If you publish anything in print, and you generate revenue from that publication, you may be on constant prowl for ways to add digital delivery to your arsenal – and likely more so – a business model which supports your web/mobile/eReader strategy.

A colleague, Jeremy Kuzub at Jufa Intermedia, recently sent me this video featuring the Wired creative director espousing the virtues of new digital delivery platforms and Wired’s approach to these.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1813626064?bctid=66775419001

As summarized by Jeremy when he sent me the video “Wired’s approach is not optimal. In the video you’d think they were enamoured by the iPad/Pod touch-style interface and navigation. However, the main point holds true: people expect their content should to be available to them anywhere in the best possible format for that time and place. This content is no longer static, either; the concept of a monthly magazine that stays the same after it is printed simply does not hold true when distribution is digital and people expect social interaction with their content and their community. Wired also cites “new-to-print” features which have been a core-part of web sites for 5-10 years.”

Jeremy is spot on. Sure the experience on new touch-type devices is more tangible and feels closer to print (touch and flip) then a keyboard-mouse interface, but all the “new” features of having video, social media sharing capability, rich interfaces, etc. have all been standard on the web for years. It’s a slicker interface, sure, but is that enough?

One interesting comment made in the video is by the Editor in Chief (Anderson), “we can reset the economics. If people value the experience enough, they may be willing to pay for it”. Well I’m not sure I get that statement, since ads fund magazines generally, not subscriptions or cover sales.

The problem with the economics of web content publishing is 10-15 years ago the print publications gave away their digital real estate to advertisers FOR FREE. They basically pushed the web to consumers to get eyeballs, then they turned around and told advertisers “pay for our print ad, and you get X web impressions for free!”. They basically shot themselves in the foot right from the beginning.

Is a new interface or consumer “experience” enough to compel a consumer to pay for the content through a subscription? Will the perceived value of ad space escalate x100 fold because of you’ve changed the interface?

Now let me add my experience to this mix. I happen to have had a few clients with the print-to-web problems. What “problems” do I speak of? Well, the transition of eyeballs from print to web translates into a loss of 100:1 in revenue (every dollar earned for a print eyeball, is worth 1 penny on the web). That’s the biggest challenge, of course there are a myriad of others I’ll get to.

What was the solution?  I pitch several – including diversification of revenue sources from pure ad-sales to include other forms – a sort of “Parthenon” monetization principle – meaning that you want to support your organization with multiple revenue-generating pillars. Imagine holding up a ceiling with 1 pillar, it would have to be huge. But 4 smaller pillars can do the same job, and losing one of those doesn’t necessitate immediate collapse of your roof!

Unfortunately I have had very few clients actually implement any of my proposed solutions. Why? 3 main reasons…

1. The new business model is more complex than the simple ad sponsored content model of the past.
2. It requires a significant up-front capital investment to deploy new collaborative focused infrastructure (half the budget usually devoted to strategy to figure out exactly what to do and the other half to execution).
3. To maintain and support the new models (both content and revenue generation) requires new skill sets and new ways of thinking about the business – its actually a whole new business. As Jack Welch once said “it’s not enough to have the right bus going in the right direction, but you need the right people on the bus..”

I attended a conference in Toronto about a year ago that was focused on the publication industry (magazines and newspapers). The main speaker was showcasing The Economist and its approach to the digital divide. Great lessons to be learned from that case study. However, I toured the room and spoke to a dozen different types of publication owners in the room and they were much more scared then excited. They understood, intellectually, the issues, but none of them had the emotional capacity to carry out the changes they needed. They knew they were dying a slow death and effectively didn’t have the capacity, skills, or courage to do something. They were all working on an “approach” that was effectively tip toeing into a tidal wave. They knew it wouldn’t work, but they were all hoping it would. It was a very very sad room.

The web is a total disruption – a cataclysmic “E.L.E.” type event. Its one of the few times you can use the term “paradigm shift” and not sound like a hack.

Digital media doesn’t change the old ways, it ignores every aspect of them – from revenue models to skill sets, to approach – publishers find themselves on a bus where the paved road they’ve known for years has turned to gravel and full of bumps they don’t know how to deal with. They don’t just need to reshuffle the bus, or change the tires, but completely abandon the bus, buy some hummers, split into smaller teams, learn how to drive in the new terrain, and then punch the gas and go. To bury a hatchet in this analogy – it’s the difference between rally racing (new) and nascar (old). The rules have changed dramatically.

My final point is this — print is not dead.  Print is just one medium beside many others.

MIT Technology Review (one of my favourite tech/science magazines) abandoned its print publication about 2 years ago in favour of a pure digital delivery format. After being a loyal subscriber for 5 years I dropped my subscription. After a year they abandoned their pure digital model and went back to a publication, instead of 6 issues a year, they were now printing 4 thicker ones (though that may have been tuned up since). But they realized, as Jeremy pointed out well above, they needed to deliver on multiple platforms, and that print was a highly prized platform, even by one of the technoratti (me).

So what do you need to do if you are a print publication with an eroding revenue base? /

Hire me and find out.

Bruce

Michael Phelps gets caught smoking pot, the judge doesn’t press the case and drops it. The only sponsor who dropped Phelps was Kellogs. Good PR move? Maybe in a 1.0 world. No less than 11 websites were setup instantly supporting Phelps and calling for a boycott – social media knocked out Kellogs.

What lesson to take from this? Two:

1. Understand the risk – what’s bigger, pot or a guy who’s a hero to millions, a dedicated athlete, symbol of American pride, and winner of 8 (EIGHT) Olympic gold medals?

2. Understand your audience – are they the kind of people to connect closer to their idols when they do something that humanizes them (for example, make a mistake)?

The backlash against Phelps’ critics is amazing – and in today’s self-publishing, easy-to-access soapbox that can reach millions instantly – you have to be very very careful which side you are on.

What’s interesting is that “Web 2.0” connects directly to society’s true sentiment by accessing individual commentary.

So understand your audience and balance the risk with this insight to ensure you find yourself on the winning side of the marketing game.

I was intruiged by a recent post by Jeremiah at the Web-Strategist.com about how the search box in a browser is circumventing the address field. I read this after sitting with a client today and discussing their mamoth 3.2 million page website. Third client actually, the first one had 100,000 pages, and second one has about 1,000 pages. How do you organize all that content?!

So here is an idea i’ve been toying with for a while. A colleague at Jufa Intermedia and I drew it out on a whiteboard over lunch one day. Should we develop it?

The idea is developing a CMS that treats pages as stand-alone pieces of micro-content. Here is the gambit: the navigation structure is dynamically created, and the pages are easy to find using search tools. So you can both explore and/or search for specific elements. If you don’t know what you want but know the topic you explore, and if you do know exactly what you want you can narrow your search down rapidly. But wait, there’s more…

People don’t usually consume whole websites, they use parts of it at any given moment of need. Search boxes are the second most used navigation element within most sites, yet most site-specific search functions… well, frankly suck.

One of the biggest problems client’s have is
how they will structure their IA:

copy the organization’s operational structure

or

discover how the user consumes the information provided.

The answer is sort of obvious from an effective marketing stand-point – you design for the user. But it’s not that simple, because in larger organizations, the workflow of how content is published does not usually correspond to how the world consumes that information. So if you can’t create good content, then your “effective” user experience is for naught.

So instead of publishing to an area that you are responsible for maintaining, you simply publish for various categories (to seed the choice), you tag it and you tell it who your intended audience is from pre-loaded user-profiles. So you don’t publish to a part of the site, you publish to the TYPE of person you want to read the content.

The CMS will dynamically generate menus based on traffic patterns for each pre-determined user type.

It will guess at what a particular user is looking for based on what the user is looking at and how long they spend looking at it. That’s the first part. Second, is that each page must standalone. So you publish a page so it can be found using an onsite search engine. You can categorize and tag, as you may a blog entry. So instead of a site of pages linked together through a man-made and stagnant architecture, you effectively create a catalog of the content.

Imagine surfing a large site
(1,000+ pages) like you would looking for a book on Amazon.

You have recommendations based on previous experience, you have recommendations based on others experience, you have categories you can browse, and you have simple and advanced search functions for narrowing your results. If the content contains “web 2.0″ user-generated features such as comments, ratings, etc. then they can be integrated into the CMS as well, by helping rank search results, and offering new navigations methods.

So, any VC’s out there want to fund this project?

Bruce