One big happy family

An online publishing business plan for print publishers.

Publishing online and in print creates richer experiences for your readers
Audiences use different formats concurrently, and publishing in new formats brings the content and advertising to new audiences
Publishers like Wired.com publish daily online to bring audience to their print version which features more polished content.
Online Archives allow perpetual advertising revenue from otherwise stale content
Subscriptions don't work well enough for the overhead required to keep non-subscribers out, but advertising-free browsing is easy enough to add that it could also be a revenue source.
Cost of publishing online is much less than print, and if used as the primary publishing platform can bring savings to the print publishing budget through cheaper tools, software, computers

How? Money? The Short Version

Advertising will work.
Focus on tracking your audience and connecting people to your archived content.
Write in a simple XML format for easy publishing into online and print, and future formats, and remove microsoft word+computer costs.
Use free software and old computers.
Use online forums to create discussion and advertise there
Put ads in your RSS feed, but have it be full-text.
Optimize your website code to reduce bandwidth fees
Add writer blogs for deeper connections with audience.
Optional: Offer a no-advertising version for a price.

Draft: May 17, 2005

Let's get to it. The question is whether or not publishing online will mean fewer readers of the print edition. Will the online version kill my print version?

Audience seeks different formats for fuller experience

I will be glib and put forth the question: Did the Jurassic Park movie kill sales of Michael Crichton's novel? The answer would be no, exactly the opposite happened in fact. Now, i can hear you saying, "Look we're talking about two seperate forms, right, and large dinos with sweet genes, so it doesn't quite compare." True, but the example illustrates my first point which is that our expectations of audiences are usually confounded by their enjoyment of the content, and their seeking to create complete experiences for themselves out of the content we as publishers provide.

In fact, I can point to two friends who waited to see Jurassic Park until after they read the book. The movie was the summer blockbuster, and people were busy prepping for it at libraries and Barnes & Nobles. Audiences use your content in reference to all the other content they receive throughout the day, and they will decide how useful a given format is to their experiences. So, publishing in multiple formats by its very nature is good, because it creates the opportunity for richer understanding of the content.

Formats: Content Interfaces for Different Audiences

Fact: Different audiences will consume news and content in different, and in many cases multiple formats. The key to remember is that putting content into new formats opens that content up to new audiences, therefore new chances to market and advertise.

The printed format is a standard way to interface with information. An alt-weekly for example has news in the front, classifieds in the back, and I know how to find what i'm looking for because it has a table of contents. This is after years and years of publishing design through trial and error on creating a standard format for printed information. This research gave us page numbers, sectioned content, table of contents, back covers, and best of all (wink) focussed advertising. Why do we have page numbers? Why do we have sections? By creating a standard format that makes the content that audiences want to read easy to find we insure that advertising gets seen by the largest percentage of interested parties.

So, it would follow then that the next step would be to follow the standard format of content for the next generation of audiences, which is clearly online publishing. The interface of online publishing is attractive to the newer generation of online readers because of several reasons. It removes the need to keep old content in your house in stacks of aging newsprint. It removes the need to go to a certain location to received the content. It removes the need to remember what page an article was on.

Browsing through pages of information is an idealization of how people read newspapers and content anyway. Let's not use that as a reason against publishing online, because people have always used formats to their specific purpose. I check the music listings in the paper when I'm eating at Conan's Pizza, but I read the articles online at home. It is the same content, but the way it fits into my life is through two separate formats.

This can be take further when considering the emerging online formats that have been standardized such as RSS. This sort of aggregatable meta-format allows your content to seep into even more audience because it encourages users to read from a multiple constantly-updating sources. Clearly, the opportunity exists to moinetize RSS feeds by adding small text ads to the content received.

Real World Example: Wired Magazine & Wired.com

Wired is perhaps the best at this dual platform for content, and a leader in both their publishing system and their approach to moving printed content online. Their system relies on a tiered set of dates that slowly reveal the printed magazine to online users. Wired creates value in its print format through beautiful design and the format's offline nature. There is a clear beefit to Wired to bringing its content online because it monetize its archives. This tiered system in which content is released online could be used by other publishers to preview the

In addition, Wired's frontpage holds none of the content from the magazine and is instead a source of the latest and most up to date provided by the staff. This dual system brings in audience on a daily basis. This reinforces the audience's reliance on Wired as a news source and allows Wired to charge appropriately for their advertising, while still pushing the printed version as a more "polished" source of news. I will be first to acknowledge that good journalism and content takes more time than the average blogger puts in, so the cycle of news for the printed version allows for a focussed deadline and a different standard of quality.

The online part of the news reinforces this higher quality content by giving readers direct access to the writers thoughts and bias. The stories that a publication covers strictly online can be focussed more towards the online audience with a local perspective, while the printed version must reach out to a larger base.

It's all about Archives

Advertising is your best bet for revenue. The benefit of online revenue is that it can be reasonably automated, it is easier to track and manage, and has very small overhead.

By having content and archives online you gain the trust of your audience, and you earn revenue off of the already published works. It is the print-only model that misses this point, because you are only able to make advertising revenue off of the current issue, the current content.

So how do you encourage advertising revenue from archives? You make content archives very easy to access, well-organized, searchable, well-connected between each other, and well-connected with sources on the web. Becoming a useful archive of information will gain you audience, and by proxy advertising revenue.

When a news story comes up around the internet, encourage users to come to your site by adding the archived content to the discussion. With focussed advertising, each archived story could be useful for gaining revenue and audience share. One employee, or better yet, an intern could be in charge of connecting your publication with other internet sites, and as your audience grows you can increase the price of your online advertising.

A quick dip into subscriptions

Many will try the subscription model for their archives. They see the archives as paid-for content comparable to old Miles Davis sessions or elusive writings by e.e.cummings, which justifies their understanding that access to this paid-for content should include a ticket price. This model works well in booksellers and your local indie music closet/store, but can rarely be pulled off by internet publishers because there is no compelling reason for users to pay for old content online.

Perhaps you could point to the "success" of the iTunes music store, but this is merely the success of the iPod, because neither the musicians nor Apple makes any money off of selling their archived songs for .99cents. This delivery method and pay-per-play is designed to sell ipods, not songs. The margins on a .99 cent song barely covers the bandwidth required to deliver that song.

The best possible solution is to sell users the option to browse wiithout advertising. The wealth of advertising in people's lives has created a product of it's own: the ad-free environment, and some returning online readers will pay for a stripped down version of the site, sans-marketing.

Cost of doing e-business

Focussing your attention online means an aggregate savings of money throughout your publishing organization, because the tools required to publish online are cheaper, require less computing power, and are easier to track and manage.

There will of course be fees for the content created, but this should be expected. These are the large expenditure for "printing" online. Your costs specific to an online content publisher:

design & maintenance of the site, archives, advertising
bandwidth, hosting, domain fees
computers, maintenance, system upgrades
software
security, backups

The first will be an initial investment and should be planned well to integrate into company's standard publishing system. Ideally the online version will be considered first because it allows for a richer online experience, but we can't alway get what we want. A three phase system works well, in which the company focusses mainly on print, but wants to archive online. Then, the company splits it's resources between online and print, and then finally print becomes the printed version of the more in-depth online version.

The second will be equivalent to paying a printer to publish your book with pen and ink. Finding a quality host that won't rip you off, one with good online and telephone support is very important. You will be trusting this company with your livelihood so spend some time here, and don't think you can just Do It Yourself. There nuances to a good server versus a bad server, and it won't become obvious until after it is too late. Try not to choos the lowest you can find. It ain't worth it.

Computers are key, but can be shared. You can work with open source tools such as Linux and old laptops for an online site because the layout is mostly controlled by text files. You won't need to buy the latest quark xpress or adobe software, because your site is clean xhtml. One license of these software is good for the designer, but you could probably get away with a lot fewer software expenses. Think how much you use word, and imagine if you could just publish as clean xhtml? Or if you need more formatting, Openoffice?

Backups should be done constantly, but on the internet your backups could be done automatically through archive.org which gives higher creedence to online news publications over geocities homepages.