FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

After last month's blog post on "bogus" magazine metrics, I got reactions ranging from "right on!" (Discover's newsstand consultant) to "why on Earth would you write a negative blog post about media planners?" (our ad sales team).

One of the more interesting responses came from Publishers Information Bureau President Wayne Eadie.  Wayne e-mailed me to expand on their use of rate card revenue (the metric I called "bogus") in addition to page counts:

We have surveyed agencies repeatedly as to what they would like to see reported, and every time they reply More...

The first quarter PIB ad page numbers painted a pretty bleak picture for the industry.  The revenue numbers told an equally sorry story for all but a few publications.  Among the top revenue gainers were Hallmark Magazine (up 53.5 percent in revenue) and Disney's Wondertime (8 percent).

What's that you say? Hallmark and Wondertime have both been shut down?  How could that be? It's because the PIB revenue numbers bear only a fleeting resembla More...

For Discover, online growth doubles as an operating bright spot (we now have approximately 1 million monthly unique visitors) and an all-consuming strategic concern (continuing to grow and monetize that traffic).

Based on my conversations at trade events, however, many publishers still struggle with the basic issue of getting content online in a way that is timely, efficient and interactive.  On top of that, the twin financial and publishing crises make it unlikely that anyone can round up the capital to do a 1999-style $5 million custom CMS development.

Enter the open source content management system.

FOLIO: cover More...

A typically brief and unscientific survey of magazine sites reveals a range of approaches to online games, from "blah" to spectacular.

Mimicking the success of big game sites like Pogo, many women's magazine sites include a set of generic, "casual" games—casino games, solitaire, crosswords, word scrambles, Sudoku, etc. These games are easily licensed from a number of providers. Ladies Home Journal (9.5 million monthly page views) and Reader's Digest (7 million monthly page views) use games as a lure to get More...

As part of my blog post last week about social bookmarking, I motivated myself to do some original reporting and e-mailed a few questions to Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis.com. Here are my questions and his (lightly edited) responses:

HD: What aggregators/sharing sites have the most traction in the marketplace?

TIM: I'm not sure that I am qualified to answer the question regarding sharing sites as it relates to aggregated sharing. Our focus is more of a distributed model. If you are referring to the social More...

Magazine Web site traffic (up 12 percent in Q1 according to the MPA) continues to be a bright spot in an otherwise rough year for publishers. Magazine sites are getting savvier about blogs, video and user-generated content (especially recipes).

In the last six months, however, the biggest traffic drivers here at Discover have been More...

I rarely rise in defense of Condé Nast. Wired is an especially nasty competitor of Discover, even though their science coverage is a small part of their tech culture package. The New Yorker also competes with us for ad pages.

You have to give them their due, though. From my perspective, they are by far the most effective spokespeople in the world for the power of magazines. Their editors are industry giants who straddle the worlds of media, fashion and entertainment. Do you ever hear Anna Winto More...

As noted in the Times earlier this week, Google users can now search deep into content sites without leaving Google, bypassing publishers' own search functions entirely. Publishers, contemplating the resulting page view migration from their sites to Google, have reacted negatively and some have asked Google to stop providing the extra search box underneath the results for their site.

Here how it works: I'm looking for an article I saw recently in Scientific American on particle physics so I google "More...

I'm on the record here as being in favor of hiring away other people's bloggers ("Coveting Thy Neighbor's Blogger") and there was an entertaining Internet dust-up this week about the next logical step: whether or not big media companies should buy big blogs.

The recap:

Jeff Segal on breakingviews.com thinks that media companies should steer clear of buying blogs right now because of some obvious risks. Blogs are tough to value, dependent on writers with More...

Quote from a media reporter at lunch last week: "Every magazine tells me great things about their Web strategy, then I go back to check their Nielsen traffic and they're too small to be measured."

If you believe the trade magazine box scores, online traffic was a rare Q4 bright spot for magazines last week in a month of mostly bad industry news (newsstand and advertising are down, paper prices keep going up.)

The fact remains however that unless you have More...

Once upon a time (maybe 24-36 months ago), publishers struggled with how to integrate online advertising sales with their existing print efforts.  Hire a new sales person who knew his or her way around the Internets?  Retain an outside rep firm with a set of relationships in the online agency world?  Train your print reps to sell the site?

Two to three years later, most publishers have a team of in-house sales reps that can sell integrated packages.  Why is this so?

 1. Online sales know-how has to be one of your core strengths. You'd be foolish to outsource it.

2. There are no more online-only sales people because there are no more print-only sales people. Your average 28 More...

I called my wife Tuesday from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

"Forget about building that addition on the house. We need the money for the 150-inch TV I just saw."

Understandably alarmed, she pointed out that we would probably still need the contractor to build a steel-reinforced wall in the man cave to mount my dream television.

As I snapped back to reality, I surveyed the vast expanse of the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Hundreds of exhibitors covered the floor, each showing More...