Eye On Digital Media: Digimags Keep Plugging

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Steve Smith

Don't Stop Believing: Digimags Keep Plugging

The digital magazine is a platform that has been in a persistent state of becoming for a number of years. And many publishers ask me this persistent question:

Who needs, let alone uses, a downloadable facsimile of their print product anyway?

I don't have a ready answer, but I got something close to one from Zinio president Rich Maggiotto when we discussed his digimag pioneering company's new customized marketing initiative for publisher partners. "Some publishers now see up to 10% of their circulation coming from digital," he says. "Close to 2 million issues are downloaded a month" from Zinio's library, which includes Playboy and key titles from Hachette Filipacchi Media, Rodale, and Ziff-Davis.

Financial information is the lead category of content for the platform, with men, sports, and health also popular. Maggiotto says that while the natural early adopter demo for digimags once skewed severely male (e.g., Playboy), in the last two years women's titles have come on board.

Zinio's newly announced Publisher Growth Services Group is designed to move the digimag needle by customizing programs that bundle and market digital product. In the past, Zinio has co-marketed packages that put magazine archives on CD-ROM or USB drives as premium value adds. The new group is working with Woman's Day to design a branded online newsstand for its special issues on renovations and remodeling.

For Men's Health, Zinio is helping in a banner ad campaign to promote the availability of digital editions. And visibility is the name of the game for this ever-hopeful format. A few bad actors have gotten into the game in recent years offering a quick and easy path to porting simple print facsimiles online. "That doesn't work," says Maggiotto. "That is a half solution. You need a whole marketing component attached to figure out ways to promote it and let the audience know it exists."

Selling the digimag format to users who already have broadband access to increasingly sophisticated Web 2.0 sites may get harder rather than easier, but Maggiotto remains bullish on the persistent appeal of the print experience and his company's ability to push its content across all the emerging channels, from Web to downloads to mobile. Expect an update of the Zinio platform later this year.

To my mind the best indication that digital magazines may finally be finding a niche is the international appeal; that is, those who don't have easy access to print versions. "About half of our audience is coming from overseas," he says. "We see there is a major global play."

Steve Smith (POPEYESMITH@COMCAST.NET) is Digital Media editor for min/min's b2b, which includes weekly columns and the biweekly min's Digital Media Report e-letter (complimentary to min subscribers). Smith also writes the Mobile Media Report for Access Intelligence, LLC's biweekly Wireless Business Forecast.

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