The digital magazine has had a good week. Dennis reached more than 200,000 men in its first ABC for its stand-alone digital magazine Monkey and NatMags is looking at extending the digital format to the teen market with Project Celia.
Imagine Publishing has scrapped the print edition of its PlayStation Portable magazine Go Play in favour of a digital-only magazine.
All three markets are in circulation freefall on news-stands as readers migrate online and publishers see replicating the look of magazines as a viable alternative route to these high-spending audiences.
The products go beyond static digital reprints offered by companies such as Zinio and Exact Editions, offering video and audio clips and multi-angle picture views.
In addition to a range of ad spots inside Monkey, including display ads with embedded video and audio content, Dennis is now offering advertisers bespoke direct marketing using the same technology, mailed to a targeted audience.
The publishers cite digital magazines as a low-cost, low-risk means to launch new brands and an attractive way of filtering web content for busy readers, with more interactivity than print titles. But aside from a low-key version of BBC Magazines' Top of the Pops, featuring music videos, no publisher has extended a print magazine in this way.
Best of the web
Jan Adcock, Cosmopolitan and Cosmo Girl! group publishing director, who has led the development of Project Celia, sees the title as a way of bringing magazines' strengths to the web. "This will give them the best of the web for that week," she says.
Dennis, too, sees Monkey as a digest, suggesting that the format could work for its news round-up The Week. St John Betteridge, group ad director for men's lifestyle, says people enjoy finding things online, but sometimes want the search managed for them.
"Monkey has a beginning, a middle and an end and allows readers to be immersed in the content in one viewing - something that's difficult on a website," he says.
The idea of providing completely refreshed content each time has obvious appeal, but agency digital specialists doubt the longevity of a format at odds with the way people use websites. Dan Brown, head of online at Universal McCann, asks: "Are they really better than anything else digital out there? They're quite slow and aren't intuitive."
While he sees the appeal of men forwarding clips and jokes from Monkey to their mates, he says it is restricted by its frequency and rigid format. "People have access to anything online and they'll go to YouTube or find it in an instant on Google," he explains.
Amy Lennox, OMD UK's head of digital, argues that the likes of Monkey will inevitably be outpaced by technology. "It's a transition format: cool when it came out, but something better will come along."
She believes, however, that digital magazines could force publishers to reflect their print brands better online. "Monkey is challenging publishers to capture the glossiness of their magazines online," she says. "The web is crying out for something with the production values of a magazine."
To an extent, Monkey is already tackling this with unobtrusive yet hard-to-miss ad formats, which Project Celia will also run. Nick Oram, head of digital at Total Media, says: "The editorial creates the experience of clicking and interacting that translates to how readers use the ads." Furthermore, he argues, the look of digital magazines is easily translatable to mobile phones.
Broader audience
However, other publishers aren't rushing to get on board. David Killeen, Hachette's digital director, says publishers are too busy trying to adapt established brands to the web to consider new options.
Dennis and NatMags are deliberately targeting a broad consumer audience, but Damian Butt, managing director of Imagine Publishing, wants to reach specialist audiences.
Go Play's digital magazine aims to reach 50,000 people through promotion on Imagine's websites, inclusion on covermounted DVDs and a tie-up with an online retailer. The publisher plans more this year.
"The cost is low, there's no barrier to entry and the frequency is easy to manipulate," says Butt.
DIGITAL MAG FORMATS
- Monkey and NatMags' forthcoming Project Celia use a platform developed by Ceros, which replicates magazines as PDFs with embedded-rich media where readers turn virtual pages. Users receive the magazines by e-mail and view them on a private host site. Dennis is now using it for bespoke magazines for ad clients, including Sony
- Go Play, Imagine Publishing's magazine for Sony PlayStation Portable, has switched from print to an in-house digital format. About 50,000 of its target audience will receive alerts allowing them to download the mag, which will host clips of games and can be viewed in a mini-version on the PSP console
- Top of the Pops offers a paid-for digital edition, featuring embedded music videos, through its website
- Hello! and Practical Parenting are among about 50 UK magazines on offer in digital form from US-based Zinio. Users download free software to view the magazines
- The Spectator, Prospect and Dazed & Confused are among 38 UK magazines available by subscription as digital reprints from Exact Editions. Users click on small images of each page to read them in full, including ads, and skip to the page they want.