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Douglas MacMillan is one of the Ninja Hamsters at ADOTAS aka an intern. He previously spent several months working as a dutiful intern under the dictatorship of Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, only to be set free by our own Kiran. He does not get Jaime skim lattes in the morning.

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Welcoming The Fashionably Late Guests To The Online Party

Written on
Apr 5, 2006 
Author
Douglas MacMillan  |
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Welcoming The Fashionably Late Guests To The Online Party

While they borrow some content from their sister publications, these sites have earned their success precisely because they generate unique reading material and interactive activities for their users, and allocate greater independent resources within Condé Nast. Sites like VanityFair.com, on the other hand, are viewed by Internet users as a cheapened, less-expansive version of a magazine they can already obtain and read at their discretion. VanityFair.com got a sneak peek at what their traffic potentially could be in mid-February, when it released a much-circulated video of its cover shoot featuring starlets Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley in the nude. When you give your readers something like this, which takes them behind the scenes and far beyond what they can read in the magazine, you can start to bring them online regularly.

There’s something about getting Vanity Fair readers all in one place online, on a regular basis, that has advertisers drooling all over themselves—and it’s not just the nude videos of Scarlett Johansson. Trade publications by definition have very segmented audiences, and that makes them incomparably easy to behaviorally target.

When magazines have by and large settled into the online frontier and left their ink and print roots behind them, this factor will be the main advantage they have over newspapers. Online newspaper sites, like NYTimes.com, are similar to large portal sites like Yahoo and MSN in that they have the potential to attract huge amounts of traffic over continued periods of time. However, advertising in the online newspaper arena has become a tricky thing, because their readers occupy widely varying demographics.

Magazines, on the other hand, often supply advertisers with a good idea of their audience in their masthead alone. Where could be a better place to pitch your high-end business accessory than at Entreprenuer.com? Where else would you sell your new percussion product than at ModernDrummer.com? When magazines take up full-time residence on the Internet, figuring out who to advertise to and where to find them becomes much, much easier.

Seelye quotes Condé Nast’s editorial director Thomas J. Wallace as giving his employees the mantra that they need to “enrich the web experience.” While this is a positive first step, I believe the folks at all of Condé Nast’s publications need to take this philosophy a bit further. Instead of websites opening doors onto print sales and subscriptions, the magazine industry is headed toward a point where the print publication will sell the consumer on its counterpart online experience.

Several competitors are already blazing the trail for this next major media migration, and garnering the readership numbers to prove it. For good examples of the interactivity, exclusive content, and behaviorally targeted space that is to come, take a look at the following site spotlighting the Media Industry Newsletter’s Top Ten Websites Associated With Magazine Brands for January of this year (click for larger image):





Reader Comments.

Advertising blog site Adrants has an extensive and interesting forum discussion on this topic here…
http://adrants.soflow.com/NewForumTopic/25446a101b30

Posted by Author | 11:53 am on April 6, 2006.

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