Measuring Digital Engagement

Mediaweek has a report on a lively panel discussion of digital magazine auditing at yesterday's PPA annual conference:

...during the ‘Magic Numbers’ panel session, Tye (James Tye, CEO of Dennis) called for industry measured data to be produced faster rather than waiting on the "perfect", multi-platform measuring solution for brands.

Tye said that despite the iPad "being around for a year now", Dennis has not been able to tell its commercial partners officially how many readers download its magazine iPad editions, such as Mac User.

"My worry is we have a system built on the past five decades, we need to build it faster and more reactive to what the customer want," he said.

"The iPad has been around for a year now, yet only now can we start to think about including it in our future auditing certificates", he continued. "As an industry I think we’ve got to learn to move quicker than that." MediaWeek 'PPA 2011: ABC under fire for 'five decades old auditing system'

Rupert Turnball, publisher of Conde Nast's Wired, also had some highly pertinent questions for the magazine audit organizations: "we are interested in measuring engagement and influence and the ability to amplify messages, and that's not measured at the moment." That is certainly something that advertisers and big brands are deeply interested in when it comes to digital media. The problem that the magazine industry faces is that there are plenty of solutions, and an increasingly perplexing range of digital advertising metrics (Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Hitwise, Flurry etc), but none of them are specific to the magazine industry. Since none of the digital advertising platforms (Google, Yahoo/Microsoft, Apple, Facebook .... etc) are specific to the magazine industry, none of the digital audit tools that are evolving will be specific to the magazine industry. Perhaps the most useful role that the magazine-specific audit bureaux could now play is to recognise that there is no longer a sensible role for narrowly magazine-based audit functions.

Digital advertising is multiplatform and multipolar and so it follows that the audit role has to integrate with the best tools across the web and mobile marketplace. Digital magazines have extraordinarily rich potential for advertisers, and influencers, but the challenge is to find a way of demonstrating and leveraging this without resorting to the simplifications of the one page audit certificate.

Magazine Publishers and Horse Dentistry

It seems that every other day brings a new bout of moaning about the limitations of the Apple iPad system as a digital magazine platform.

But are these complaints justified, or is it really an indication that magazine publishers are both missing the bus and looking a gift horse in the mouth? The latest piece of mis-guided bleating comes in an otherwise sensible article from Damon Kiesow in Poynter Online. He says:

What publishers and consumers need from Apple is a real digital newsstand, which would allow:

1. One-stop shopping for multiple publications
2. The ability to buy a single issue or subscribe
3. Capability to connect print and tablet subscriptions, including any package discounts
4. A central location to access purchased or downloaded publications
5. Sales via iTunes or a publisher's own circulation system, with royalties adjusted appropriately

Damon Kiesow 3 strategies emerge for charging for iPad publications

These sound like reasonable requirements. But the plain fact is that iTunes and the app store pretty much does all that right now. Let us take them one at a time: (1) iTunes is a one stop shop for lots of publications, it is hardly Apple's fault if plenty of magazines have not ventured in there yet. Even so, the iTunes news stand is better stocked with newspapers and magazines than any other digital news stand. And getting stronger. (2) (the ability to buy single issues or subscriptions) as Kiesow acknowledges earlier in the article Apple through the iTunes app store allows publishers to sell single issues or subscriptions (at Exact Editions we enable publishers to sell 30 day subscriptions to their magazines which is not the same as selling single issues; but there are plenty of publishers and platforms selling single issues through iTunes) (3) (connecting print subscribers to apps) but as Kiesow recognises there is no obstacle to a magazine publisher connecting its existing paid subscribers for free to the app which is being sold by Apple in iTunes (he cites the experience of People magazine, but at Exact Editions we are encouraging all magazine publishers to do this: connect your existing subscribers for free through the branded app which you are offering in iTunes. This is completely within the letter and spirit of Apple's rules and guidance). (4) is completely baffling, because iTunes so obviously just is that; iTunes is a central location for e-commerce, for storing magazine issues and for providing users with access to archives. How would or could an Apple kiosk do that better? (5) (a system for 'sharing royalties') is already in place and Apple has the rather marvellous adjustment that a publisher can choose how to play the game, the publisher can either sell via iTunes in which case he will find that Apple have taken a 30% commission from the sale, or he can choose to give the magazine away, or indeed provide free access to subscribers from whom the publisher has charged an annual or monthly subscription (outside the Apple system). Not only can publishers connect customers who they have acquired via the iTunes system to their existing deals and print-based offers and incentives, but they can do that without paying Apple a cent for the business which is happening outside iTunes. Apple is being a lot more 'open' about this than will be some of the competing digital news-stands that are coming along.

All this should be known to the complainers in the magazine industry and I think that the real source of the griping, grumbling and equine mouth inspections is elsewhere. Perhaps these are the real problems:

1. iTunes is not a complete digital back-end system for magazines. Publishers are used to having a specialist distribution house handle all complications to do with physical distribution and maybe they are hoping that Apple would be able to do this in the digital sphere and look after the magazine publishers special interests in the way that fulfillment houses have done. Once this is formally stated the idea is ludicrous, but some magazine experts talk as though its Apple's job to deliver, in full working order, the digital back-end of their industry. This is perhaps the burden of Kiesow's request that the putative Apple kiosk should 'connect' the print and tablet subscription ('including any packet discounts' -- I like that requirement: consider the extreme complications that could arise from blending infinite varieties of print/digital discount packages the magazine publishers will dream up; that modest requirement will keep Apple's engineers busy for years). But Apple is not in the magazine or newspaper business and it is not their job to build a system which solves the transitional dislocations of those industries.
2. iTunes does not have an exclusive magazines-only zone. Like the iBooks store. This is true, but it may be a good thing for the magazine industry that Apple does not have a required format and delivery solution for magazines. The jury is still out on the iBooks solution, and perhaps Apple is being very wise in waiting to see how digital magazine delivery evolves. Why should they plump for a possibly half-baked digital standard when we still don't know what the right digital format for magazines is? Certainly Apple has not solved all the problems of digital magazine production, the result is that there is a rather interesting ferment of development and innovation. If Apple had developed a pre-packaged solution (cf Amazon and their so far half-hearted and not very good magazine delivery) we would not be witnessing these exciting experiments within iTunes.
   
3. Apple is not being friendly enough to the existing magazine business. There have been a chorus of complaints about Apple not providing sufficient information on app usage to developers, or to magazine publishers who produce apps. The magazine industry is used to having its own tame auditing service (ABC and BPA being two of the biggest industry consortia providing such information), specifically geared to the magazine industry and its advertising customers. Apple has shown no signs of opening up its books to ABC or the BPA and is frankly unlikely to do so. Why should Apple be unmovable in this respect? Primarily because the business of auditing advertisements has moved on, and there is now no conceivable rationale for having an advertising metric which is exclusively tailored to the magazine industry. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook etc will be the advertising networks that count in the future and they will all be trans-media (web, TV, film, digital publishing, social networking all in a big mix). Since 2005, the boom in digital advertising has shown that measurement and auditing is so closely tied to implementation and operations that it is naive to seek to recreate a magazine-specific analysis or distribution solution. Digital magazines will need advertising but they will need to work with digital solutions and digital metrics which are not narrowly specific to one industry or one media type. It certainly is not in Apple's game-plan or in their interest to gerrymander a magazine specific solution for reporting and measuring usage on magazine apps.
4. It is hard to sell magazine subscriptions through iTunes. Kiesow correctly points out that Apple enables publishers to sell subscriptions, and there has never been a problem about doing this (we have been doing so at Exact Editions since the iPad launched). In contrast to Android, Apple in iOS 4 and iTunes actually has a rather effective way of providing in-app purchases of subscriptions. The problem for the magazine industry is rather different: iTunes customers are hugely biased towards buying stuff that is at the low end of the iTunes price matrix. It is very hard to sell annual subscriptions to magazines through iTunes at the prices that magazine publishers would like to charge (and perhaps need to charge). This is a real problem but it really is not Apple's fault, and they can hardly blamed for this supposed shortcoming. iTunes works very well for low-priced transactions. But it is hard to see annual magazine subscriptions through iTunes flowing off the digital shelves at prices of £20/$30 and upwards. So it will be interesting to see how Newsweek fares with its experiment of selling 6 months subscriptions through iTunes at $14.99. iTunes apps are pretty 'frictionless' when priced at $0.99 or $1.99. But it is much harder to sell subscriptions at $9.99 or $19.99. Perhaps Newsweek will start a trend, or maybe magazine publishers should stick with the scheme of using iTunes for customer acquisition and then upselling them to an annual subscription purchased via a credit card direct from the publisher (where consumers are happier to spend $9.99 or $29.99, for a publication they really value).

The conclusion that one should draw from all these niggling gripes about Apple is this: publishers do not realise how lucky they are, magazine gurus should stop complaining and use the Apple service for the tasks it performs so well, and get on and sell or freely provide (in the case of existing subscribers) access to the magazines that they can now deliver digitally or in print. When you think about it, it clearly would not be a good idea for the magazine industry if Apple did provide a complete and end-to-end solution for digital magazine distribution. Magazine publishers need Android, and Windows 7 and pure web distribution to preserve their independence and choice. They need alternative channels for magazine distribution not just an iTunes route to market. Magazines, not Apple need to control and manage their own digital distribution, and if Apple were suddenly to produce a comprehensive digital magazine service, this would be dangerously sedative if it stopped innovative publishers from looking to alternative digital distribution routes and technologies.

New Models for Digital Advertising

In the last couple of weeks we have seen two new models for digital advertising proposed. First Steve Jobs announced iAds as part of the introduction for iPhone O/S 4.0. Second, Twitter announced their new concept of Promoted Tweets which have begun to be rolled out from major brands such as Starbucks, Red Bull and Virgin America. The Apple ads will be 'rich media' ads, using HTML5 (of course not Flash) but they will not be web-based, they will be app-based, and their announcement keyed in with the development that will allow apps to be nested within each other in the O/S 4.0. They also look as though they may be require quite complex and high-end design and animation skills. In his presentation Steve Jobs estimates that Apple could be generating 1 Billion iAd slots per day in six months time. That is a big opportunity.

What interests me about these new proposals for streams of digital advertising is that they promise to be quite distinct and different models for digital advertising. Sure they will be competing with Google in the advertising space but they will be competing by offering a completely different form of digital advertising. They are quintessentially forms of advertising which piggy-back on the environment of their hosts: Apple and Twitter. Apple have proposed an app-based form of advertising, and perhaps to no one's surprise Twitter have proposed a form of Tweet-based advertising. Whereas Google of course has its strongest suite in search-based advertising. Apple and Twitter are both, in their different ways, targeting the type of brand-based advertising which is where Google is least effective and dominant. They are targeting the big-budget, high impact advertising which has been the strong point of magazine and TV advertising for decades. Use of the Twitter and Apple eco-systems may be helpful to digital magazine publishers in the medium term. All publishers and advertisers will hope for more competition for Google in the distribution of digital ad-spending, but the print and TV publishers are losing control. There will be significant cuts for Apple and Twitter.

Notice also, that the Apple system is significantly less web-based than we have come to expect. The ads that are delivered are not web pages. Although the ads are built with HTML5 (big chuckle from the audience when Steve Jobs said that, sensing another jab at Flash) the advertisements are entirely based on inApp deployment. They are seen on the iPhone, the iPad etc within applications. Not on web pages. It would be no big deal to deliver these HTML5 also on the open web, but Apple have not yet said whether they will do that (nor have Apple said whether or not they will deliver iBooks on open web pages. My guess is that they will not). Apple is clearly building an Apple-only, Apple-closed system for advertising (see Frédéric Filoux and Peter Kafka). There is no point in blaming Apple for this closed approach. Google also is pretty closed when it comes to the workings of its advertising system. But the choice of 'digital advertising' as the topic headline for this blog is deliberate. Digital advertising systems are increasingly using the web and open web standards only to the extent that it really helps the technology platform to gain acceptance. We will see more proprietary advertising systems developed in the years to come (watch out for Facebook).

Could the same thing happen to books, magazines and newspapers that is now happening to advertising? Could we be moving towards a world in which there are multiple versions of mostly incompatible digital books, targeted or delivered at different types of digital distribution: ebooks for Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Sony, appbooks for Apple, slightly different Flash appbooks for Android, Google Books for Google Editions, Hulu-magazines for digital TV, Nintendo books and comics for game consols? Or will publishers, authors and readers be looking for a distribution model in which the same book, magazines and newspapers can be offered through all these platforms? Fragmentation and differentiation look to be the stronger tendency at the moment, but a move towards interoperability would be good. That should come if delivery via the web remains at the core of the service provided.

Magazine Publishers are Getting Organized (Desperate)

This last week two separate (?) ventures were announced to help solve the problems of the magazine industry. First, a still nameless new company to build a kind of Hulu for magazines, the company is being 'organized' by Jeff Squires, a Time Inc, veteran and apparently has backing from Time, NewsCorp, Conde Nast, Meredith and maybe Hearst. The flurry of objectives and business models whirling around this venture are summarized by PaidContent.

This venture is about dual revenue streams and selling content from the start—add the sale of content from the magazines or newspapers their corresponding sites and content created for digital editions to ad revenue and expanding options for advertising. Executives from most, if not all, of these publishers at various times have stressed the need for agnostic solutions that can be used across devices, platforms. Given the fragmentation in the device market, the dominance by walled-garden players like Amazon and the split we’re heading toward in gray-scale and color e-readers, anything less and I’d suggest stopping this before any more money goes in. (Staci Kramer in Paid Content).

The second proposition designed to save the magazine industry is Skiff, a new venture which Hearst have been brewing for a couple of years. They have a nice diagram summarizing its business model and projected revenue streams:


These projects are gaining a hearing in the industry, because they appear to solve the problems of the industry at one bound. They have a deep appeal because they appear to offer a digital future in which the magazine industry continues to be supported by a rich advertising stream, whilst also capturing an audience to digital subscriptions. In effect this dream appeals to the ancien regime because "Everything changes and nothing changes." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The Skiff project is almost impossibly ambitious in simultaneously 'ingesting, optimizing, delivering and rendering a wide array of content' to Dedicated Readers, smartphones, tablets and PCs. This is a tall order.

One wishes that they had picked a somewhat less comprehensive target to begin with. How about: designing a platform whereby digital editions can be supplied at very low cost to all existing print subscribers? An industry wide initiative to do this, would do much to encourage a culture of digital magazine reading and digital subscriptions. But one fears that in trying to solve all the problems of the magazine industry (and the fall in advertising budgets is the most painful of these problems, and the one which the magazine industry is least able to tackle on its own), there is every chance that the enterprise will fail.

And the real problem with that, is that too many people in the magazine industry will think that the efforts of these 'Big Boys' (and they dont come bigger than Time, Hearst and Conde Nast) will save the industry. The truth is that these big 'experiments' are not going to provide a solution, that is much more likely to come from rapid innovation and experiment at the grass roots. Let a thousand flowers bloom! That way there is a better chance that solutions will be found. I have a nasty feeling that with these big propositions on the drawing board, (subject to many months of prototyping and focus-group reactions) Time Inc, Conde Nast and Hearst are going to be even slower to innovate through the publishing activity of the magazines themselves: their publishers, editors and their existing readers have to be in the picture and enjoying the digital proposition if it is to have any chance of success. Conde Nast's recent effort to launch an iPhone App for GQ is a much more promising approach, in that way they can get feedback and a chance to offer a second iteration of the iPhone App proposition within a month or two. Have the Skiff investors taken on board how quickly the App market will be evolving whilst they spend many months, testing, manufacturing and launching their new proprietary eReader?

The Congleton Chronicle

Yesterday The Congleton Chronicle became the first local newspaper in the Exact Editions store. An annual subscription to the digital edition of this weekly paper is available for £25. There is a free trial issue available here.

The almost immediate launch of the newspaper in the Exact Editions platform was also a record. The publisher/owner of the Chronicle decided to do his digital edition yesterday and uploaded the necessary issues forthwith, discussed the deal, decided the price and the schedule, signed the contract (put it in the post -- we trust him), liaised with our team, who promptly processed the files at our end: by 4.00pm everything was shipshape. Files databased, blurb drafted and logo in situ. The net result was that the 'paper' was up and in the store less than 6 hours after the decision to proceed had been taken. One wishes that some of the big publishers we talk to could move at similar speed. They need to get moving.

The digital edition gives the Congleton Chronicle a number of things that much larger publications also need:

• A digital edition which can be bought by any loyal subscriber. So no need to put a paywall around the web site, which will continue to carry fast moving stories. But there is a lot that is not freely available from the web site; if you want the full monty, then the Congleton loyalist will buy a digital sub
• The digital edition is good for Congleton loyalists because it reaches them on the very morning that the paper is first published in Cheshire. And the statistics from the Chronicle's web site tells us that there are plenty of curious visitors in far off places who can now subscribe instantly without fuss, and with no more bother than a PayPal transaction.
• The readers also have the benefit of all the advertisements that appear in the paper. The ads are there in full glory. With clickable telephone numbers, url's and email addresses. There are hundreds of such navigable and actionable links in each issue of the Chronicle. The ads in a local paper are among the most useful resources of the paper for readers. So leaving them out is a non-sense (the Exact Editions content management solution transforms local numbers into the international format, so the American reader with Skype or mobile phone, can call the estate agent with a click from the page).
• The additional interactivity in the paper, in particular in the ads, is also excellent news for the advertisers. The ads will get additional and direct response from readers who click on links. The publisher will have the statistics to prove it.
  
• The digital edition is completely accessible on the iPhone and from other mobile phones with standard, fully capable web browsers. There is no need for the Chronicle to invest in the considerable expense and overhead of producing and maintaining an alternative 'mobile' version of their content platform. All of the newspaper content is accessible week, by week from the digital edition, which can be easily read on iPhones and other mobile devices.
• The Exact Editions platform also takes care of the support, distribution and e-commerce aspects of the digital edition and this is a proven and reliable system. So it really is possible for a publisher to be up and running with a digital solution a few days after the decision is taken (allow 5 working days, because the Chronicle may be exceptionally nimble).

The Congleton Chronicle's publisher also figured out a way in which he could recoup the really modest costs of this service from the get-go. Smart move.

On Reasons for not going Digital

We sometimes think that we have heard them all. The reasons for not having a digital edition of a magazine....

But we are still finding some surprising responses in the market. And I do not mean:

• We will want to do a digital edition when we have sorted out our web site (I mean web sites are never, ever, in that sense 'sorted out').
• We will want to look at this when our publisher is back from her maternity leave
• .... when I have finished next year's budget (a budget which should really have a digital revenues component in it, but will not)
  
• ........ in three months when our mobile strategy team has reported on our options (as though it were not relevant to the mobile strategy team to take a look at a digital platform that runs smoothly on mobile devices)
  

Those are some of the none too convincing explanations for inaction that one hears when talking to publishers. But there are some more powerful reasons that occur to our publishing partners. Sometimes my sales patter gets stopped in its tracks.

• A few years ago, I was trying to persuade the gardening magazine Hortus that they should have a digital edition and that we could easily show them what it would be like if they supplied us with a PDF file. "A what file?" came the response, and it soon dawned on me that Hortus is one of the few magazines that is still entirely printed by hot metal and it would not be a trivially easy matter to spin out a PDF file from their production process. This is the only time that in talking to literally hundreds of magazine publishers that I have encountered a production system which completely eschews the digital. Mind you Hortus is a wonderful quarterly magazine even if somewhat exclusive and I STILL think that a digital edition of it would do rather well. In fact I would really die for an iPhone App for it, but that is another matter, and I am prepared to accept that Hortus does not need to be digital.
• A couple of months ago, the publisher at another up-market, high-style, magazine which shall be nameless (but not for gardeners) told me that his magazine had such wonderful production values in print that they really did not want to tarnish the brand with a digital offering. I am not sure that he used the word 'sully', but he got pretty close. Like the Hortus guy, this chap had me non-plussed on the other end of the phone. Spluttering. How could one persuade him, if he was not willing to undertake a free trial, that this beautiful magazine would for absolutely sure look even more stunning in a digital format? For if you have looked at high-fashion and high-design magazines on really good monitors (even on humble MacBooks) it is hard to deny that they look even better digitally than in print. Added to which, to put the matter at its bluntest: frankly there is a market out there and if you do not sell subscriptions to the 20 year olds and 30 year olds who want to read everything on their laptop and their mobile phone, the market for such magazines will surely shrink.
• I was also spluttering yesterday when the circulation director at one of our biggest magazine publishers told me that he would not want to, would not be allowed to sell digital subscriptions to the magazine through the iPhone App store, because such subscriptions would not count towards the ABC circulation and subscription measures which are the bedrock of the advertising business on which the magazines depend. Since I know that the American parents of this publisher are desperate to build up subscription revenues and since I know that the advertising revenues of almost all the magazines in this stable have been collapsing, I found this reasoning less than stellar. This was a conversation about selling subscriptions to the iTunes audience, not about giving away RSS-style App feeds to the magazine content (which in fact the American parent does do for some of these big name magazines).
  

Mind you, I expect he is right and the last time I looked ABC does not allow Apple certified distribution figures to count in any way towards advertising-related circulation bases. But that really shows us what terrible shape the advertising business is in, and how sublimely irrelevant the ABC methodologies (and the same for BPA statistics) are to the businesses that they purport to serve. I would not put special blame on ABC or BPA for this, but we should be chucking bricks at the movers and shakers in the advertising business. Google and soon Apple will be eating their lunch precisely because the mainstream advertising agencies and publisher networks have not seen how fabulous digital distribution can be for advertisers provided that the technology for measurement and for targeted distribution can be transformed with digital tools. ABC should be 'penalising' magazines for not having measurable digital offerings, not discounting those that do....

Business Week's New Business Plan

Business Week has been on the block for months, and by reports it will soon be sold. At the start of the sale process, the story was that the magazine might be sold for $1. Now there seems to be enough interest that it may be sold for rather more than that, perhaps to Bloomberg. That would be an ideal outcome. Bloomberg have the capital and the network to restore Business Week to its rightful place as the most important general business magazine in the US market.

What are the essential planks of the new business plan that Bloomberg should enact?

1. Advertising has been the bedrock of Business Week's revenues for decades. Until recently was a massive cash gusher; but it has fallen dramatically. In 2000 Business Week carried 6,000 ad pages (yes, that averages over 100pp a week). Last year fewer than 2,000 ad pages were filled and this year the total is heading towards 1,250 pages (source: 24/7WallSt.com). Since the page rates will inevitably have softened, it is likely that BW will in 2009 gather perhaps only 15/20% of the ad revenues that it clocked up in 2000. Do not neglect the print advertising, it is still far too important to the annual budget. But the business plan should not be predicated on rapid recovery in print advertising.
   
2. Do not assume that the web site advertising will hold up either.
   
3. Advertising is not the solution. A solid subscription base to the circulation has to be the bedrock of the new business plan. The easy part is to fix the print subscriptions and to do that by charging a realistic subscription rate that makes money for the magazine from marginal subscribers. Some print subscriptions are being sold at a 90% discount from the official rate. Such deep discounting undermines the list prices and there is no point in selling subscriptions at a loss when the advertising targets have been drastically reduced. Hold the print price and be prepared to increase the price....
4. If increased value is being delivered to print subscribers be prepared to raise the price on the news stand and through subs. Quality in the editorial matter is fundamental. Improve the editorial product, so that the magazine again becomes a must read for its core audience. The circulation may be pruned by reducing give away subs, but it can be rebuilt from a firm content offering.
   
5. Develop the digital subscription offering. This means delivering a digital edition service which is complementary to print subscribers (automatic benefit when they have communicated their email/user name), which provides comprehensive access to the excellent archive. Make it a genuine web subscription so that bookmarks work, so that special issues can be given away as samples via the BW web site, and so that the subscription works on all web-enabled devices (iPhones, TVs, Wii's etc).
6. The print circulation base to BW is just under 1 million. Some of those marginal subscribers will be lost as prices are adjusted, but it is perfectly realistic for BW to aim for a digital subscription base much higher than that. BW as a digital offering could become the leading international business magazine for consumer-subscribers. But it will take time to build the digital subscription audience to 100,000 and then to 1,000,000.
   
7. As well as offering complementary digital subscriptions to all print subscribers, offer digital only subs at a reasonable price (not too low, perhaps 50% of the real print sub price). This will mean that the digital sub is very good value for overseas subscribers. But that is an audience that BW already to some extent has, and needs to consolidate.
8. Do not muddy the waters by 'throwing in BW' subscriptions as part of the Bloomberg subscription. Tempting though that option is, the aim has to be to develop BW as a distinct and valuable subscription offering in its own right.
9. Consider carefully whether it really makes sense to offer BW via the Amazon Kindle, when Amazon is taking a 70% cut, and the Kindle edition is showing up without colour and full content.
10. Consider carefully whether it would not be highly advisable to sell digital subscriptions via the iPhone App store. Having a Free App is an interesting starting point, not an end game.
11. Fundamental rule. Believe in the value and quality of the magazine as a print product and as a digital service. The integrity and editorial substance of the magazine is its key asset and lies at the heart of its digital success.
    

Many of these recommendations amount to saying "Make Business Week more like The Economist". One can be sure that The Economist does feature in a competitive analysis of what has gone wrong with BW, but The Economist also has not yet figured out how to deliver a solid audience of digital subscribers. BW will have some advantages in getting this right first. This sale is a break with the past. So much has not been working out well for BW in its digital initiatives that it is time that some sacred cows were sacrificed and some simple steps taken. Building digital subscriptions is the obvious path that needs to be developed.

The Athletics Weekly Branded App

Earlier this week Exact Editions release through the Apple iTunes App store a branded magazine App for the UK's leading sporting periodical Athletics Weekly. If you have an iPhone and work in the magazine business you really need to treat yourself to a short subscription to this publication. Direct link.

To speak frankly, this is a breakthrough for the magazine industry and it has not yet been properly noticed. One key point: on the iPhone, a magazine is an enjoyable read in just the spatial arrangement and layout in which it is printed. Exactly as printed. The text is readable, column by column, and of course can be expanded or shrunk with the touch gestures that iPhone users love. We were lucky that the App became available just as Usain Bolt produced his amazing runs in Berlin:





Even more important than the readability of the magazine text, is the new shape and potential for digital browsing. In its iPhone implementation, 'pageflow' encourages rapid browsing of the whole magazine. Here is a still shot of the coverflow feature (comparable to the coverflow with which iTunes users survey their CDs).



Pageflow is a crucial step through which digital magazines can benefit from the quality and the design values of the print magazine. Pageflow in action gives the digital reader the quality, the artwork, and the design built in to print magazines. Magazine publishers have for too long worked on the assumption that it is their task to adapt the magazine to the web by 'repurposing' its content and its design values. Nonsense. The web, or at least an iPhone rendition of the magazine, gives the publication its full visual quality. Perhaps even better than in print (though I would rather be judged on this claim once Apple has produced its new Tablet device. The 10" tablet with a digital magazine will be more sumptuous than many printed versions).

Finally, the key point about a magazine App is that it is for sale. This is commerce: the iPhone is a way of selling subcriptions which simply are the whole magazine and as much of its archive as the publisher cares to offer to iPhone subscribers. Athletics Weekly offers subscribers access to over 100 back issues, which makes the weekly subscription price, of £1.19 amazingly good value. From the magazine publishers point of view, the key thing about a branded iPhone App is that this is a way of selling magazine subscriptions. Athletics weekly is now being offered through weekly or monthly subscriptions and readers are buying subscriptions and making in-App purchases for renewed subscriptions. The Apple iPhone App-ecology is working. This is some really good news for the magazine industry. Sell subscriptions to iPhone users and iTouch users. There will soon be over 50 million such digital customers waiting for their magazine subscriptions.


The sad truth is that much of the magazine industry is so stunned by the way that advertising revenues have collapsed that business strategists are finding it hard to think about anything else, about anything positive. But the community of iPhone users is a huge market to which magazine publishers should be selling subscriptions.

It is amazing how slow the industry has been to see and to seize this potential. We know of no magazine which currently makes itself commercially available in its entirety through the iPhone App store. Athletics Weekly is the first magazine to show how it can be done, and it came through Apple's unpredictable approval process in the very week in which Usain Bolt showed us that 100 metres can be run at lightning speed. Some of our biggest and best magazines are slow off the mark!

We have a short video which provides a brief overview of the way this App technology can work for a magazine. Note the way that telephone numbers become call-able off the page. There can be no doubt this is the way that magazines should behave on an iPhone. All phone numbers should be callable from digital editions that work on phones. This is another big step for the industry, and one that has key potential in reviving those advertising budgets.

Twittering Friends and eMail Friends

One of the really great things about Twitter is the way that it enables you to build up real, but virtual, and in some cases one-sided, friendships with people in other countries that you would otherwise never have met. I now have about 30 such Twitter friends (as well as 100+ Twitter acquaintances) whose postings I usually look out for. Here are a few of them, in an East to West order: Virginie Clayssen, I like that her tweets are mostly in French, Ian Davis, whose technical tweets are worth attention, Eoin Purcell, whose taste in sandwiches is probably reliable,, Jose Antonio Furtado, with an unrivalled stream of topical epublishing tweets, @Personanondata, who should probably be forgiven for being a Man U supporter, Fred Wilson, a NYC VC with lots of ideas, @MikeCane whose tweet stream is sometimes too fast and fran/phrenetic for me, Don Linn who has a dry sense of humour and a touch of Damon Runyon in his tweets, KatMeyer who has a Pacific Coast style of tweeting, as does DannySullivan (roller blades) and Kirk Biglione (shades and cocktails), who in typical Californian style, between them know so much more about search engines and DRM than I could ever get to grips with.

Thanks then to my Twittering friends and twitting aquaintances (are there really 124 of them?). I learn a lot from them every day. This is all by way of also thanking an email friend (Alain P) who sent me a link today to a blog post by Bill Hill, all about advertising in newspapers and magazines. I like this line in the blog:

Web technology today doesn't yet support ads you really want to view.

Bill Hill thinks that getting this right -- making ads really glossy and seductively attractive is one of the next big tricks for advertising on the web. I wonder if he thinks that this free and open service from Dazed & Confused is yet doing that? The Exact Editions platform is pretty close to delivering high quality photo-shoot ads such as are found in Dazed & Confused in such a way that you really want to look at the ads. These rich visual ads are of course even more seductive to subscribers who get the full size page. Put this rich visual delivery onto the iPhone and the fact that all the phone numbers in the directory are clickable, is a step which delivers exceptional value to customers and advertisers alike. I dont think magazine and newspaper publishers have yet taken stock of the fact that iPhone digital editions will greatly leverage the value of direct response from the ads themselves. See this direct customer response from printed phone numbers in the Exactly App video. The screen of an iPhone is already crisp and bright enough to deliver a really good view of a glossy ad, the trick which the advertising and publishing industries now need to solve, is how to make those phone numbers as valuable to the advertisers as they are convenient to readers. This is not a big step.

Dazed & Confused in page-flow mode in the Exactly App

News Stand Sales: Are They the Solution?

There is no doubt that the physical distribution channel for magazines in the US is in major crisis. In the last month some of the major distributors have pulled out of the market, and it is now being reported that circulation of consumer titles through news stands collapsed in the second half of 2008. Audience Development offers an Analysis:

In the last week the fragile newsstand distribution system has essentially broken down. Two of the four major wholesalers have, in effect, exited the business. Publishers and the remaining wholesalers are scrambling to pick up the scattered pieces. If this wasn’t enough, the recently released second-half 2008 ABC and BPA newsstand sales data revealed (based on a preliminary analysis) that the unit sales of audited publications fell a devastating 14.9 percent and the revenue declined a record 6.7 percent.

The story behind the dysfunctional newsstand distribution business is so convoluted that it makes Tim Geithner’s stimulus plan explanation seem clear by comparison. But regardless of its complexities one thing is sure—there is plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the distribution channel. It includes wholesalers seeking massive unilateral price increases and a ranting former channel partner that apparently would rather sue than try to find a reasonable solution. Equally culpable are the publishers and their National Distributor representatives that have allowed, largely for competitive considerations, channel conditions to reach these devastating proportions.

The system is very broken, and a major part of the problem is that the news stand sales for magazines (and for newspapers) have been barely profitable, even loss-making for years. News stand sales matter much less for the dollars and dimes that are generated from circulation, than for the way they build an audience for print-based advertising. Magazines that sell for a dollar or two on the news stand generate negligible revenue for the publisher ('returns' from unsold stock run at roughly 50% - -consider the cost of that). So this crisis in news stand sales comes just when the advertising market is already falling fast.

There is no quick and easy solution, but there is a solution and building digital subscription revenues and digital circulations has to be a key part of the response of the magazine industry. The British consumer magazine has not become as over-dependent on advertising as the American market, but it is suffering from the same general malaise. Advertising revenues are slowing fast and revenues from subscriptions and news stand circulation have been neglected in recent years. Obviously digital subscriptions can now play a key part in rebuilding the audience and generating profits from circulation.

Newspapers, will they be paid for and will they be digital?

The answer to this question is obviously yes, and yes. But there is a widespread and total conviction in the newspaper industry itself that paid for digital newspapers will not fly. Anyone who doubts this is considered to be an unrealistic dreamer. Roy Greenslade, who puts out great blogs about newspapers for the Guardian subscribes to this view. But Roy is not blinkered and the other day he mentioned a countervailing opinion:

"Giving away information for free on the internet while still charging 50 cents to $1 for the print version of the paper was one of the most fundamentally flawed business decisions of the past 25 years. Newspapers told their paying customers that the information truly had no value." - Professor Paul MacArthur, Utica College, New York. Greenslade, quoting Storch

This seemed such a sensible and sane view that I hunted down the original interview. You will find a good deal of balanced reason in the Professor's views. From the passage quoted he goes on to say:

Why would anyone pay 50 cents for something he or she can get for free? This poorly conceived and obviously flawed strategy has helped put the newspaper industry into its current financial condition and hastened the demise of many publications. Any newspaper that attempted this strategy deserves the consequential losses.

The rest of the interview is also good sense. Sooner or later newspapers, which have become over dependent on advertising, and magazines that rely 90% on advertising, will realise that digital subscriptions are a good source of revenue. Sooner or later newspapers will stop obsessing about the fact that they all carry the daily news (in different selections, shapes and formats) and learn to live with the fact that they each and everyone have a style and editorial format which endears them to their readers, and for which some readers will be willing to pay reasonable subscriptions for a good digital service.

Professor MacArthur is also acute on the Detroit newspaper crisis (the 2 dailies in Detroit have moved to stop home delivery 4 days of the week).

It makes them irrelevant. The Detroit papers are breaking the newspaper habit. They are telling their customers, "You can no longer trust us to deliver the news on a daily basis."

Detroit seems to be as sadly out of touch with the business of newspaper publishing as its car industry.

Google Pictures and Google Books

Did you investigate the recent news stories about Google putting 14 masterpieces from the Prado into Google Earth, so that you can zoom and pan these great works in extraordinary detail (search for 'Museo del Prado' on Google Earth)? Over 3 months Google engineers/photographers took 8,000 highly detailed photos of the 14 paintings and in painstaking fashion they have been pieced together to form magnificent reproductions. Here is a tiny detail from Goya's picture of Executions on Principe Pio hill.



You would need to be peering very close to the picture to see this detail of the terrified eye of the victim.

This is a great project and for me it immediately raises the question: "Will Google attempt to do for pictures and the world's great art what it is now doing for books and all the world's published literature?" Namely: will Google capture all of art, the contents of all museums in image form and render it searchable and viewable to anybody anywhere? It is a perplexing thought, and I suspect that at some level of detail Google does want to do this. Remember the Google mission: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

While Google has immense ambition and vast technical appetite, I wonder whether they really can be planning to capture all the works of art held in the world's museums and galleries. There is an awful lot of it, and surely its unfeasible to track and record it in the great zoom-detail of these Prado masterpieces. And, who, after all, is to say that even this level of magnification and detail is adequate? A thorough and scholarly appraisal of many objects will require even greater resolution and magnification. It also has to be said that it is hard to see great potential for advertising revenues, still less subscription revenues, from a database which captures all cultural artefacts in 2D or 3D high resolution. At some point, the goal of collecting and organizing all the world's information, becomes an incoherent and an infinite task. Indeed at some point well before that infinite limit, any conceivable or realisable value in the aggregate of all the information in the world runs out. If Google does plan a collaboration with museums and libraries as intensive as the collaboration it is now running with 20 of the world's leading research libraries, it will have to take on board the principle that selection, focus, metadata, and priorities need to be established before you database the lot. Especially when you are databasing only some of the lot.

If Google is planning to put a very large, but necessarily selective, database of art and all museum-worthy objects into a database drawn from the world's museums, it is interesting that they have chosen to do this through the medium of Google Earth, rather than be a development of Google Images. So you see these high resolution pictures as though you were visiting the Prado, guided to them through an excellent 3D model of the building and indications of where, in which room, the paintings are hung. You do not come at them as you would in searching for 'Goya execution' on Google images, where you arrive at vastly inferior reproductions of the same painting, mixed up with other stuff.

I suspect that museums and art galleries will do a lot of this sort of work themselves. This virtual Prado does not carry any ads, but let us face it, its a spectacularly good advertisement for the Prado itself. Rival galleries must be envious of the attention this has drawn to 14 masterpieces in Madrid. Similar resources will be free to the public and advertising will pay a relatively small part in the funding process. Google will be much more interested in providing the search services and the indexes for all this curatorship and detailed photography than in actually doing all the heavy lifting. Mind you, if it turns out that museums and art galleries are quite capable of databasing their own collections, it may also turn out that more libraries decide to do a similar job for their own collections. The fact is that the tools used by Google for capturing information held in books, libraries, pictures and museums are increasingly available to us all. Capturing information on your digital camera or your iPhone is almost a democratic right. It will be very hard for companies to build exclusive monopoly holds over information which anyone can collect with a wave of their hand.

Magazines need a Solution not a Bail-Out

Magazines and Newspapers are finding the recession very tough mainly because of a sharp drop in advertising, which co-incides with a shift in advertising budgets towards performance-based digital advertising. Advertising Age has an informative article which tries to analyse some of these trends and put some numbers on the digital revenues that magazine companies are achieving. According to the Ad Age figures, Time Inc is one of the magazine companies that is most successful in attracting digital ads (c. 10% of advertising revenue across the group comes from digital), and Conde Nast is one of the worst with only 3% of ad revenue coming from digital. But these successes are modest and the real problem with the major magazine companies (especially in the US but to an extent in the UK) is that they have pushed for advertising revenues at the expense of circulation:

A big part of the problem -- and the current pressure for change -- stems from the prevailing emphasis on building ad page sales and increasing ad page rates. Conde Nast practically fetishized ad pages for many years, but almost everyone played the game. Pushing circulation as high as possible, though, undermined subscription prices and ran up costs for marketing, paper and distribution. (Nat Ives: Ad Age 19/1/09)

In effect the magazine business has been experiencing an advertising bubble which has been expanding ad pages, but shrinking circulation revenues for over a decade. The music has stopped and the advertising budgets are popping. This is not a temporary problem, as Ives puts it: "And whatever relief arrives whenever the economy recovers from the recession, nothing suggests that magazine ad page sales will reclaim their previous heights." The magazine industry has a real challenge and is facing a tectonic shift. It has to get more digital and it has to replace advertising revenues which will not come back quickly. I would not be completely gloomy about the prospects for magazines acquiring new digital advertising revenues in due course. Magazines really have to have solid digital audiences before they can expect promising growth in digital ads.

All of this says that magazines must look at the options for building circulation revenues, including digital circulation and digital subscription revenues. There are straightforward and effective ways of doing this, for example with the Exact Editions platform for digital subscriptions. The banks have to go to the government for a bail-out, but the magazine industry can solve its own problems by building digital circulations. Digital subscriptions are clearly part of the solution, and it is extraordinary that many of the largest and most successful magazines have not yet seen this.

Magazine Formats and Business Models

Jeff Jarvis who has been predicting dire things for the newspaper business (some of which are coming to pass) is now becoming the Jeremiah of the magazine business. He has a very gloomy moan on his blog Magazines don’t look so slick now

First, the grim reaper came for newspapers….Now magazines are looking bad and worse by the day. ....

And magazine advertising is falling in the dumper - and it’s sure to get worse as the impact of the crash deepens. The Wall Street Journal reports at 17% plunge in ad pages in the fourth quarter against a year ago. For the year, they were off 12%.

Things are in some ways as bad as Jarvis says. Costs are going up and advertising revenues are plummeting. But Jarvis's outlook only sees more of the same. His vision of a digital future is of a world of the web as we know it now, where the only form of content distribution that works is free access paid for by Google-style ad-management. But the web is changing and the way in which it changes is giving new opportunities to publishers. In Jarvis's comment-stream Rex Hammock points out that there is a distinction between magazines-as-formats and magazines-as-business models.

The trick for magazine publishers now is to figure out how the changed circumstances of the web and a search for sustainable cultural values can support the magazine format. The great advantage of the magazine format is that it is ideally adapted to niche markets and so special interest content packages should thrive when a new business model is adopted draws strength from the web and internet distribution. Special interest consumer magazines (superior dress design, specialist cuisine, extreme sports, poetry, ecology, jazz and other musical genres, etc) can easily acquire a paying subscription audience on the web. It will be much tougher for magazines which are simply mass market and mass circulation -- they really do need the mass advertising, low subscription audience that is fragmenting and vanishing. Magazines of real quality and passion will work, and as their digital audience develops new models for attracting and delivering value to advertisers will emerge.

Jarvis is right to emphasize the urgency of the challenge, but the formats will be saved if the publishers steer to the appropriate business model. For many magazines that means developing a digital subscription audience.

Pricing and Devaluation

The sharp fall in the value of the £ is good news for exporters. Good news for subscribers who want to buy British magazines. This may explain why we seem to be having a boom in overseas subscriptions (which have always been strong).

A monthly magazine whose digital subscription costs £45 (eg the wonderful Opera) seems a lot better value when that translates into $69 rather than $99 which is what the $ price was a few months ago. Mind you, there is a completely free trial issue here.

Gift Subscriptions

We are seeing a surge in gift subscriptions. Could this be a sign of Christmas? Or is it the first loosening of consumer budgets as we climb out of the recession? Your guess is as good as mine.

If Christmas shopping is on your agenda, here are some last minute ideas (we are 24x7 so you can even delay your shopping to Christmas morning if you expect to wake up before your nearest and dearest are online). Here are some suggestions: Whitelines for that troublesome snowboarding nephew. Taste Italia for the brother-in-law who wants to open an Italian restaurant. Prospect for your intellectual friends. Opera or The Wire or Jazzwise for your musical buddies. Finally, the Ecologist for anyone who cares about the environment and Red Pepper for the anti-capitalists in your network.

We don't yet cater for every special interest and taste (I wish we had something on Tropical Fish for Uncle Fred), but we are getting there.

Magazines Coming out of the Recession I

The recession is hitting magazines hard and there is no doubt that 2009 is going to be a tough year. Bad news this week from Haymarket, Centaur, and Time Out. These are publishers with top quality magazine properties. We assume that it must be even tougher for the second tier players. Advertising, mostly the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. But circulation figures are also being challenged. This makes it really incomprehensible that the major magazine companies have mostly failed to introduce, in many cases failed even to explore, the practicality of building a digital subscription base.

Digital editions work. They tend not to be competitive with a print subscription. We have very little evidence of customers switching from print to digital (except for a few 'ecologically motivated' subscribers); but our steadily rising subcription rates, usage rates and the direct feedback from subscribers tell us that customers like their digital subscriptions. Any magazine ought to be able to get a rise in its subscription figures of 5-10% in the first year by offering a digital subscription and promoting it through the web.

Any magazine CEO who is planning to cut the editorial budget by 5% or more for 2009 should be asking themselves why they are doing this when they have not yet launched a digital subscription option to their key magazine properties? If you will get an uplift of 5% to 10% in your circulation for 2009, and to your subscription revenues, by promoting a digital edition, should you not be doing this?

The Exact Editions business model involves no upfront cost, no investment at all for consumer magazines (its commission based for any well established magazine). And since digital subscriptions to individuals and institutions will grow even through a recession (especially during?) deciding to offer a digital edition is a real no-brainer.

Hard Times for Print Media

The combination of a fierce recession and a big shift in advertising budgets towards new Media is making life very difficult for newspapers and consumer magazines. Take this article in this week's Advertising Age, Will Print Survive the Next Five Years?

In the worst-case scenario, however, advertisers won't come back. The downturn will drive them into the arms of efficient electronic media that can better demonstrate a higher return on investment. Auto looks likely to behave that way. Marketers will get the hang of building friendly social networks and advocates around their brands, undermining their interest in the trusted brands of newspapers and magazines.

The hemorrhaging of jobs will scare the print industry's top talent into other businesses entirely. The focal points of culture and commerce will swing further from faded institutions such as newspapers and magazines. The print products that continue will rely on smaller audiences than ever.

Portfolio is chopping out its web team, and "doubling down on its print edition" but it still has not launched a digital edition. What is the point of doubling down on your print edition if you dont offer it through the web? Where is the sunlight? If you look around the newspaper and magazine industry pundits optimism is very thin on the ground. The problem is that the industry has not yet appreciated that the web can be used to deliver the magazine, it has made the terrible mistake of trying to repurpose its content to a format and a package which will attract the same audience as the print product. As though mashing up a print magazine as some kind of web service could conceivably deliver the same audience and the same commercial benefits. Oddly enough this last week's announcement from Google and the publishing industry really tells the magazine industry what it should have been doing in the last five years. Books are now to be sold as web services. Magazines should be sold as digital subscriptions for the audience that uses the web. This audience is growing and will value the fantastic advantages of web delivery (speed, archives, searchability, omnipresence and multiple access). None of the major consumer magazine companies in the US or the UK has an effective program of digital subscriptions and paid digital circulation. If they had been building this for 4/5 years they would by now be seeing 20% or more of their ciculation coming from digital only subscribers, at much higher margins than can be realised by a print product.

The gloomy pundit will point out that it is still not entirely clear how digital magazines can deliver the advertising benefits which make consumer magazines highly profitable (circulation revenue is not the 'cream' of the magazine business -- the cream comes from ads). But magazine experts are being too blinkered if they write off the potential for consumer magazines delivered as high value advertising through digital editions. One can begin to get the flavour of this digital potential if one looks at the free sampler that we now have running for Dazed & Confused. On this page note the discreet link to chanel.com, or the Blackdice ad with its phone number. Within the index of advertisers there is a wealth of linkage that can be used to generate instant targetted responses for advertisers. That is a nexus which the magazine reader and the advertiser need to see integrated through the digital magazine.

Browsing but not Reading

We are now delivering a service for magazines in the Dazed group which allows users to browse these magazines for free, but not to read them properly. The browsing is limited to the two-page per screen view, at this resolution most text is unreadable but the pictures are fine. As each new issue is published it will be available in this browse mode until the succeeding issue appears. Here is the current issue of AnOtherMan. The site is simply branded for the magazine's style



This is an open account, but you need to be logged into it and the issue in it will be available for a limited period, so to see the links that follow in this discussion you will need to be logged into here (http://www.exacteditions.com/sample/anotherman), and when the next issue jumps into that account the links will only be available to magazine subscribers).

There are two principal justifications for offering free previews at the browse level for a magazine of this kind.

(1) Like all the Dazed magazines AnOtherMan is visually gorgeous and the publisher believes that as users become familiar with the quality of the photography and the advertisements they will be more likely to subscribe. And the 2-page view works nicely since many of the double page spreads are compelling, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and Paul Smith. Or Lucien Freud, and Viggo Mortensen. One could say that making the current issues open to this free browsing is a bit analogous to the 'sampling' which is possible in a newsagent. However since the online browsing is unlimited it is considerably more generous (this issue is a whopper at over 300 pp).

(2) The second reason for putting the browseable version of the magazine completely in the open is that it will encourage usage of the advertisements and response to them. Although the format is not really readable, it is completely searchable. So if you are looking for the Belstaff leathers and after browsing the magazine you decide you will actually buy one, you can click on the url or the phone number to place your order. See the corner of p83.

AnOther Man

Autumn/Winter 2008

Page 83

Reviewers and Bloggers

Martyn Daniels who writes a good blog for the UK Bookseller Association led me to an interesting experiment by Michael Hyatt, another blogger, CEO and President of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a big religious publisher in the US. Michael had a clever wheeze: why not give away books to bloggers who agreed to write reviews and publish them on their blog..... He has had over 100 bloggers review The Faith of Barrack Obama. I wonder what difference that made to sales? The few reviews I sampled will have been very gratifying to the author and publisher. Probably also to Barrack.

Magazines don't often get reviewed, and so its not surprising that we have had few reviews of the Exact Editions platform or the digital magazine experience on it (one recent one here). Books, on the other hand do get reviewed, and getting new books reviewed is one of the key publisher skills. As it happens we offer publishers a generous allowance of gratis subscriptions for every title in our system. Now that we are doing books we must encourage the publishers to give free subs to bloggers. Obvious really, thank you Martin and Mike.

Mike also requires that the reviewers produce a 200 word review and that they post it not only on their blog, but on the Amazon details page about the book within a month of getting the book. Exact Editions would be offering a one year subscription to a digital book, but I guess it would be reasonable for any publisher offering these review subscriptions to similarly stipulate that the review should (please) appear on the Amazon details page. Would that be disintermediating Amazon?