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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Digital Boxscores Preview: Science, Celebs Lead ’09 Growth
Friday, May 22, 2009
Steve Smith

A number of consumer magazine brands continued to gain traction online in the past year, as min will report next week in its exclusive Digital Media Boxscores data. Comparing March 2009 to March 2008 page views and unique users, it appears that the relaunch initiatives from Health.com, RD.com, DiscoverMagazine.com and OKMagazine.com succeeded in registering high double-digit growth in the past year. Some brands

redoubled their online efforts and launched new strategies that significantly expanded their reach. Bonnier’s Parenting.com, Source Interlink’s Motorcyclist.com, Wenner’s UsMagazine.com and Condé Nast Digital’s Allure.com all experienced triple-digit hikes in unique users over the past year.

Scientific American’s SciAm.com was among a trio of science-related information titles that fared especially well in the past year. Its success in growing audience to 1.8 million in March is a good example of throwing the levers that the Internet makes available. According to Mike Kelly, online marketing manager, the site did an SEO audit in April and put its optimization strategy in place by the summer, leading to an 86% rise in search referrals and a record number of referrals in February and March of this year. The site clearly has been effective in converting the search hits into brand loyalists, as typed and bookmarked referrals rose 52% in the past year. Likewise social news referrals jumped 40% and external site referrals rose 138%. Kelly says that SciAm launched a social media strategy in late 2008 that optimized the sharing tools and increased visibility on Facebook and Twitter. As a result, the site’s content is being more widely distributed by the social media eco-system and paying dividends in traffic and audience growth.

Distribution, distribution, distribution seem to be the three lessons for major magazine brands online. To wit: min’s boxscores show that Glamour.com quintupled traffic and audience in the past year. According to Condé Nast Digital, this was all about the partnerships. Syndication into MSN, Yahoo and AOL all kicked in over the past year, supercharging traffic.

For the complete raw numbers on year-over-year site growth for over 100 magazine brands, see next week’s issue of min.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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