Canadian Digital Magazine Readers up 56% from 2013

Magazines Canada reports strong growth of digital magazine penetration in Canada.  In fact 10% of all readers in Canada now read digital magazines! 


According to Print Measurement Bureau's Fall 2014 report - nearly 10% of Canadians age 12+ reported reading a digital magazine in the past three months, up 56% from 6.1% reported in the Fall 2013 study.  Some other key findings:

App Newsstands growing - Apple still has significant lead

A new Digital Dashboard released by Next Steps Marketing measures the rapid growth of Magazine Apps in the various newsstands.  While growth is continuing, Apple continues to dwarf the others.  Here is an overview of their most recent findings:

Buyer's Guide: How to Choose the Right Digital Magazine, CMS & DAM Vendor

I recently ran across a well thought out article for publishers considering digital strategies for their magazine. 


The entire article can be found here.


A key component of the article posed some key questions that should be asked :


Questions for Vendors
When selecting a vendor, publishers should always ask the basic business questions, of course. Pricing, customer service, and reliability are essential to any purchase decision. However, for digital publishing and content management providers, there are some specific matters to address:

• Does the digital content display to a typical subscriber's satisfaction on multiple devices, operating systems, and screen sizes?
• Is the content viewable in text form -- especially on smaller devices? 
• How easy is it to add rich media, such as video or animation?
• Does the vendor make it easy to use a device's built-in features, like a camera, or social media venues? 
• Does the vendor make it easy to discover and purchase the digital edition or content?
• Does the digital content service provide new opportunities and benefits for advertisers or sponsors?
• Does the vendor provide a path to responsive design publishing on multiple platforms?
• Does the vendor's system provide ample measurement of reader activities and responses -- to both editorial and advertising content?
• Does the vendor's system leverage the publisher's existing production skills and capital investments?
• Does the underlying CMS or DAM provide a high level of automation, or otherwise lower the overall labor and capital costs of producing digital content?

Decisions, Decisions
Making a digital content move should not be done lightly -- or simply because others are doing it. If at all possible, the process for creating and managing digital content should leverage existing skills and capital investments on the print side -- especially if print is still the primary channel for subscribers and advertisers. However, since the content experience on tablets and smartphones is often radically different from print, new skills and technologies will be required.
Every magazine has a unique base of subscribers and advertisers -- with a knowable relationship to emerging technology. When selecting digital publishing vendor partners, be sure to select those that will best help you be there at the right time for your audience.

Why We Don't Measure Unique Visitors To our Digital Magazines

We often get asked by clients (and potential clients) who use our real-time Reporting system - where are our Unique Visitor Reports?  At Advanced Publishing, we do continually try to improve our analytics by measuring and reporting key metrics that help drive our publishers businesses -- and give a true picture of reader engagement with their digital magazines. 

But...we don't measure Unique Visitors.   We feel this data point is inaccurate and misleading -- and getting more so each day with multiple device use.  Each reader often starts the magazine on their desktop browser, switches to Safari on their iPad, and then completed the issue on Chrome on their Android phone.  The only way currently to capture a visitor is via a browser session.  So in this case, this would be counted as 3 unique visitors.

In addition as we often point out, many people regularly delete cookies. A cookie is dropped the first time a user hits a site (ie an issue in our case).  If they return on the same browser, a check would be made for the cookie - if it exists, that user would not be counted as a new "unique".  If a reader clears their cookies weekly, for example, and then return to the issue -- they would be counted as a new unique visitor.

The exception to this does exist -- where we can measure unique readers is via a user login process.  For those publications that require a sign in each time for viewing - we ARE able to capture an accurate measurement of unique accesses and we do report that metric in our Subscriber Accesses reports. This measures only the first access of a reader for that period.  In that case that metric would be a true representation of unique visitors.

I found a great post on this very topic - that goes beyond unique visits and discusses other digital measurement metrics.  One thing for sure is that digital advertising measurement is in its infancy and evolving rapidly.  We continue to strive to measure what makes the most sense and gives a true picture (as best we can) of reader engagement.

Here is a link to that article http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca  called --Digital publishing metrics: What’s real?

60th Jesse H. Neal Awards - Notable Client Finalists

It is with great pleasure that we congratulate a few of our clients for making the list of finalists for this years Association of Business Information and Media (ABM) Awards:


American Hospital Association - Hospital & Health Networks


Best Subject-Related Series
http://www.abmassociation.com/abm/2014_02BDiabetesMan.asp


Best Single Issue of a Magazine - March 2013
http://www.abmassociation.com/abm/2014_09BMarch12Iss20.asp




Hearst Business Media - MOTOR Magazine


Best Technical Content - TPMS Sensors Reach Retirement Age
http://www.abmassociation.com/abm/2014_07ATPMSSensors.asp


Best of Luck to all finalists!!

iTunes Newsstand iPad model starting to pay off for magazine industry

Despite some recent bad news about the benefit of having magazine Apps on the Apps stores, this article points out some strong growth trends for magazines in 2014. Stay tuned to Advanced Publishing for more news about our New Newsstand Ready iPad App Solution soon to be announced!
http://www.technologytell.com/apple/128850/itunes-newsstand-ipad-model-starting-to-pay-off-for-magazine-industry/