There’s a song that often comes to mind when I try to evaluate the results of a split test. It’s Jethro Tull’s Nothing is Easy — because testing is sometimes difficult to set up, and it’s often difficult to interpret the data once the test is over. Marketers do A-B tests because we often don’t …
Many publishers are in the same situation. They have great content, but they don’t have a big audience. Other sites have a huge audience, and those sites want the publishers’ content. Is it a match made in heaven? It depends. You have to look at the terms of the deal, and you have to think …
Continue reading ‘Apple News, Facebook, Flipboard, and your stories’ »
Your website ad revenue might be in serious trouble. See Apple’s Ad-Blocking Feature Is Sending Publishers Scrambling. IOS 9, which is set for a Sept. 16 release, will allow owners of Apple’s newer mobile devices to download Web browser extensions that can block advertising from being shown while they browse the Web. This is yet …
Continue reading ‘Do your visitors hate ads enough to pay for content?’ »
As traffic on mobile devices increases — often making up half of a site’s total page views — publishers are struggling to monetize those mobile visitors. See Mobile Readers Abound; the Ads, Not So Much. The problem is fairly straight-forward. You can squeeze more ads into a desktop page view than you can on a …
Continue reading ‘Paywalls on the mobile site, but not on desktop?’ »
This may not seem like a publishing topic at first, but please bear with me. A few weeks ago, a dentist did what many wealthy westerners have been doing for a long time. He went on a big game hunt. Yes, I know there are peculiar details about this particular hunt (which the dentist might …
Continue reading ‘Ashley Madison, Cecil the Lion and Internet Rage-Justice’ »
I’m a little disturbed about this, but the business of publishing has been invading my dreams recently. Even on vacation! I woke up in Stuart, Florida, thinking about the price point at which it makes sense to have a salesman for a publication, and about the risk and reward in the sale. Generally speaking, my …
Continue reading ‘Who bears the risk? When is a commission appropriate for a sale?’ »
When publishers create digital versions of their material, they need to pay attention to some potential copyright problems. One of the biggest is that if the publisher obtained a license to use art, or charts and graphs, those licenses may not permit the publisher to use that material in a digital edition of the book. …
I read on my iPad every day, but the experience frequently reminds me how much better it can be to read a real book. Sooner or later, somebody is going to solve (at least some of) these issues on the digital side, and the experience will lean more heavily to the pro-digital side. But for …
With Amazon’s “kindle unlimited” program, people can get access to a pretty big collection of ebooks as part of their membership in the club. It’s like spotify for books. Part of the genius of this sort of program is that the books seem free, even though you’re paying a monthly fee. I’ve expressed my doubts …
I’ve had subscription fulfillment systems on my mind recently. It’s gotten so bad that last night I dreamt about it. I was visiting a fulfillment bureau I used to work with and happened to bump into Jeff Bezos at the coffee pot. I told him that Amazon simply doesn’t understand the subscription publishing business. They’re …
Continue reading ‘A fictional conversation with Jeff Bezos about magazine circulation’ »