via alexa.com
Just a little bit of Alexa to highlight how anorak.co.uk is trashing its UK men's mag rivals online. The only men's mag online that's ahead of Anorak is FHM which has large US figures because of its American print heritage.
Ashley's take on, well, everything
Early days, but we are having fun playing with the cover and kicking ideas around
Massively excited about this. The UK's best football website, Whoateallthepies.tv, is to launch a magazine. Available in early December the magazine will be available as a free download for the iPad and as a printed version.
Some of the content for the magazine will be crowdsourced from Pies huge (over 800,000 readers each month) and passionate community.
There's more information about the project here http://www.whoateallthepies.tv/competitions/52222/contribute-to-the-who-ate-a...
We (Anorak Publishing) are looking for sponsors for the project - especially sports and photography brands - contact ashleyatanorakdotcodotuk
I have been having an interesting chinwag with a few people on Twitter this morning about how publishers can make money from tablet magazines. While there are some clear savings (no paper or distribution costs) there are still some additonal costs like the % paid via iTunes to Apple. I don't know exactly what these figures for VAT and iTunes are, but according to people who know more about publishing costs than me they are around 40% of magazine costs, the same as paper, printing and distribution for paper products.
However, even if publishers can keep costs down they face a much bigger problem and that's technology. The most important thing about print publishing was its high barrier to entry. If you wanted to produce a magazine in the 90s you needed plenty to money to pay printers and paper merchants, and that's before you even approached a distributor who could make or break your mag by getting it into the stores.
In the early days of online content the barriers to entry were still high, it was just that brands didn't want to advertise online. Ironically by the time brands recognised the opportunity of online publishing blogging had arrived and the barrier to entry was gone. Publishers, with their existing high cost business models, simply couldn't make enough money from online content - not that too many bloggers in the UK have made money either...
Now magazine publishers are pinning their hopes on tablet magazines. They'll offer the same magazines, with added interactive features, in tablet forms, invariably charging the same price for them. The one big issue they face is that while the barrier for entry for producing a tablet magazine is high at the moment, when the WordPress for tablets arrives, as I am sure it will shortly, people (bloggers, enthusiasts and indie media companies) will produce their own tablet magazines, and they will be delivered more frequently and have more content than those from traditional publishers. They will be free too, funded solely by ad revenue. And as smaller companies do deals with image agencies, as the most successful bloggers have done (see Anorak.co.uk) so they will have the images people are searching for and want to see well before the weekly or monthly tablet mags appear.
The same is true for apps? Pretty soon anyone will be able to produce an editorially driven app, or one that harnesses UGC, and it will be very tricky for publishers to monetise content apps.
The main problem mainstream publishers face is that each time technology creates a new opportunity, they only have short window to monetise that content before the barriers to entry are lowered. This then leads to an explosion of content (which is invariably free) that inevitably drives advertising revenue down.
Ultimately I think that Jeff Jarvis has got it bang on. Publishers are good at creating communities. They should look to focus on these. They should also look again at their business models, reduce costs and get used to the fact that, for now at least, profit margins are going to be a lot lower than they used to be.
The Jarvis article is here http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/08/04/whither-magazines-2/#
... According to Alexa
I know Alexa has its faults, but it does often give a fairly good idea
of website traffic trends.
Any queries on Anorak give me a shout ashleyatanorakdotcodotuk
Flying in the face of the accepted wisdom that July is normally a quiet time for websites with only limited growth, Anorak Publishing has just posted its best traffic figures ever - and then some.
Between them Anorak.co.uk and Whoateallthepies.tv delivered 10.8 million page impressions in July, which smashes the previous best figures by 60%.
Pies attracted a huge number of visitors 843,056 who delivered 4.5 million page impressions.
Meanwhile Anorak scored 676,120 visitors and 6.3 million page views - that's almost 10 page views per visitors.
Anorak's editor Paul Sorene attributes the surge down to 'some great breaking stories, amazing images and readers looking for a more edgy take on mainstream news.'
Pies Editor Ollie Irish said 'I think Pies will hit a million visitors a month shortly. We seem to be offering readers news, opinion and images that they can't get anywhere else.'
Interesting stuff from Paid Content http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-social-nets-pulled-cpms-down-by-18-perce... on how social networks (well Facebook with a bit of MySpace) have pulled down the CPMs (amount advertisers pay per 1000 views) to new record low levels.
At the same time the blog points out that ad spend has dropped in the first part of this year and media is already experiencing a double dip recession.
For me this underlines a few things
1 Social media is seriously harming online media. If social media didn't exist then online media would command much higher CPMs.
2 That you can't put the genie back in the bottle - Media companies have just got to work with this and accept that Facebook et al will keep CPMs down over the next few years.
3 However there may be an upside one day - If brands begin to start valuing online media once again. I don't really think this will happen until we see new a new media properly emerge with many print titles dying or shifting completely online and brands recognising that the new wave of blogs and websites that have grown in the last few years have influential and important audiences.
Still as David puts it on PC
But there’s still hope for web publishers looking to blunt Facebook’s impact on CPMs. The social net doesn’t want to challenge major publishers directly on premium display and has in fact avoided deploying any of the larger display ads that have captured sites’ attention since the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Online Publishers Association began promoting new standard formats last year. Publishers insist that offering a larger, uniform display format for advertisers will inspire greater creativity.
The thinking goes that in turn, more creativity will spur greater ad spend. That may actually be happening right now. But overall, it will have a limited affect against the never-ending flow of inventory from social nets and the laws of supply and demand that sites like Facebook will continue to exert on advertisers’ finite ad budgets.
Finally I should add that Anorak.co.uk and whoateallthepies.tv did a record breaking one million page impressions over the weekend. If the ad sales CPM was $3 that would be $3000 (or rather $9000 as there are three ad positions). The reality is that the real figure will be an awful lot less than that
