Will Digital Magazines Make the Market?

Bob Sacks of Publishing Executive recently authored a post on The New Reality of the Magazine Business.  In it, he discusses the threatened revenue and delivery models of the traditional magazine industry. In summary, he advocates that as advertising dollars continue to dwindle, printed magazines will continue to have some success, but only for those titles most worthy of the higher cover and subscription prices they’ll be forced to charge in order to employ their editors and writers. For the general magazine population, it is his conclusion that the success of their product will be determined by their content, and even more so by the innovative experiences they can offer readers.

How does Bob believe magazine publishers will create a more superior reading experience? He continues, “You must understand that a major component—and perhaps the most successful part of our industry—is going to be digital.”

I think he has a valid point. If publishers create something interactive and captivating that has the flexibility to work not only on computers, but also on the gamut of mobile devices, I think readers will actually want to pay for it. How much? I don’t know.

Think about a digital magazine’s potential on a device like a tablet. In portrait mode, the magazine page could take up the full screen making it’s natural layout and lifestyle imagery the focal point, but elements within the layout could be interactive. Click to view a table of contents with thumbnails of the actual page layouts and article titles optimized for quick search and usability. To flip through pages, you could click the corner of the page or swipe your finger across the screen. Devices on cellular networks or WiFi, could update content instantaneously, bringing news to readers when it happens rather than the following day on the newsstand. Readers can now share articles with with friends and get a conversations started over email, Facebook, Twitter or a host of other social platforms. Publishers of content are no longer just writers and photographers, they can embed video and audio to take their readers deeper into the story or products. We can add links to related articles and even pull live feeds into a magazine for things such as breaking news, reactions, stats or live scores.

When magazines are digital; the possibilities are endless. If the success of magazines will be determined by all the experiences they’re going to deliver readers, then I have no doubt that the future of the industry looks to be an exciting and promising one.

Feedback:

Assuming the average cover price of a printed magazine is $3.50, how much would you expect to pay for a digital magazine that offered a unique, enhanced experience and could be easily downloaded and read on your computer, tablet, e-reader or phone? Either respond below, send an email to marketing@dirxion.com, or let us know of Facebook or Twitter.