David Nussbaum

We see it as being totally integrated. That feeds into the whole community structure. F+W serves 15 “passion” markets. Previously, we were serving these markets with four different groups (books, interactive, magazines, events) that worked independently of the other verticals. Today, we’ve reorganized by communities rather than channel. We’ve established a new position—community leader—which determines the best ways to serve the market for all things from data to media. There is no more prejudice for people to say, ‘I’m in the magazine group, I’ve got to figure out how to sell more print,’ but rather we need to figure out best ways to serve our consumer base.

Advertising is not a large piece of our revenue pie. Most of our revenues come from book, subscription  and e-commerce sales. Fourth is print advertising. Our prime motivator is not to sell more advertising, although we always want to do that. We want to find new ways to sell content effectively.

We’ve invested seven figures in digitization of our content. That’s roughly a three-year project and our goal is to digitize about 3,000 books and magazines. We’ve also put a six-figure investment into the CMS and hired 25 or so new people in the digital media arena—everything from online project managers to developers to content people.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE

Post Comment / Discuss This Story - Info/Rules