Thinking of Converting to a Digital-only Magazine? Read This First

But while closing down a print edition and keeping the title “alive” in digital form used to be viewed as a last-ditch effort to preserve some form—any form—of a magazine’s existence, some publishers actually are thriving with digital-only publications.

Before taking a closer look at some of those success stories, it’s worth noting that shuttering a print edition in favor of a digital-only publication is no cure-all that can be applied by any publisher in any market. And depending on your cost structure, readership and advertisers, it may not be an option at all.

“If you’re fat and sassy with a lot of print advertising, you’re not going to want to do it. So call a spade a spade,” says Norm Kamikow, president and 
editor-in-chief of MediaTec Publishing Inc., a Chicago-based publisher of workforce development and talent management magazines and events.

Kamikow’s team shuttered Certification magazine’s print edition 18 months ago after a 10-year run. “We did it because we were really at a marginal point with the [print] magazine,” he says. “… Profitability is way up now. Going purely digital changes your cost structure so dramatically—once you take the printer and the post office out of it—that your profits should be there.

“We never would have done it if there weren’t examples of other IT publishers like IDG and Ziff Davis that had done it before,” Kamikow continues.

Putting aside the print-versus-digital debate, it’s clear that both mediums have their own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding these, and how they are likely to affect your readership, advertisers and bottom line, is central to any decision to go all-digital.

Effects on Readership
Kamikow estimates that, at the time of his decision to pull the plug on the print edition of Certification, 33 percent of the publication’s subscribers were digital-only, while another 33 percent received both the digital edition and a print copy. So two-thirds of the audience was already familiar with the digital edition, and the readership—made up of information technologists—is what Kamikow calls “online savvy.”

Despite the successful switch to the digital-only publication of Certification, Kamikow says he “wouldn’t do it for our other magazines. … The driver has to be the readership. Because if the readership will respond well, the advertisers will respond well.”

Reader adoption remains a barrier to many publishers’ digital magazine strategies, but Micocci suggests many are simply taking the wrong approach. “As long as a publisher offers free digital alongside print, digital readership will probably remain a small percentage of the whole, as you are asking for a new behavior, and the benefits to the reader are not obvious,” he says.

Instead, he suggests marketing the two products with very different price points, while advertising the value-adds of digital to your readership. “It boils down to cost of acquisition and how much … your market [likes] your content, if they’re not sold on the delivery process,” Micocci says.

For Advertisers
But if the “driver has to be the readership,” as Kamikow contends, the fuel must be the advertisers in order to keep the magazine headed down a profitable path. Depending on the market, advertisers’ understanding and acceptance of digital magazines will vary.

“We went to the advertisers, did some rate adjustments, and created a case for the advertisers that a digital-only publication was more efficient for us and more desirable for the reader,” says Kamikow. “We also said, ‘Mr. Advertiser, we’re not going to charge you as much money, so this is good for you.'”

Prospects Graduate, a long-time successful print product for recruiters in the United Kingdom, found itself with a crumbling business model in 2006. “Because of the growth in e-mail and the use of Web sites, [Prospects Graduate] essentially lost its route to market,” says Allan Brown, sales director at the product’s parent company Graduate Prospects. Brown and his team surveyed their first two options—shutter the struggling publication altogether or convert it to an e-mail newsletter—and didn’t like what they saw. “We wanted to produce something that had the impact and ability to brand that [print] has, but also the immediacy, flexibility and accountability that you find online. It was just at the time digital media was coming out, so it was a toss-up between that or producing a PDF, but PDF just didn’t have the functionality, so we decided to go with a digital product,” he says.

That decision saved Prospects Graduate, but not before Brown spent many a day in customers’ offices extolling the virtues of the digital magazine. The pitch, he says, went something like this: “Here is a valuable product to you, Mr. Advertiser, that you don’t want to see disappear. That said, because of changes in technology, the route to market has become more challenging, so we’ve got a solution that can not only continue to deliver in the way the old product did, but, on top of that, has the added benefits of being able to be more flexible and creative with your advertising, to be able to measure your response, which you weren’t able to fully do before, and the ability within the product to engage readers in a slightly different way.”

Next, it’s important to educate your sales team on how to properly present and analyze metrics to advertisers. “Advertising has really moved to lead generation,” says Kamikow, “… and now we are able to give them a much more measurable response on readership.”

But how they measure this response is key, says Brown. “We had to make sure the sales team was talking about the right numbers … . What really counts is how many people are opening it, how many people are looking at each page, how many people are clicking on it, are people getting responses to their job ads, are they actually recruiting from those ads?” says Brown. “I think there were skeptics out there, but very quickly we began to build up a list of customers who were actually getting results from it and were very pleased with it.”

Keeping advertisers’ expectations of metrics and leads in line with market norms will go a long way toward healthy customer relationships.

Advice for Making the Move
“Plan as far in advance as possible,” says Mast, as it will likely take a minimum of three months from the time you make the decision to go all-digital until you have all of your subscribers and advertisers ready for that first digital-only issue.

“Engage with the medium,” says Brown. “I think this is one of the issues that a lot of publishers face, and we do as well—in that we have print products that we do digital editions of. And, frankly, that’s not engaging with the medium. You might as well just do a PDF. If you can, try to tailor the product to the medium, because that makes it more accessible to the reader, it makes it a more interesting product proposition, makes it more engaging and, ultimately, more successful.”

A digital-only publication isn’t for every publisher, but thanks to rapidly improving technology and changing reader habits, it could well be an option.

And remember, Micocci suggests, that whether published digitally or in print, a magazine still has a unique value to readers and advertisers alike that cannot be replicated by 
a Web site.

“A magazine, even a digital one, is like going to a movie,” he says. “It’s a designed experience with a beginning, middle and end. A Web site is like going to the library—plenty of information if you know where to look. People pay to go to movies, not libraries.”