Earlier this week National Magazines decided to stop producing the weekly digital magazine JellyFish. We felt this was a great shame as it was one of the early adopters of our software, and had grown into a great product.
The main problem cited as the reason to pull the title was with distribution. JellyFish has taken note of Monkeys launch and distribution methods which focused mainly on email distribution. Users were sent an email once a week to tell them the new mag, and entice them to check it out. This is quite a rock solid plan, but it does rely on one or two things.
Firstly Monkey had a fantastic resource of emails from within Dennis publishing, and the quality of these emails were high, slotting into the target audience perfectly. Jellyfish however did not have quite such a targeted pool of users, especially not as the initial target audience was young girls. Let me tell you, getting a list of 13 year old girls emails isn't going to be easy!
This distribution method was further hindered by hotmail and other mail providers seeing the emails as spam (without pointing the finger of blame, this was not natmag's fault), something that proved almost impossible to recover from.
A change of target users was required, but probably came too late.
Some comments on the web point to the technology proving a problem users, as it requires Flash, however the target audience for these magazine are the sort of people who seek entertainment on the web, the sort of people who visit YouTube and play flash games, and with a 95% saturation of the market it's hard to blame it on that.
That being said, it is apparent that these sites rely on broad band users, or at least users with a decent connection speed (or patience), and also our advanced metric measurements which take into account the user loading the magazine before we record a view. Something standard websites don't! This means users will quite rightly not be recorded as viewing the magazine if it's not fully loaded on a page or spread, something that will hopefully be exposed on standard websites, with the introduction of time based user metrics.
I think that in order to successfully drive the masses to an on-line magazine, you need to address the masses. Sites like Digg and Technorati are great, but none of my non geeky mates have heard of them, let alone know what RSS or feeds are. Having said that there is a fantastic resource of users if you can tap them, but there not necessarily the answer. A strong and quality pool or emails is a great start, along with a strong supporting site informing the user about the product, how to use it, subscribe, and when it's out etc. This site can also be a great tool for generating traffic, and a landing for advertisement. Once this is set up other avenues can be explored, but enticing users in and driving subscriptions seems to be key.
We have learnt a lot from JellyFish, and the early distribution problems definitely forced us into exploring other avenues for promoting the product. In the next few days we will be releasing a comprehensive package for publishers to optimize their magazines for search engines as a way to drive more organic traffic. We also have the tools to identify first time users and deliver them helpful tips, although it's one thing providing a platform, and another thing encouraging development on it.