6 Lessons From The Failed Dot-Com Magazines

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July, 2001 by Jimmy Guterman

If two years ago you found yourself planning to spin off your magazine's Web site as a separate company and retire on the proceeds of the inevitable IPO, you now know to hold off on that trip around the world for a while. But you weren't really serious about ordering that yacht, were you? Well, some of the people who were working at Web-only magazines really did think they were going to learn how the idle rich got through the day.

As publications like the low-key Word have disappeared and the anything-but-low-key Salon are in deep financial trouble, it's become common for big shots at print magazines to say they knew the dot-com magazine castle was built on sand, and that readers and advertisers would ultimately remember that good old ink-and-paper was superior.

But such arrogant gloating isn't merely off base--it's potentially a recipe for disaster. Print magazines must continue to experiment with a wide variety of business and editorial models online. Even the venerable, aggressively traditional New Yorker has established, at last, a modest online presence. The New Yorker and others of its ilk are on the Web now because their managers know two things: Any branding opportunity in this current environment can't be ignored, and that when the current period of online confusion ends and conditions improve--and they will--only those already in the game will have a chance of gaining new readers and revenue online.

You may work for the most Luddite magazine around, but consider these six lessons you can learn from the Salons and Slates of the world:

Stand-alone repurposing isn't compelling to anyone

If all you're planning to do is run the text of your magazine through an HTML filter and dump it onto a Web site, you might as well save your money. With few exceptions, the magazines that will thrive online will be those that write and present with the medium in mind. The New Yorker may be online, but no one who has an option will choose to read an 8,000-word Ann Beattie short story in small type one screen at a time. And what Web advertiser would want to buy a banner ad on the last screen of such an opus? But a Beattie package that augments that story with a wealth of useful related material will garner both readers and sponsors.

You're on the Net. Take advantage of it

Here's a secret some magazine Web sites have yet to discover: Your readers know that your site isn't the only one out there. No matter how exhaustively your reporters cover a topic, or how exclusive the interview your editor scored, another site somewhere on the Web is covering similar topics in an interesting, complementary manner. There are clever ways to alert readers to this without sending them away for good, but you will need to put your trust in your readers to return. Indeed, the savvy online publication that can take advantage of what the wider Web has to offer will be repaid with more traffic, more goodwill and more visibility.

And don't forget that the Net is a two-way medium. Any chance you get to let your readers talk back--in any forum that makes it clear what material is magazine-generated and what is reader-written--encourages people to spend more time on your site learning what it has to offer and, potentially, making it more interesting to the next visitor.

Provoke your readers, but don't annoy them

Nearly every online magazine is desperate for more revenue. That's why we've seen such growth in new, more intrusive ads like interstitials, new-window ads, and the SuperSize ads from CNET and others. As the percentage of screen space devoted to "legitimate" editorial shrinks, it becomes that much more crucial for those designing and maintaining a magazine's Web site to make sure the layout is crisp, the navigation is clear and directive, and that it's obvious where to go for any topic or service.

One of the most entertaining books about online user interfaces in recent years is tided Don't Make Me Think!. You want your readers to think about what they find on your site, but if you make them work too hard to get what they want, they'll be heading elsewhere.

Be reasonable

Every person working on your magazine's Web site should expect to be overworked indefinitely. This isn't pleasant news, but it is the truth, and most people with bills to pay think that too much work is better than none at all. The staffing levels of two years ago were unsustainable, we now know, but even as the ad chill diminishes and magazines get fatter, don't expect to see head counts rise too much. Lean org charts, for better and worse, will be a permanent directive at most online magazines.

Document, document, document

Whatever the staff size at an online magazine, frequent turnover remains the ugly truth. Many online magazines experimented with a number of content-management systems, homegrown and those developed elsewhere, before they stumbled onto a customized hybrid that more or less did what the producers wanted. The programmers and producers who perform these astounding feats of imagination and endurance (and as anyone who has been through this experience knows, I am not exaggerating) don't stick around forever. If you don't want your next generation of technical staff to have to put everything on hold for weeks while they figure out what their predecessors did, institute a formal plan for documenting every aspect of the site today. You can't serve your readers if you don't know how to publish anything.