I simply don't understand why trade magazines bury good content on-line. What on earth are they afraid of? I presume that the client of advertorial content would be delighted if the articles were reprinted, referred to, or otherwise distributed. The problem is that the on-line "readers" that these publications use are so archaic that navigation, even on a large screen, is clumsy at best. You can't clip interesting bits to share with colleagues. - yet that's exactly what an advertorial client is trying to achieve. Have you ever seen a book with navigation instructions? Of course not. So why would you even think of launching a reader that apparently needs them. This represents the last dying gasps of the print medium, especially in niche titles. It's unfindable and unsharable. So it will go.
You may be right, Jonathan, but some B2B magazines do a better job of it than others. GPS World, for example, offers its content in both standard web-page format as well as a whole-magazine reader. You can send links to a particular page or pages to someone by e-mail or the various social network services or download the magazine as a PDF file and view it that way.
ReplyDelete-- Richard Langley
Full disclaimer: A GPS World contributing editor