10 Leading—Edge Innovators

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

Nationalgeographic.com has partnered with a service provider to create Map Machine, a dynamic mapping engine. "We tell you all about the place--down to driving directions," Holmes explains. National Geographic's thematically layered database of maps dovetails with datasets from government agencies and from Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., the Redlands, California-based software company that specializes in mapping and GIS (geographic information systems) software. Users can do comparative analyses of ecoregions, for instance, or the population density of various locations. And if there's a political change in the world, little patches can be created, printed out, and pasted onto pages in a print atlas. "It keeps information dissemination fun, interesting, and participatory," Holmes says.

Nationalgeographic.com is attracting a broad new audience. Statistics gathered a year ago indicate 95 percent of the memberships sold online were to individuals entirely new to the association.

"Even though that's an older figure, it's significant when you consider the exponential growth and its potential," says Holmes. "Also, a lot of what we're doing appeals to a younger audience than we typically see in National Geographic magazine, and nearly a third of current traffic comes from outside the U.S. That's very appealing to us."

www.siforkids.com

It's Just Cool, on the Web or in Print

"With a kids' magazine, you just let your imagination go," says Peter Kay, director of new media at Sports Illustrated for Kids. And whether the kids or the editors are having more fun is a toss up. Full of games, daily sports news, polls and quizzes, trivia, and "quick-hit stuff that kids love," 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds flock to siforkids.com at the rate of about 2.5 million page views per week.

Fantasy Leagues are particularly popular, with as many as 30,000 kids signing up for each two-week "season" of hockey, basketball, football, baseball, NASGAR racing, and other sports. Kids become coaches, field a team within a prescribed salary cap, and join a league. Stats of real athletes are tracked during the period, scores are tabulated, and winners are posted online. Leagues are formed among friends and families or for school, neighborhood, and church groups. "We're working closely on a strategy of conversion," explains Kay, "to interlink the magazine with the site. Features in the magazine raise awareness for the leagues and tell kids how to set them up. And we tell kids in the leagues to read the magazine to get filled in on the sport."

The January 2000 cover of the magazine exemplifies this strategy. Kids saw wide receiver Randy Moss and were asked to fill out a questionnaire in the magazine, indicating what they thought the wide receiver of the future would be like. Suggestions (laser eyes, extend-o arm,) were integrated into a character for the magazine cover and animated online as a short cartoon. "Online, we said this was generated from your ideas--to see more, go to the January issue," says Kay. "In the magazine, they were heavily directed to the site. Cross-promotional efforts such as this stimulated a three-fold increase in fantasy league signups in the four-month period since January and doubled the number of teams fielded year-over-year.