Digital Magazine News - March/April 2005
Small circ TV journal thinks—and acts—BIG
The e-edition would also have an important competitive advantage in the magazine’s overall digital strategy. WSN now has a large Web presence, both in English and Spanish and a daily news feed that reaches about 30,000 TV executives. But until recently it was playing catch-up with two of its main competitors who had moved earlier to launch extensive online operations. “It would allow us to be the first out there with this kind of a product,” Guise sail.
Moving quickly, WSN managed to launch its first e-edition in just two weeks. On January 2nd, 30,000 television executives who receive their daily e-mail received a link to the e-edition, which was produced on the Olive Software platform. Then, in late January, just before the NATPE TV programming convention, the company quickly expanded its efforts, and added e-editions of sister publications TV Kids and TV Latina, a Spanish language publication covering the Latin TV industry, to the WSN product. Soon, the company’s other publications, including TV Europe, TV Formats and TV Docs will also have e-editions.
Quick hiccups
This quick launch, Guise admitted, produced some early hiccups. Some rich media ads were slow to load, prompting two complaints. But in general “the buzz from the product has just been incredible,” Guise said. “If we were covering the cement industry people might not have been so interested. But our advertisers are primarily distributors and producers of television programming. They love the idea of being able to include a clip of their programs (in a rich media ad). Most everyone we’ve shown it to has immediately understood the potential.”
That interest has allowed WSN to charge advertisers a premium of 25 to 30 percent to have their ads included in both the print and e-editions. “Otherwise, there really isn’t any point in doing this,” Guise said. He expects the new revenue to cover their annual costs for the e-edition sometime this spring.
Meanwhile the edition is also bringing in other new subscription revenues. Guise noted that they’ve been getting a large increase in requests for subscription to the print product, which in not distributed on newsstands. “For the first time, many people who get the email were able to see what the print edition looked like,” Guise said. “Some were so impressed they decided to subscribe.”