’ve paid little attention to power requirements and battery life. Ms. Goodman made it very clear that these issues will come to the forefront as color displays are demanded by consumers. The Kindle’s current modest use of power will be much less of a virtue if and when Amazon offers a color version of E-ink, as has been suggested. Then let the draining begin. The speaker reminded us that when content becomes rich, someone has to pay, suggesting that downloading a magazine as rich data could cost $5 at current market rates. She also addressed the cost of manufacturing devices and batteries and the environmental implications. Tablets require relatively large and heavy batteries.
Mirasol has a compelling technology and environmental story. Look for the display to come to market later this year. Please go to http://www.mirasoldisplays.com/ for more details.
Ryan Marquis, co-founder, PixelMags, came to MPA about six months ago with an elegant approach to creating magazine apps for the iPhone. The company has since moved into the iPad space but perhaps that is not the most interesting part of the story. PixelMags will be embedding subscription and e-commerce offering, such as back issues, within apps. The company will also have an interface with Facebook and offer with some safeguards a five-day feature that allows you to share magazine content. This is just the beginning.
It has taken these entrepreneurs less than a year to understand there is an enormous potential for e-commerce within the app in particular and in social media in general. Don’t be surprised if before too long, every page in the digital magazine will become an e-commerce page. After all, it’s just another line of code.
Marquis reported that in the first forty-eight hours of the iPad’s existence consumers flipped over 2 million magazine pages. This beautiful object is a marvelous data generation tool.
Social is in the air. Social was also in the air at IMAG, so much so that some of us joked, prematurely of course, about a post-Google world. I’m not ready to bet against that house but Google is ten years old and the upstarts smell blood and dream of riding social media to riches. This is not all pie-in-the-sky. We know that Facebook has outpaced Google in sending traffic to web sites. And we know that Facebook users spend 99% of their time in the news feed, don’t click on links and simply don’t want to stray to far from their friends.
At lunch on Monday we heard from Scott Jones, founder of ChaCha, an elegant SMS mobile application that answers real-time questions from an existing 500,000 million-answer data base and 50,000 eager experts waiting in the wings. While Jones was speaking a map behind him captured live the number of questions coming in, where they were coming from and whether the questioner was a man or woman. It reminded me of the live search map at Google’s headquarter, only less busy.
Jones said what we have heard before: the future of search is mobile. The facts speak for themselves. ChaCha is #1 in mobile text search, surpassing Google.
ChaCha gets six new users every second. Ninety-two percent of users come through the viral door. The company aims for the broad market of feature phone that represents 80% of the mobile market. Jones mentioned a number of possible ways to work with magazines. He might look into subscription marketing.
I’ll follow-up with another post regarding other subscription initiatives in social media.
Chuck McCullagh
The 2010 IMAG Conference got off to a fast start in a Sunday-slow Washington DC with the highest attendance in years and strong support by technology companies who tend to look at this long tail of publishing as a testing ground for new ideas.
First to the podium was Samir Arora, founder of Glam Media, a fast-growing online Vertical Content Network now focusing on women's and lifestyle sectors but pushing into the men's content space. Arora wondered at least twice why someone hadn't done the same thing with print.
Glam had visited MPA a few years ago when it had a handful of sites and seemed a promising business but there were questions about scale. No more as the network has grown from 12 to 1500 sites in four years with 2000 sites expected by 2012. The Glam network is fueled by 6000 editors and writers, one of the largest staffs in the world.
Glam is developing a huge footprint in the space with close to 80 million unique visitors a month which places them in 9th spot in the online media business. Equally important Glam has been able to attract 95% of available brand advertisers, proving critics wrong. Glam has become a big brand in its own right by aggregating premium sites.
Glam does about $80 million a year in total revenues and is pushing $100 million. The revenue share is 50/50. Arora said Glam has returned $100 million to content producers.
The founder reminded us more than once that Glam is really a technology company able to take costs out and get to scale without massive overhead. Glam employs 250. While other content sites have been struggling with online CPMs, Glam seems to have figured this out too.
On the way out a number of publishers said more or less: where did these guys come from? I responded they have been in plain view. Perhaps we weren't looking.
During the afternoon's session speakers did not forget about technology completely. Cia Romano, Interface Guru led spirited discussions about monetizing content and strategic planning for mid-sized publishers. She also had a warning about the iPad that "will sink as many publishers as it saves." Her point was well-taken. Publishers had ten years to play with the web and get it right. The iPad won't be so forgiving.
Romano has been looking at publisher web sites and media/digital strategies for a decade and sees vast room for improvement. Her research indicates that 80% of companies have never created a defined media strategy. She has found that 53% of digital media staff have learned on the job and 26% have no experience. The remainder of the afternoon was spent in breakout sessions where Romano and her team showed us how to get out of this cul-de-sac.
The day ended appropriately with the Utne Awards dinner for smaller magazines with 200 cheering fans in the room. One of the winners compared the event to the National Magazine Award held in New York last week with the NMA being more advertiser-focused in some way. That's probably a false distinction. Our industry needs both celebrations and business models. This is my fifth annual IMAG conference and I am reminded again of how passionate and innovative this long tail of publishing is, born out of both love and necessity. After sitting next to a staff member from "Hip Momma" I was learned again how ideas for magazines incubate. Where else would I go for an article such as; "Everything I need to know about motherhood I learned from Animal House."
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