After almost three centuries in our hands and in our hearts, the concept of a magazine has grown stagnant. This might seem like a foolhardy statement, given that it appears in print, but the introduction of colour and photographs aside, there is little of major significance the magazine can offer us now that it couldn’t 300-odd years ago.
That’s not to say that the magazine does not remain as popular as ever, or indeed that there is anything significantly wrong with it as a product, but it’s a simple truth that there is only so much you can do with ink on paper, which is why everyone, from national newspaper to magazine publishers, is devoting increasing resources to online publishing.
Even so, there is a suspicion that magazine publishers have yet to find the best means of delivering online to their target audiences. Websites have a tendency to be overwhelming, and are often more confusing to browse than their printed counterparts. In light of this, recent launches from Dennis Publishing and NatMags have looked to combine the best of the online and offline mediums to find a
unified product for the future.
Online-only
On 1 November last year, Dennis Publishing launched Monkey, the latest addition to the raft of UK men’s weekly magazines. So what? Well, unlike the two market leaders, IPC’s Nuts and Emap’s Zoo, Monkey is online-only. “To be honest, we missed the boat a bit on the print weeklies,” says Ben Raworth, business development director at Dennis. “And it’s relatively cheap and easy to launch an e-zine – Monkey took six months from development to launch – whereas it’s expensive and time-consuming to launch print.”
The decision to launch online-only was also motivated by the sense that the traditional magazine format had grown stale, and that there was a niche to be exploited by anyone who could find a way to combine the rich format of the web with the familiar feel of a printed magazine. It was a feeling that London-based pre-media firm Fresh Media Group (FMG) had already picked up on, and which had led to the creation of its Ceros software.
Ceros aims to take some of the features of the printed magazine format, such as its look, and transpose them to an online product. From a user’s perspective, it has a very polished feel and it is not surprising to learn that FMG invested several years’ worth of research into its development. “It was built with two key drivers in mind – ease of use to ensure people return to it and revenue generation for the content owner,” says FMG group marketing manager Dominic Duffy. No sooner than Ceros was launched in February 2006 and Dennis was already knocking on FMG’s North-London door.
“We had been playing around with the [e-zine] format for about two years,” says Raworth. “Back then it was clunky, slow and incapable of delivering the content satisfactorily, so we had to wait for the technology to catch up.”
Despite Ceros already having advanced to Version 1.6, the project Dennis had in mind (which later became Monkey) required a higher level of media capabilities than even Ceros 1.6 could provide. “While we had greater rich media support in the development plan for the product, its inclusion was too far away for Dennis to launch Monkey on schedule. As a result, we accelerated the development of rich media support and, in doing so, completely re-wrote the processing and page display mechanism,” says Duffy.
Four months later, Ceros 1.7.1 was born. Combining the look of a printed magazine, from its layout to the manner in which the pages turn, with internet-style content, including embedded video, a zoom function and links to other web pages, Ceros had caught up with Dennis’ aspirations.
Although Dennis and FMG were both singing from the same hymn sheet, convincing advertisers to part with their cash was not that simple. “Dennis took a brave step with Monkey. Not only did it launch a completely new brand, but a new publishing model as well,” says Duffy. “From an advertising perspective, it was completely unproven.”
Storming ahead
The proof came in timely fashion at this year’s Publishing Expo, where Monkey’s first ABC Electronic circulation figures were announced. It had more than doubled its pre-launch target of 100,000 unique users in its first ABC Electronic circulation figures and actually trumped Emap’s Zoo, by a few thousand, to claim the number two spot behind IPC’s Nuts. “Clearly, this has had the desired affect,” says Duffy. “We had several agencies come onto our PubExpo stand to ask how they should supply content to us.”
At the same time, NatMags revealed that it was working on Project Celia (now known as Jellyfish), an online-only, weekly fashion and entertainment magazine aimed at teenage girls, again using FMG’s Ceros software. Rumours are that Emap also has something in development with FMG, and Duffy has revealed that there will be at least one more Ceros-powered launch later this year.
Meanwhile, the technology that could turn an online-only e-zine into something tangible is fast approaching. Ultra-thin flexible screens capable of displaying changing text and images, of the sort seen in Hollywood film Minority Report, are not that far away. Russ Wilcox, chief executive of E Ink Corp, says: “The movie [Minority Report] is set in 2054, but I think you’ll probably really see that around 2015.”
Coupled with city-wide Wi-Fi, this technology could lead to the printed magazine – together with newspapers – being replaced by an altogether electronic medium.
So is this a turning point for printed magazine publishing? Are we staring down the barrel of an online future? Duffy doesn’t think so. “In reality, I think the impact will be minimal. Clearly, the interactive nature of the online-only titles we are seeing emerge means they simply could not exist in print. Consequently, their existence has no real impact on print.”
Andrew Pindar, chairman of print and online provider Pindar, believes that both print and online will continue to exist alongside each other.
“To me, that’s just the way that the world will be. The film didn’t kill the book, video didn’t kill the radio star, and online delivery of information, though inexorable, does not necessarily spell the end of the printed word.”
Naturally, the last word will be with the publishers. At the end of the day, it’s their content and it’s up to them how they want it delivered. Encouragingly for the print industry, publishers continue to invest significant amounts of money in new print ventures, such as the £18m IPC spent on its latest new-launch, Look.
Jan Adcock, NatMags’ Cosmopolitan group publishing director, makes the distinction between content and delivery, stressing that Jellyfish is not a standalone product. “Jellyfish is part of a three-pronged strategy for CosmoGirl!, which encompasses the print magazine and the website cosmogirl.co.uk.”
Duffy agrees: “I think what we are seeing now is simply recognition among publishers that where they have content, they have value. Ceros represents a new and compelling platform from which to publish that valued content.”
Like it or loathe it, The Spectator looks set to continue its record run and, who knows, maybe one day it will be joined by Monkey as the oldest continuously-published online magazine.
MOBIZINE
Although it is the most obvious challenger, online does not represent the only alternative channel
to print. Content providers are currently faced with a proliferation of media with which to
target consumers.
Advances in mobile phone technology, which have come thick and fast in recent years, have led to their development from mere communication devices to mobile media platforms.
Refresh Mobile has taken advantage of this fact in its development of the Mobizine. Mobizines are free ‘snack-sized’ mobile phone publications, designed to boost sales of their printed partners. Users are not charged for the mini-magazines, which are instead paid for through advertising.
Each Mobizine is double compressed, which saves on storage space and expensive data transfer charges. Refresh Mobile uses both Flash Lite and Java interfaces to pull together word, picture and sound files, which are then displayed as a multimedia page on the mobile phone.
Magazine publishers have been quick to reap the benefits of delivering mobile content and Refresh Media’s client list includes such publishing giants as IPC Media, Dennis, Future, Time Out and Condé Nast, which has collaborated with Refresh Mobile to make mobile versions of GQ and Glamour.
Condé Nast interactive editor-in-chief Abigail Chisman says: “What we’re doing with Refresh represents the next step in presenting our brands to a wider audience in a dynamic environment.”
In addition to print and online companies, Refresh reports that it has also worked with TV channels and record labels in its quest to create mobile magazines.
Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 all support Mobizines.
