> I pay for Consumer Reports Online. It's worth it to me. But that is unique
> information backed by a decades-old brand name that has established a bond
> of trust with its customers.
Which are major assets that such publications rely on, as they're
the reason that they can charge and have people pay.
> And note that CU and the WSJ have never derived the bulk of their revenue
> from ads (in fact, CU is ad free), whereas most publications are almost
> entirely ad-supported. Major commercial publications typically derive
> 60-90% of their revenue from their advertisers. Subscription revenue is
> only a small percentage of their total revenue stream.
Most *print* publications, I assume you're referring to here. And
then of course the amount of advertising-to-editorial has a bearing
on credibility and audience (some publications exist because
people want to see the ads; some publications I am wary of
because of the obvious relationship between advertising and
advertorial). I suspect that people will be more wary of the Web as
we start to see more links (overt or covert) between content and
vested interests.
> As publications move online and reduce or eliminate their production and
> distribution costs associated with moving pieces of paper around, they
> will stop charging for a subscription and rely entirely on advertising.
The hard thing is to push the traditional advertisers into the
electronic medium if they have had little or no experience of it.
There's a whole new education needed just to get them to think
about it, and it becomes very difficult when they themselves have
no Web presence.
It also means you have to think very hard about the advertising
support mechanisms you have in place on your site to provide
them with the traffic analysis on which they will make their
purchasing decisions.
And then there's the big debate sabout whether CPM is an
appropriate mechanism to use, how advertising metrics differ online
to the more traditional avenues etc.
> This is not bad news for small publications, since web production costs
> are a small fraction of what they now pay to print and mail out their
> product. In fact, small publications and online-only publications will
> flourish.
So long as they find a way to avoid the huge pitfall of ongoing
maintenance which can be very time-consuming and costly. As
publishers ourselves, we appreciate the relative low costs of the
Web as a medium (particularly in reproducing colour), but as Web
people we also recognise the huge potential for spending vast
amounts of time (=dollars) on Web sites that are not pulling the
money in.
We did find that the time taken to get something online for the NZ
Science Monthly was causing us real hassles, even when we were
doing a simple single-page precis of the print publication's
contents. Consequently it was always bottom of the list and behind
the times.
That's how we started to investigate automating print-to-Web
publication managment, purely as a defensive manuevre on our
part. By the time we realised it was a problem for lots of people
(with commercial potential :-), we were well on the way to building
TurboPress.
Ironically, the smaller publications are the ones with the greatest
needs for a system that will handle as much automatically as
possible, yet they are also the ones with the least economic
underpinning and willingness to spend now to save in the long
term. (After all , we can't *all* afford to throw the millions at Web
development that the big publishers do annually -- much and all as
we might like to.)
At least TurboPress has meant that we can now put an entire
issue online with all indexing, linking, structure, navigation etc done
automatically in 40 minutes flat! It also makes things a lot easier
as an editor having access to a fast full text search of nine year's of
publishing (makes answering queries about some article we ran
three years ago a lot easier to track down).
We don't provide extra online content (although that seems to be
the best way to attract and maintain online readership), but we do
make the whole site available to subscribers without any extra
charges (and there's on online sub only available too). We've found
running an automatically managed, rotating, or keyword-related set
of ads in a top of page banner works well for us, particularly when
sold as an added value to print advertising or sponsorship. At least
in the science and technology area you've got good odds that
advertisers ahve substantial Web sites.
An example of such is a site my wife and I run,
> http://www.women-connect-asia.com/. We have one sponsor and although the
> amount is quite modest, it's enough to make the site feasible. Of course,
> we're looking for more :>)
Yeah, tell me about it :-) I have stacks and stacks of printouts on
the publishing world and the Web. Everyone's still looking for
suitable models.
Cheers,
Vicki
=============================================================================
South Pacific Information Services Ltd, Box 19-760, Christchurch, New Zealand
[EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.spis.co.nz
Tel: +64-3-384-5137 * Fax: +64-3-384-5138
TurboPress Print-to-Web publishing automation * http://www.TurboPress.com
<<< Web design, development and hosting * http://www.spis.co.nz >>>
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