Digital Magazine News - May/June 2005
Profiting From the Past (Excerpt from)
While digital editions of magazines offer snazzy features like rich media, readers have consistently identified one fairly basic tool as one of their favorite features—the ability to search and archive past issues on their computer.
Yet very few magazines have moved to aggressively exploit the value of their archives. Digitalizing past issues is an expensive process. Many publishers already offer a great deal of content to subscribers on their Web sites, a fact that may make it difficult to recoup their expenses. Some also fear that digital sales could cut into the revenues they already earn from the back sales of print editions or by syndicating their content to third party aggregators like Lexis Nexis.
….Time archives Roosevelt
For example, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Time’s Web site offered a number of articles on Roosevelt’s career. People who clicked on one of the articles were told they could read the article if they agreed to pay $4.95 for 12 issue of Time, which would also give them unlimited access to the archive. Only after refusing the promotion subscription offer, were users given the option of paying $2.50 for the article.
While Time currently sells print facsimiles of old covers and digital copies of older articles, a new strategy may be in the works. Soon after the Pope’s death, Time began promoting an offer that allows visitors to the Web site to view a sample edition of the October 30th, 1978 issue that featured Pope John Paul II on the cover. The sample was created by Olive Software.
Time has also bundled its articles together into certain themes, such as articles and covers about the Star Wars series of movies, a tactic that a number of newspapers have been successfully using for several years to drive consumer interest.
For example, the Scotsman has digitized all of its archives (also powered
by Olive Software) back to 1818 which promotes on its Web site to North
American readers a way to search for their family roots and explore U.S.
history.