Web Survival Guidelines for small magazines

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 2000 by Cheryl Woodard

Like any good entrepreneur in an experimental situation, Atwood pays close attention to each of his sites, changing direction if a given idea doesn't pan out and speeding up when the news looks good. For example, by monitoring e-mail and online book sales, Atwood learned that the Air Age sites bring in a younger audience than the company's print publications, especially for the model car title. So he advanced his plans to publish new books about model cars and delayed titles on less popular topics. Then he institutionalized the creation of Web content and expanded the Web staff from one to four. He bought affordable and easy-to-use digital video cameras and created 15-second videos of models-in-motion. Later, as bandwidth increases, the plan is to create longer videos.

Atwood is also investing in chat-room technologies, so visitors can have live conversations with experts in their niches. "I'm talking about the senior engineers from Boeing and Northrop-Grumman who designed the airplanes," Atwood says. "These guys are heroes to both our modelers and full-scale aviation buffs. We can monitor all of that chat-room activity. We never had this kind of instant feedback before."

Regarding effectiveness, Atwood says that, "Although we are early in our efforts, we are getting good results." Total traffic is up by 50 percent across the company's sites over the past six months. While he declined to state actual traffic numbers for the Air Age sites, Atwood says that by combining strong content with maximum search-engine visibility, an established enthusiast magazine's site can generate up to 10,000 unique users per day. Some of the big dot.com companies that would not even talk to him a year ago have recently come back looking for partnership deals. "Now we've got some bargaining power when we sit down to negotiate with these guys," Atwood says.

Leverage assets without increasing costs

Web space is lot cheaper than printed pages. Consequently, the cost of adding a story or photograph is practically zero. Many smaller publishers are using that lower-cost Web space to great advantage.

Air Age, for example, got a 25 percent increase in sales at its online bookstore by adding just one extra page per book, enough to post a photograph, a paragraph of text and a table of contents for each book. The store offers 30-plus titles. It also offers more than 300 model-airplane plans for sale at the store. And the payoff from a virtual bookstore can be significant. Says Atwood, "An e-commerce store that sells subscriptions, books and ancillaries can be expected to generate between $15,000 to $25,000 a month."

Vermont Life, meanwhile, creates enhanced Web ads for advertisers who also buy space in the print magazine. "People who are running black-and-white or two-color sixth-page ads in our print version can get a whole Web page, in full color, for very little cost on our part and a lot more impact on theirs," says publisher Jackson. Advertisers pay about $4,000 per year to run a sixth-page ad in all four quarterly issues of the print magazine.