idio Platform

Last night, whilst the Association of Online Publishers celebrated their awards evening, John Menzies Digital (a digital replica magazine stand) closed up shop and admitted it had overestimated the demand for digital replica magazines. John Menzies was offering a similar service to Zinio, basically digitising print versions from 11 major publishers, and then selling subscriptions to the individual titles.

As we have noted previously, there are several issues with the basic page-turn replicas of magazines, and it seems these proved too much for John Menzies to cope with. It’s a real pity for all involved, but it underlines the fact that simply converting print versions for online viewing does not entice the reader to pay for subscriptions.

Paidcontent.org notes that MD Sarah Clegg “made the startling admission that no ad team from any publisher had shown an interest in digital editions.” The real trouble is that that shouldn’t be a startling admission. Firstly, selling print ads into a digital format crosses two media-buying budget holders (online and print) – neither of which are willing to pay for a campaign that is really beyond their remit. Also, from what I am hearing, publishers’ sales teams are already swamped with inventory that they are presenting to clients, and another differentiated option just confuses the process. The only company I hear of doing this is Ceros – who seem to be able to create decent formats and find the right budgets (using the print approach of insertion fees rather than CPMs). The other approach, which we are doing very effectively, is to insert premium online-native advertising formats into a version of the content which has been completely (and automatically) repurposed for web browsing.

I hear that several of the digital magazine providers have interesting developments in the works, so hopefully they will avoid the same fate as John Menzies.