Trusted content is king. (At first I said “trustworthy,” but that’s not right. It doesn’t matter if the content is objectively trustworthy. It matters whether the readers trust it.) If you’re a publisher, you hire professional writers to create fantastic content, and then some amateur takes up the topic as a hobby and creates a…
You may have seen the recent Bo Sacks post with the headline “Magazine readers prefer print.” One interesting thing about the results is that even younger magazine readers prefer print. Not to the same degree as older readers, but it’s still a strong preference. At the same time, there is a strong move towards digital…
A recent Bo Sacks post included this interesting paragraph. “Norwegian publisher Amedia reaches 2.4M readers daily across all platforms. It uses a machine learning algorithm to identify characteristics of user behavior that indicate happy and satisfied customers. The algorithm analyzes up to 70 reader behavior statistics and boils it down to a single number called…
(If you’d rather listen to me explain this, I did a LinkedIn video on this topic.) Let’s say I have a service on the Fair Labor Standards Act. It covers the whole Act, but the subscribers are always calling and asking the editors questions about chapter 4, which covers whether an employee is exempt or…
(I wrote this in April of 2016, but it’s still an important message.) This article — Publishers: Weigh The Risks Of Platform Content Distribution — makes a lot of good points about the dangers publishers face when they put their content on a platform. Unfortunately, it starts off with a very common but fundamentally misleading…
A few years ago a publishing colleague asked about some of the simple subscription management plugins that work with WordPress. The question took me back to the days when I was first learning how incredibly complicated circulation systems can get, which also reminded me of the early days of iPad. When Apple first got into…
Pick-up artists claim to use psychological tricks to manipulate women into close encounters. The story is that if you follow a certain procedure, or method, you’ll play off instincts and hidden desires and such that women aren’t consciously aware of. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I’m pretty sure most people…
Once a month I’ll be sending out a 4-page letter (in the mail) about publishing technology, with a focus on customer data. I’m sending an actual letter because everyone’s in-box is so crowded, and everyone’s mailbox is (relatively) empty. If you’re in publishing and are interested in technology issues, please send me your name and…
You can read below, or watch this short video. The quote in the headline is an overly harsh standard I read in an online forum one day. It goes too far because there are some kinds of science that can never become engineering. Like social science. I mean … God forbid that social science becomes…
Publishers are missing out on some remarkable tools to help them know and serve their target markets better. Why? I recently went to Austin for the IIEX conference, which is for the market research industry. I quickly realized how many useful research tools are available, and how infrequently most publishers use them. For example, one…
By adding benefit language to their paywalls! Why are newspapers dying? There are lots of reasons, but one contributing factor may be their paywall and subscription offers. Sorry to be blunt, but they’re pretty awful. I spent a few hours reviewing paywall messages on dozens of newspaper websites, and what I found was uniformly unimpressive….
I was very pleased to be able to participate in Subscription Show 2021 in New York City earlier this week. I ran one of the rooms for break-out sessions, and participated in the experts panel / wrap up at the end. (That’s me on the right.) It was a good show, and my first in-person…
Long-time media experts I know and respect will disagree with me on this one, but I’d like to make the case for ditching the word “magazine” for your digital product. Publishing has been going through a long transformation in which print products have been converted into something like a digital equivalent. This has created the…