Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
ElectronicHouse.com instead of distributing print copies by mail. Paid subscribers can
also access back issues, which are all fully searchable.
The trade publication CE Pro has a digital edition that the publisher uses for building
ad revenue. Instead of charging extra for ad placement in the digital edition, they sell ad
packages that include a certain dollar amount that is automatically allocated to the
digital edition. Advertisers can “opt out,” in which case they pay less for their print-only
ads and the publisher substitutes a house ad in the digital edition. This arrangement
was implemented as a compromise between the magazine’s publisher, who didn’t want
to try for extra ad revenue from the digital edition, and EH Publishing senior
management, which did.
The objective of the digital edition of Church Production is to reduce foreign postage
costs. The magazine has a large percentage of subscribers outside the U.S., who can opt
into the digital edition (the digital edition is not available to U.S. subscribers).
EH Publishing launched the digital edition of Channel Pro, which is a joint venture of
EH Publishing and NASBA, the Association of Channel Resellers, only recently. The
objective of this digital edition was to supplement limited Web content. The digital
edition is available on www.channelproonline.com.
EH Publishing acquired several magazines from another company, including Live
Sound. The previous company chose iDigital Edition for Live Sound, a platform based
on Adobe Flash technology, as opposed to Texterity’s SVG-based technology or PDF.
Elizabeth Crews, VP of Audience Development, says that iDigital Edition’s presentation
is attractive, and it’s a cheaper solution, but it has the disadvantage of not being
searchable or indexed by the major Internet search engines.
When interviewed by Red7Media for Texterity’s Digital Channel on www.foliomag.com,
Crews said the advantages of digital editions come from four different models: revenue
generation, circulation cost savings, content generation and postal savings. Says Crews,
“Our experience with Texterity has been smooth sailing. They look at what we’re doing
on a quarterly basis and show us what we can take advantage of. When you work with
just a digital edition company, you don’t have the same support.”
For consumer titles, EH Publishing offers a digital edition as an add-on for any
subscriber whose email address they have in their fulfillment database, which is
outsourced to Suncoast Data. EH Publishing handles fulfillment in-house for its trade
magazines using QuickFill. Subscribers are asked if they want print, digital, or both. If
the system detects that a user is from a country outside the U.S., it offers digital only.
The production process for publishers using Texterity is quite straightforward. EH
Publishing produces layouts in QuarkXPress, with each page as a separate file. This is
necessary in case they need to pull an ad and replace it with a house ad. They send
Texterity high-resolution PDFs (typically about 100 files per issue), which Texterity
then digitizes. The publisher provides subject lines and messaging for the emails that go
out to subscribers announcing availability of new issues.
71
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com