It’s 6 p.m. on a typical Monday and my office e-mail box has logged in 110 e-mails today. As is true of most workdays, about 20 percent of them were from people or businesses I knew or people or products I want to know. The rest were solicitations or introductions from those who shall be know as the “deleted mob.”

I’m not complaining, mind you . . . I can tie a chunk of my own compensation to efficient and targeted e-mail as can most modern day publishers. We live by the marketer who wants to use our qualified readers to target, often in some sort of adjacency to content. But does anyone else think it’s just gotten out of hand?

Here are just a few of the things that some publishers are doing today that re More...

The IAB released its Internet Advertising Revenue Report yesterday, which details full-year 2011 results and was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. As it has for the last ten years, except for a slight dip in 2009, annual revenue easily beat the previous year—hitting $31.7 billion in 2011, a 22 percent increase over 2010 and an all-time high.

In the last decade, revenues have shot up $25.7 billion at 20.3 percent CAGR. Even so, mobile got recognition as a format that came into its own in 2011, jumping 149 percent to $1.6 billion for the year. 2011 also marked the first year in the report that mobile was broken out as a standa More...

Bring your own device (BYOD) is one of those big changes currently sweeping through the tech sector. Instead of the new employee being handed an aging laptop much abused by the three previous employees, the newbie is being told to use whatever device they want and the IT staff will do the work of connecting the BYOD to the corporate network. Would that it be that easy, but the idea is powerful: the newbie gets to use his or her favorite device, the company doesn't have to keep shuffling around dinosaurs and that agonizingly embarrassing moment when you have to present your media company's hot new cutting edge capabilities on a laptop from the past decade is avoided.

But for b-to-b firms, as well as just about all media companies More...

On Wall Street, it is often said that stocks must climb a “wall of worry” before they can reach new and sustainable highs. Unemployment, escalating interest rates, a poor housing market and deficit spending – these represent just a few of the worries in today’s investor landscape. But if history is any guide, the next bull market is right around the corner as investors scale the wall and reach new levels of value.

The magazine industry today faces its own wall of worry. The traditional world of print is in a slow but steady decline and advertising dollars continue to migrate from print magazines to television, web, social media and other non-traditional channels. However, just like Wall Street, the publishing industry ha More...

In the world of publishing, it is expected that sales teams are rewarded for performance with commission; but for a long time, there was no opportunity for editors to earn outside of their base pay. “Church” may be considered holier, but “state” tended to be greener.

That is, until now. Recently, a few publishers began to compensate their editors based on performance. Performance is a relative term in this case: two publishers implementing this model chose difference audience indicators as the determiner of top editorial performers. Forbes’ chief product officer Lewis DVorkin expanded on how his company is rewarding writers at FOLIO:’s March Roundtable.

“We had More...

“E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial” was playing at the movies, Michael Jackson had just released “Thriller,” the average cost of a home was $82,000 and gas was 91 cents a gallon. It was 1982. TIME declared the computer its “Man of the Year” and CRN published its first issue under the name Computer Retail News.

For three decades, CRN has been reporting on technology news, and these advancements have certainly forced publishing–an industry that had seen few substantive changes in the prior 200 years—to rapidly adapt to new platforms, new mediums and new business models.

Thirty years ago, reporters and editors were using a fluorescent-green terminal called Atex to file stories. Today rep More...

For 35 years—mostly living in Manhattan—I have owned a car. This past weekend I gave up my car at lease-end and did not replace it. I realized that in four years I hadn’t driven 9,000 miles and the cost and annoyance of owning was not worth it. I could rent when needed.

I decided to use the cathartic experience to think of what else I don’t need (another glass of wine…well…). Could I give up magazines? I’m a magazine junky (I've had a New Yorker sub since 12). I counted. I get 28, mostly monthlies, meaning likely 300 issues in my mailbox each year. It’s staggering and impossible to get through.

Then I thought about my day and what I do. My i More...

There’s been a lot of chatter on the Web this past week about the impact the new iPad (with its retina display and four times the pixels) might have on digital publications like those created on Mag+ or Adobe DPS, which render most of the content as images to present a pixel-perfect design experience, since this approach creates “large” files.

There’s no question that higher resolution images take more space, but in tests with our plug-ins, we’re seeing closer to a 2x or less increase. And since most of our issues are 150-200mb, we’re only talking about retina issues of around 300-400mb— More...

Last fall, at the American Business Media’s Executive Forum, I joined IDG Enterprise CCO John Gallant and SourceMedia EVP/CCO David Longobardi on stage for a panel about the future of content and editorial and, much to my surprise, my introduction of the “brandividual” concept turned into a lightning rod for subsequent hallway conversation (see FOLIO:'s blog on the topic here).

When was the last time you saw a billboard for one of your local news programs? Have you ever stopped to think about how those billboards essentially subjugate the brand of the station to the brand of the news team? That’s because the most important currency that More...

In between last week’s DMA Circulation Marketing Day and the upcoming MPA Digital: Swipe conference on March 20, I thought it may be appropriate to reflect on a pattern forming in the magazine publishing industry. It doesn’t require expert sleuthing skills to deduce how much the industry has changed over the past year; a massive shift in focus is evident.

Digital used to occupy a session or two at any given conference, though the open Q&A’s at the end of panel discussions showed this is where audience concerns really lie. In 2012, by hosting and participating in a pletho More...

Creating and serving digital content across multiple devices typically requires a somewhat grueling conversation with your IT team. Unfortunately, I’ve been on the serving and receiving side of those painful discussions that focus on strained resources, support and the infamous “approved project list,” but they are quickly becoming a thing of the past. New products have emerged into the marketplace that will have your IT team singing your praises; not because it’s one more thing they need to help you build and support, but because it’s one less thing they need to worry about.

Over the past year, SaaS based solutions have been introduced into the marketplace and are designed to work seamlessly with the products your cr More...

For our March issue cover story, we convened a Folio: Roundtable to deliberate on the current state and future of content. It’s a topic that can easily get overlooked while we get distracted by the various technologies and platforms that enable its production and distribution. Content is not the same old product we’ve been producing anymore. In no particular order, here’s why:

1. New Access Dynamics
Where our content gets delivered to and consumed from has not only enabled greater access, it has changed the way it’s produced, demanding a new skill set from its creators. We don’t simply pour identical content from one platform to another.

2. More...