When working with publishers new to digital magazines, one of the first questions we hear is, “How is a digital magazine different from my website?” This is a great question. In today’s age, we don’t have extraneous budgets or time to produce multiple products that do the same thing.
Rather than discuss product features, though, let’s focus on how readers treat the two entities differently, for it’s the unique reader behavior that really gives publishers additional property to market to advertisers.
Since we started producing digital magazines in 2003, we’ve come to form these “Three Rules of Digital Magazines,” and have yet to have a customer that they haven’t proven true for.
Rule 1: You will have more visitors on your website than your digital magazine.
Think about it: If I send you a link and say you have to read this, you’ll probably click on it. If I drop a magazine on your desk and say the same thing, you likely will put it aside until you have time. As a society, we’ve already conditioned ourselves to click in and out of websites quickly, but we view all magazines – not just print ones – as something requiring more time. And time is something we have less of today.
Your move: If you’ve got an advertiser only concerned about page views, steer them to your website. You’ll have more there.
Rule 2: You will have longer engagement times inside your digital magazine.
The average website visitor across all categories stays about one minute. Last month, the average Nxtbook reader stayed inside the digital magazine nearly seven minutes. What’s more: the number four most read Nxtbook had an average engagement time of fifteen minutes.
Your move: Savvy advertisers are looking to engage with readers. Long engagement times make the digital magazine an ideal vehicle to position to those sponsors who want to make sure their messages are seen for longer periods of time.
Rule 3: You will have significantly higher click-through rates inside your digital magazine.
Advertisers tend to ask about page views, but that’s not really what they want. They want leads and leads come from clicks. Rules One & Two show that digital magazine readers are more highly engaged than website visitors and they demonstrate this time and time again with click-through rates that are typically four to six times that of our publishers’ websites.
Your move: If your advertiser is selling high volume products and treasures leads, the digital magazine may be a better buy for them. In addition, the significantly higher click-through rate can often negate the lower page views of the digital magazine as well.
Understanding the difference between your digital magazine and website is the first step in helping to position these two products in your portfolio. Properly understood, they represent unique buying opportunities for your advertisers and additional property for your ad sales team to market.
What it means for the Hispanic Market
It's also quite possible that the three rules of digital magazines apply even more to the Hispanic market. During the same period that all Nxtbooks had an engagement time of seven minutes, Nxtbooks produced for the Hispanic market had an engagement time of eight minutes and forty three seconds. In addition, visitors inside these books read an average of twenty percent more pages. While it's possible magazines for Hispanic market might simply be longer, the increased engagement times should be considered a strong factor in the viability of this product to the marketplace.
Marcus Grimm is the Marketing Director for Nxtbook Media, a proud members of the Inc. 500/5000.