Right on TREND

TREND is an online magazine which will generate income through subscriptions. The content of the magazine is specifically based in the north-west region of the UK and will feature local issues that affect 18 – 30 year olds living and working in this area. The magazine will be focused on social and cultural events, activities and places to visit with an easy to use listing system that will make planning a day or night out in the north-west easy and accessible.

TREND will look for independent businesses in these locations that provide quality services but are often overlooked due to mainstream businesses taking their customers. TREND will review these businesses to allow customers a real insight into what each provides.

TREND will also offer local offers and deals, as an incentive to subscribe to the magazine and also to generate interest in the local areas that it covers. It will be a magazine that caters for more than one age range so that students will find it as useful and functional as young professionals. This will be a big focus for TREND, as the economic position of 18 – 30 year olds can differ greatly due to varied careers and education choices.

Social media will be a massive part of the brand, Twitter and Instagram will offer immediacy and allow customers to be involved with TREND and its content 'as it happens' whilst Facebook and Pinterest will promote material after it has been published. TREND will put emphasis on building that relationship with its customer so the brand is formed by their input and really concentrate on what they want to see in the magazine.

The magazine will focus on Manchester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Lancashire and Cheshire and so will cover a wide range of up and coming locations throughout the north-west, particularly because BBC have now relocated to Media City in Salford and job opportunities are much more varied and prosperous.

 Looking forward, TREND will aim to be a real part of the north-west community, hosting events around the region encouraging customers to get involved and build an online magazine that they know they love.

Comicate Magazine

Who We Are

Comicate is a brand which has two extensions. One is the website which holds competitions with incentives of winning electronic gadgets, and second Comicate is the name of our magazine which will feature winning designs of competitors. It is a company for creative individuals with a passion for animation, journalism and creative writing. We want to be regarded as a prestigious magazine, and a feature published with in this magazine is considered of a high honour to everyone in the UK.
The timing is right for starting Comicate because animation, design, content and story telling plays a huge role in everyday life, as well as in the work place. More than 3000 People in the UK sign up to a creative course and then find that there are no communities for them to engage with, or compete in. This is where Comicate comes in, and will fill the gap in the market for those with creative passion.
Saima Omar, the sole trader and the owner of Comicate has worked in a high-pace customer facing roles in retail customer service and sales for over five years. She has studied English Literature and Language at degree level and is doing a Masters in Magazine Journalism. she has knowledge of how a magazine publishing business works, revenue models, magazine content, law and also literary aspects of themes, story telling, writing prose and so on. management team has a strong mix of business, financial, and mechanical experience that will ensure a great investment and the overall success of the venture.

Magazine publishing is a high profit and high margin business. Therefore the main way to succeed at this is through good marketing. Comicate has made sure it has a extremely purposeful multi-dimensional sales and marketing arrangement to construct its total circulation base rapidly.
The magazine will be printed on matte paper, 78 pages, contemporary in appearance and appealing to many creative people. Quality art and written content is the constant goal of this magazine. The magazine will be entertaining and thought-provoking. It will appeal to a broad artist and journalistic readership. No magazine like it is available today.
Pricing of our products must remain initially competitive with our rivals. The price of a copy of the magazine will be £2.50 for at least the first year before the price will be reassessed.
The revenue forecast represents the business scaling up sales quickly in the first year as the UK community recognizes the high quality of the magazine it produces, the prestige surrounding a feature in the magazine and the prize incentives that are to be won.
What We Sell
Comicate sell competition entry for a chance to win an electronic device/gadget. They sell a magazine for animators, designers, creative writers and journalists. They also sell advertising for other businesses with in their magazine and website. When the business in up and running and a bit of profit is made Comicate will sell printed personalised merchandise such as keyrings, t-shirts and mugs.

Who We Sell To

Our market analysis looks at potential customers and potential business. Comicate explored the market segments, their needs, and did a marketing analysis. The need for this venture was looked at first. Does the UK need a creative magazine for animators, journalists and story-tellers? The answer was a resounding yes.
Once the need was established, Comicate needed to analyse the make up of its customers, who and how many. Who is the potential customer? How many potential customers are there?
Once it was determined that there was a need and who the customer is, the next step was to figure out how to make them Comicates customers. How do we get the potential customer to visit our website, and buy our magazine?
There is a movement towards horizontal integration as Comicate will provide events every so often so this can include industry professionals wanting to get involved with Comicate. The main target market is students and those people who are learning or practicing their creative hobbies. It will be a specialist interest magazine with several interests combined with in its 78 pages.
Financial Summary

Financial Highlights 

Comicate will fund its launch largely though its own cash reserves and a loan for the start up of the website, marketing, advertising and magazine printing.

Financial Highlights by Year.

 No net loss was projected.

VICE From Lads Mag to Vertically Integrated Global Digital Brand

 Vertical and lateral integrations have propelled VICE from a free magazine to an international multi-platform, vertically integrated brand with revenue of $100 million dollars in 2011 and estimated worth of $1 billion dollars in 2013 with only around 3% of that coming from the magazine itself.

VICE has always been a free magazine, however they have a controlled audience in that the magazine can only been found in highly vetted select boutiques, cafes and bars.  This ensures that the magazine has a 100% pick up rate by the target demographic of young urban trendsetters with disposable incomes.

The magazine is available globally and VICE have used their online platform to gain an in-depth knowledge of their target demographic. As VICE have a cult following internationally they have recognised that there are common features amongst this demographic.  This accumulation of knowledge production is where the value lies.

VICE have vertically integrated into advertising. Their agency Virtue produces content for big brand advertisers. They have a digital distribution advertising network, AdVice, that allows brands to connect with consumers on many other online platforms outside the VICE domain. But most interestingly they have radically integrated laterally by offering entertainment solutions and digital platforms for big name brands.  A current example of this is The Creators Project in partnership with Intel, which provides a digital arts and culture channel. This allows Intel to stay in touch with their core demographic of creatives.

VICE are adept at generating maximum profit from their content with successful moves into book publishing, music production and management and video production. Currently in the process of creating their own video player, which will ensure that their online video production will have a long tail whilst being embedded into host sites and advertising revenue will be split.

Vice continue to grow with incremental horizontal integrations and are producing many new niche channels.  Their success is tantamount to the interest the brand has received from other huge media companies.

You can view my presentation here http://prezi.com/4g34oryjxa4q/edit/#1_24309637

For Better Or Worse: An Analysis Of Digital Publishing

It’s been 550 years since Johannes Gutenberg pioneered a new printing technique and began to publish on a mass scale for the first time. With the dawn of digital publishing a new frontier revealing itself to us. Digital is being promoted as the future of the publishing industry and as tablet computers and e-books become increasingly widespread the ways in which we devour our media is changing faster than ever before.

While this is only a brief analysis of the arena of digital publishing and it wouldn't surprise anyone if this information is rendered irrelevant in 6 months, looking at the industry as it stands provides an interesting view.

Political

As digital generated content and Internet access is becoming increasingly widespread there is a new generation of writers from all backgrounds on an international scale. These new writers can create followings and generate interest in their pursuits, whether they are political or creative. With a wider field of reporting and the repercussions of coverage can be felt in political institutions across the world. The recent Arab Spring was accelerating by the use of digital communications and localized revolutionary reporting. The flip side of this is that those with an extreme agenda have the same soapbox from which to speak.

Economic

There are a series of new revenue streams that digital publishing presents for the industry in general, which goes some way to explaining why the leaders of publishing companies are fiercely pursuing it. While 40% of tablet owners have purchased a magazine app and 25% regularly read magazines on their device, there are still considerable gains to be made in that market. Advertising has been deemed more effective if it is seen to be interactive. With companies such as Facebook have been quick to adopt purchasing software such as Synapse and Alvenda buying direct from a digital magazine can hardly be light-years away.

Social

There is an increasingly social side to the way digital content is created and eventually published. Publishing efforts from 37 Signals have pioneered the use of blogs to release parts of their book over time and in order to engage with their readers to see how they were being received.  Wayne Gladstone’s book Notes From The Internet Apocalypse was originally a serialized novella published on Cracked.com but will soon be published by Thomas Dunne books.

Technological

The reading experience has been enhanced by the dawn of this new technology. The time spent reading magazines rises with digital publications, the average number of minutes spent on Vanity Fair rose from 65 minutes to 200 when the audience used a digital copy. Since their release in 2010 over 100 million iPads have been sold worldwide and this is a considerable audience for any publisher.

Legal

With digital content being so easily exploited, copied and reproduced there are a number of legal issues revolving around the rights of digital content. Acknowledging the right of workers and professionals is one key aspect of this but also the rights of the purchaser. Looking at the widely reported story that Bruce Willis was to sue Apple in order to leave his considerable digital music collection to his daughters raises an interesting question, who actually owns downloaded content? In reality customers never actually buy a lot of digital content, rather they purchase the license to use it. The same is as true for ebooks and magazines as it is for music. There may be a digital artifact on your kindle but we cannot say that you “own” it in the traditional sense of the word. As such that feeling of “buying” something may be misplaced.

Environmental

A great deal has been made about the benefits of digital readers to the environment. If there are less trees being felled for magazine paper then there will be a positive impact. However, the natural resources that have to be harvested and mined for the creation of tablets and various e-readers could have a negative impact on the environment. Books and magazines are easily recyclable whereas technology is particularly hard to dispose of and can lead to terrible amounts of waste and landfill.

Even this blog (which was meant to come in at a tidy 300 words) cannot fully incorporate every aspect of the burgeoning digital publishing industry, but hopefully it has demonstrated that in this relatively infant medium there is plenty of potential for great success.

Advertising as revenue stream in E-Books

There seem to be contradicting convictions on the possibility of advertisements being included in e-books in order to reduce their cover price (a move which could ease the reader protestations mentioned in The Maudster's post). While Sam Hollander claims that “None of the sources in digital publishing would agree that in-book advertising is on the horizon” (Hollander 2011), John Wheeler’s research in publishing trends shows a prediction that ads WILL start to appear in eBooks (Wheeler 2011). Could it be that in the six months between the first comment and the second we have seen a change in sentiment towards advertising?

Generally I would argue that the latter makes sense since, socially, we are already so conditioned to be interrupted by adverts, on tv, on the radio, in magazines and in newspapers.

It seems to still be in debate among publishing companies with varying conclusions such as Harper-Collins' plan to include ads in e-textbooks but not fiction e-books, where it deems it would be too distracting (Kobie, 2011)... though one wonders if it would really be so distracting in natural chapter breaks.

But I also think that if publishers have shifted their feelings on advertising it may be due to the resounding success of Spotify as a model for the music industry. We know that publishers have looked to the music industry for indications of what to do and what not to do with their own digitalisation, and perhaps the Spotify model is one of the 'what to do's'. Namely that users are generally happy to be interrupted by adverts if it means they are getting something else (music) for free / cheap. Plus there is the added revenue model in the incentive to pay to go 'premium' so as not to get interrupted by adverts.

As a magazine journalism student (who is nevertheless still very interested in eBook models) I'd be really interested to get thoughts on advertisements from the publishing students.

Hollander, S. (2011) “Listen to the Music: Lessons for Publishers from Record Labels’ Digital Debut Decade,” Publishing Research Quarterly, 27:26–35

Kobie, N. (2011) "Publisher considering ads in ebooks", PCPro.co.uk at: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/371191/publisher-considering-ads-in-ebooks [Accessed 22/01/2012]

Wheeler, J. P. (2011) “Publishing Trends 2011 to 2012, and the Changing Landscape (part 2 of 3)”, Spi-global.com at: http://www.spi-global.com/content-solutions-blog/content-solutions/publishing-trends-2011-to-2012-and-the-changing-landscape-part-2-of-3 [Accessed 22/1/2012]