New low-cost revenue channels
I’ve been MIA for a while but am slowing shifting gears and getting back into action. I haven’t yet had time to chew over the significance of these news but I wanted to capture these thoughts before I forget them.
Print off-shoots of popular digital properties become the new low-cost revenue channel for publishers:
A few years ago the conversations in publishing buzzed around creating and optimizing web properties for print magazines. While this is still a primary focus, Meredith and Hearst have taken to using print offshoots to market their web properties. Case in point: magazines for Delish.com MixingBowl.com and Realbeauty.com
The content on mixingbowl.com and realbeauty.com is largely user-generated and there is some amount of gratification and reward to a community than seeing their recipe in print. Popular blogs (think the sartorialist, chocolateandzucchini.com etc) have resulted into books, so its only natural that popular web properties have their own print versions. But where do we go from here ?
Digital is so fragmented that new devices and platforms are constantly changing the dynamic between the content producers and the readers. I am curious to see how the content producers innovate to serve up this new audience.
Tying this post to my previous post about the iPad – instead of a print version of the mixingbowl or delish – would an iPad application for recipes be more useful than a print magazine ? Just a thought.