Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Conclusions

those valuable referrals that will bring readers back to a publisher’s Web site as
one of their key points of origin.
� Community – Similarly, publishers need to accept that their roles as
information providers exist within readers’ communities. The more they can
foster the healthy growth of such communities, the more traffic and brand
recognition they will achieve.
Auditability — The best and most innovative content products will attract significant
readership that can be monetized in a number of ways. Advertising has long been a key
part of most publishers’ revenue model, and before the advent of digital publishing,
audited circulation was a critical factor in determining advertising rates and billing
advertisers. Because of the importance of accurately determining the number of copies
of a publication that were actually circulated, a sophisticated set of standards and
requirements have long been established to measure the circulation of printed
magazines and newspapers.
The real question for publishers is whether they can work within the necessary auditing
bureau strictures and still produce an innovative digital product that will excite and
delight their subscribers. The key issues are the consistency and placement of content
between digital and printed editions. The requirement that digital pages maintain a
similar appearance to the original printed page has made it difficult for readers to read
and navigate pages on digital displays where the form factor is very different.
We believe that publishers should weigh the pros and cons of conforming to the
standards required for the digital publication to be considered auditable. While it is
terrific when digital editions can add to audited circulation figures, maintaining
Auditability can become a pyrrhic victory if Auditability standards limit the
development of the content and features required to offer subscribers compelling value
proposition.
There have been productive dialogues between publishers and the audit bureaus that do
such an excellent job of helping publishers quantify their circulation in a consistent
fashion. As digital markets continue to emerge and evolve, audit standards for digital
publications will become more sophisticated so that they enable the growth of digital
readership while still portraying an accurate description of readership for advertisers.
For example, statistics on the time that readers spend on certain pages of digital
publications and measuring the number of “click-throughs” provide advertisers with
new forms of tangible evidence as to the effectiveness of their advertising investment.
These new measures can augment traditional circulation data.
Deploying archives — The continued popularity of search engines results from readers
seeking information on a specific topic or finding an answer to a question. A significant
benefit of a digital replica edition is that it stands as a record of what was happening in
an information domain(s) during a certain time period. For example, The Guardian has
built an extremely robust archive of over 1 million pages. This archive has become a
very important research tool for students, scholars, and experts and has become a
valuable part of The Guardian's digital publishing strategy. Remembering that many
people are looking for specific, authoritative information or the answer to a question,
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