Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Vertical had originally planned to charge for digital edition subscriptions, but they
decided to offer it for free to both print subscribers and non-subscribers. The magazine
also does not charge advertisers extra for their ads in the digital edition.
Digital edition subscribers sign up with their email addresses and are not required to
convey any other personal or professional information. Advanced Publishing stores
email addresses and handles all distribution and email messages.
Results
� Readership of the digital edition is now 6,200, which is about 26% of total
circulation of 24,000.
� For those digital subscribers, Vertical was able to save the vast majority of the
$7.50 per issue it costs to mail the print publication outside of North America.
Lessons Learned
� Digital circulation has grown much faster than anticipated.
� Vertical’s competitor Rotor & Wing launched its own digital edition in March
2006, so Vertical is looking to add more features to differentiate its digital
edition from the competition.
� Vertical intends to capitalize on the opportunity to add more timely content,
because the digital edition reaches readers immediately, instead of the two
weeks it takes for the print publication to come back from the printer. For
example, Vertical’s photographers produced extensive coverage of the Southern
California wildfires in late 2007; future digital editions could include more such
photos than could be placed in the print edition.
� Mike Reyno, Vertical’s Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher, believes that the
helicopter industry will eventually move to digital editions; the industry tends to
be about a decade behind the technology curve. He is finding some resistance
among advertisers that typically place ads in trade publications, so Vertical is
starting to push harder in their marketing efforts, stressing the searchability and
immediacy of the new product.
Gilbane Group Conclusions
� As with several other case studies in this report, Vertical’s experience shows how
effective digital editions can be for small B-to-B publishers with geographically
diverse readerships in increasing immediacy while cutting distribution costs
without the capital investment required to build sophisticated Web sites.
� The digital edition of Vertical shows off the magazine’s high-quality
photography better than a traditional Web site can. Publishers that generate lots
of high-quality images should consider digital editions as a way of showing their
images off while still retaining the immediacy of a digital format.

18
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com