Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Results
� Savings in postage for Church Production subscribers outside the U.S.
� Incremental ad revenue in the tens of thousands of dollars from CE Pro.
� Web content production costs reduced for Channel Pro.
Lessons Learned
� Crews feels that eventually digital editions will bridge the gap between publisher
content and the Web. The key enabling technology is the ability for users to
search magazine content through both the magazine’s Web site and the major
Internet search engines. The latter leads to new marketing channels and
potential audience for subscriptions.
� EH Publishing is working with Texterity to achieve optimal balance between
free access and paid subscriptions. Controlled viewing, (e.g., up to 1 page before
and after the search result), prompts prospects to subscribe in order have
complete access. If this is done outside of the magazine’s Web site, then it
becomes a form of search engine optimization (SEO). This is not possible with
competitive, Flash-based digital edition technologies.
Gilbane Group Conclusions
� Texterity’s ability to let digital edition content be indexed by Internet search
engines helps to solve a major problem with publishers’ digital products: that
the “product packaging” technology precludes discoverability, which hinders
publishers’ ability to compete with “free” content online.
� EH Publishing’s experience shows the breadth of strategies that digital editions
can deliver, particularly across the divergent objectives of consumer titles –
such as circulation building – and B-to-B titles – such as distribution cost
savings. EH Publishing had different business objectives in mind for each of its
digital editions, yet it was able to meet them all with a single platform.

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