Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions - (Page 68) Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases Increasing ad clickthroughs. Meeting the Challenge Shane Molloy, Director of Circulation for ALM’s National Magazine Division, switched ALM’s digital edition provider from QMags’ download format to Texterity’s browserbased technology. Texterity’s non-Flash solution meant crisper, faster access on any computer, iPhone, or iPod touch. Law Technology News, IP Law & Business, and Corporate Counsel are now available in digital format. Users seem to prefer the new format: American Lawyer’s digital circulation has almost tripled since the switchover, though it is still relatively small. ALM wants to ensure that at least one copy of their well-known Am Law 200 survey of the top 200 law firms in the United States reaches every firm. ALM has no paid subscription Web sites; they post content to their Web sites for access through free registrations. Digital editions are thus complementary to Web sites as part of ALM’s product mix; they are marketed on ALM Web sites, but otherwise there is no tie-in between digital replica editions and Web sites. When people subscribe to magazines, they are asked whether they want print or digital; receiving both print and digital counts as two separate subscriptions. For controlledcirculation titles, the first subscription is free but the second one is paid. One exception to this is Corporate Counsel, which is free in digital form outside of the United States. ALM is also offering advertisers value-added digital options through Texterity such as Web links in their ads and electronic blow-in cards. Feedback from advertisers has been very positive as they learn to incorporate these new options into existing campaigns. ALM has adopted various strategies to help reach the goals outlined above utilizing Texterity’s Best Practices resources. Some of ALM’s tactics include sending multiple reminder emails to get subscribers to open the digital editions and using different sets of bullet-point copy in email messages to test effectiveness. ALM hopes that increasing open rates will naturally lead to increased ad clickthroughs. ALM has a turnkey production process with Texterity: they simply send Texterity printready files and Texterity does the rest. At this point, ALM does not reformat anything specifically for digital editions. They are beginning to explore adding multimedia content to their digital editions, such as embedded video clips. Results Digital circulation of Law Technology News is now almost 10% of total circulation. Overall digital circulation has tripled since adoption of Texterity browser-based platform, with very positive user feedback. Great progress has been made toward achieving the goal of one copy of Am Law 200 at every law firm. ©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. 68 http://gilbane.com http://gilbane.com
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