10 Leading—Edge Innovators

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 2000 by Jane E. Zarem

On the revenue front, online subscription generation for Red Herring "is huge," says Needleman, but he won't disclose numbers. He does say, however, that "an increasingly large percentage" of subscriptions are coming from the Web-- "which is, by far, the most efficient and effective magazine subscription generator that we have."

www.billboard.com

Reaching Out to Consumers

Perhaps the most impressive feature of billboard.com is its ability to attract a "totally additional audience" from that of Billboard, says John Lerner, vice president of operations at VNUE-Media, a unit of VNU-USA, based in New York. "We've not forgotten our business reader, for whom we supply searchable archives and twice-daily breaking news, but we're also creating something unique for consumers, who can experience the expertise of Billboard--past and present."

Features that are helping billboard.com broaden its appeal beyond its core trade audience include: searchable music charts, with 30-second sound bites; a database of all Billboard reviews for the last 30 years; a weekly radio show broadcast over the Web; a daily video of music news and chat, where music fans can pose questions to "chart guru" Fred Bronson. Traffic on the site currently exceeds 10 million page views per month--significantly higher than the record industry alone could produce--and is increasing consistently month to month. An international audience is being courted with recently added links to Billboard en Espa[tilde{n}]ol and Billboard Brasil. And more than 50,000 individuals have signed up to receive a daily e-mail newsletter from billboard.com.

A "fair amount" of subscriptions to Billboard magazine are sold online, and revenue from ad sponsorships is "substantial and steadily increasing," says Lerner. "We've seen a 100 percent increase in online ad revenues in a year," he says. "We also license our content to other sites, which is good revenue for us and gets our brand in front of people."

Additionally, Billboard Music Search, a pay-per-view search engine, is a "solid revenue producer," says Lerner. "We are the industry resource, and no one else in the world has our depth of information." The online archives are enhanced by sources from the Northern Light Special Collection research library and from music Web sites around the world. "Bringing in articles from other publishers makes it a more useful tool for the user," Lerner adds.

Billboard is growing tremendously because of billboard.com," says Lerner. "It's exciting to see the numbers."

www.enr.com

Lists, Trade Shows, Job Fairs

Enr.com's most heavily trafficked sections are career opportunities, directories, and news stories, says Judy Schriener, managing online editor and Web producer for McGraw-Hill's Construction Information Group, New York. These are all useful tools for generating repeat visitors, she says. Since enr.com added news to its site in November 1998, for instance, traffic has increased five-fold to about 300,000 user sessions per month. And a sponsored e-mail newsletter, launched in February and published weekly, has grown to 11,000 subscribers.