Why Digital Magazines Work
James Mallinson, publisher of digital men’s mag Monkey at Dennis Publishing, looks at the success of the title and addresses three key questions about why digital magazines work.
Last week’s circulation result for Monkey proved once and for all that, after 23 years, the digital magazine has come of age. In a world where most magazine sectors are seeing a long term decline in general and a haemorrhaging in the men’s market in particular, digital magazines can be a success.
There are three key questions about why digital magazines work that I want to address here:
Do they offer value to the reader?
Digital magazines are a hybrid of their print and website siblings. They offer many of the benefits of both – such as the reader relationship of the former and the rich media proposition of the latter – and can provide a bridge into the online world for digital immigrants.
If a magazine on any medium is to be a success, it has to provide its audience with an aggregated, finite experience of its subject matter. In Monkey‘s case we make sense of the best content on the web for men and blend it with information on gadgets, girls and entertainment in one easy to understand package. We liken Monkey to its Dennis stable-mate The Week, describing it as “a virtual The Week for the YouTube generation”. Last year’s Mintel report into men’s magazines said there was a prize for the publisher that broke the formulaic and un-innovative existing propositions. We (modestly) believe we have cracked it.
In a time-poor world where 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day and where we have 20 minutes for lunch, men want bragging rights – so we do what men’s magazines used to be able to do and show them things first. It’s why Monkey‘s team of super-surfers looks at over 500 sites every week to give the readers these golden nuggets.
Instead of seeing a screen grab of Dario Franchitti’s 200mph crash, you get to see it. Rather than just looking at a great photo of a celebrity in a magazine, we provide a video interview with that person too. Or you can vote for her to be on next week’s cover. Given the exceptionally short lead times, we are hugely topical as we go to press on a Tuesday night and are available on a Wednesday morning.
Do digital magazines provide value to advertisers?
Being a print and web hybrid ensures that digital magazines provide advertisers with the inherent benefits of both platforms:
1. Branding. Advertisers are bringing their hugely powerful press executions to life. On one hand this sees entertainment advertisers inserting their HD trailers and exclusive content into their existing advertising. Alternatively, clients are able to use flash and audio to make their creative more powerful. For example, Lucozade animated hundreds of bubbles on a page and made them pop to great effect.
2. Measurement. Being digital means advertisers can see how well their ad has performed in a way magazines never can, from how many people have seen your ad through to how many people have actually clicked on it. Monkey is generating as many, if not more, click-throughs than the richest forms of traditional web advertising.
In Wilkinson Sword’s recent campaign, over 100,000 readers requested a free razor, generating a huge database for them to market to in the future.
3. Creativity. The line between advertising and editorial is blurring and, in digital, relying on UGC alone is limited and often fraught with disaster as it is generally not very good. But mixing it with traditional branding and interactive mechanics can ensure cut-through. Wilkinson Sword’s ‘Extreme Shaving’ campaign got relatively few people to enter. However, across 10 weeks, an average of over 12,000 people a week voted for their favourite.
All these factors have helped to ensure that Monkey will generate over 300 pages in its first year of trading. August alone has been our biggest month, featuring new campaigns from the likes of Smirnoff, Pepsi, Nokia, and Tuborg, to name a few.
Do they work for publishers?
If you told any of the UK’s publishers that in the current market you could deliver them a new magazine with a circulation of 245,404 (Monkey‘s Jan – Jun ABCe) in under a year they would all bite your hand off.
The desktop publishing revolution of the ’80s and ’90s helped fuel the biggest surge of new magazines ever. However, media owner consolidation combined with shareholder demands means that new mags cost £10 million plus in order to drive the required returns. Ironically, this would mean that most of the existing monthlies would be unlikely to see the light of day today.
Whilst digital magazines clearly don’t offer retail sales value, they do, like the internet and free newspapers, provide healthy returns through advertising and a significantly reduced cost base. As such, I see no reason why Monkey‘s success cannot be replicated in many other sectors.
Like any new business, creating Monkey has unearthed all sorts of challenges, which we are overcoming on a weekly basis. While digital magazines have existed since 1984, they have had no real consumer impact. The American world-leader digital magazine distribution company Zinio said it had delivered 55 million magazines, across 1,200 titles for 350 publishers, from 2002 to 2006.
In 2007, over 10 million copies of Monkey will be read.
Digital magazines have indeed come of age.