A few months back we announced the PageLife platform for producing e-Magazines - or digital magazines - built using Microsoft Silverlight technology. So it is interesting to note a couple of pieces around the topic of e-Magazines.
ReadWriteWeb has penned - the Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? - prompted by the demise of the print format PC Magazine in favour of a digital only edition. In fact RWW takes a dim view of the digital version PC Magazine.
We perused the June edition, but didn't see a lot of interactivity. Also many of the hyperlinks simply opened up pages in PC Magazine's website. A letter from a reader in the feedback section of this issue noted how he likes to print out parts of the digital PC Magazine. That implies to us that PC Magazine hasn't fully escaped the shackles of print. In fact it seems very much like the print magazine simply transplanted into an eBook. The magazine has plenty of fans, and is known for its reviews, however, it still has a few tricks to learn about digital magazines by the look of it.
RWW did reference much better examples, in particular Avantoure, a lifestyle magazine that started life exclusively as a digital edition. Avantoure looks to have an interactive design team that are digital natives and operate free from any print legacy.
This point links to the second post from MediaWeek on Buyers Wary of Electronic Subs Counted into Circulation Stats. The piece quotes media buyers as complaining that digital editions aren't worth the paper they are not written on.
Scott Daly, executive vp, executive media director, Dentsu America, said he sees “absolutely no value whatsoever” to digital editions and that if he were negotiating with a magazine that sells digital subs as part of its circ, “we would probably discount it, because a digital version of a magazine is not the reason we’d go into a magazine.”
I agree. Sticking a passive ad inside a sealed PDF to be despatched to free circulation oblivion would be a waste of money. The point is media buyers need to capitalize upon the opportunity for interactivity to get the best from the medium.
That's just what Mediacom did by asking us to help their client Seat with this example of an e-Magazine created for a recent Seat car launch. We pushed for rich interactivity, Seat agreed, and loved the results. Shortly, we should be able to share a few of the performance analytics. The lead conversion rates are most noteworthy, they are much higher than we'd normally expect from a microsite (although the work of Mediacom and MSN in targetting would have played role too).
Several more PageLife based e-Magazines are in the pipeline. We'll keep an eye on performance and report back.
Tags: PC Magazine, e-Magazines, Avantoure