Profitable Web 2.0 Tactics
NewBay Media fine-tunes its integrated publishing strategy.
March 2008 By James Sturdivant
In January, as they do every year, the editors of Guitar Player, Bass Player, Keyboard and EQ, all published by New York-based NewBay Media LLC, made the trip to Anaheim, Calif. for NAMM, the International Music Products Association trade show. The largest show of its kind in the United States, NAMM (which originally referred to the National Association of Music Merchants) is as familiar to musicians as the Detroit Auto Show is to the car industry—an event sure to generate excitement and ample editorial content for months to come.
NewBay, however, decided not to wait around for the next editions of its musician magazines to hit the racks or be posted online. Harnessing an innovative means of posting real-time video, audio and text originally developed for live updates from concerts, the editors produced live reports from the show floor, interviewing celebrities, previewing the latest gadgets and filming performances and talks.
Before the end of the month, more than 150,000 hits had been reported for http://LiveFrom.MusicPlayer.com, which gained a life stretching far beyond the end of the trade show. Subsequent press releases and articles featured links to the material. Videos brought people to NewBay’s Music Player Network, home of music news, forums, equipment guides and online TV networks wedding popular brands to original content.
The success of the endeavor has led to plans to expand it. “We are building out what we look on as our LiveFrom portal, which will encompass other shows and events that we attend and own,” says Vice President of Web Development Joe Ferrick.
According to NewBay CEO Steve Palm, the initiative represents an excellent example of the company’s efforts to promote audience overlap between various brands and platforms.
“We’re really focused on putting all of our internal and external efforts toward the notion of ‘in print, online and in-person,’ ” he says. “Our goal is to serve readers and business partners in whatever way they would like to get data and news. Everyone in the company is a participant in this strategy. We’re looking at the whole effort—sales, editorial, design—and presenting to our readers and business partners what we can do as an organization. While other groups are fragmenting, we are taking a much more holistic approach. The integration within vertical markets offers more opportunities for the readers.”
Getting More Ducks in a Row
Implementing a new system for standardizing content management and ad fulfillment is a core priority for Palm, who was brought in as CEO in February 2007.
Five months earlier, in September 2006, NewBay, an affiliate of private-equity firm The Wicks Group of Companies LLC, acquired many assets of CMP Entertainment Media, including Guitar Player, Bass Player and Keyboard, as well as business-to-business titles Pro Sound News, Systems Contractor News, Residential Systems, Videography and Television Broadcast, among others. These titles are now part of a roster of nearly 40 magazines, 13 show dailies, 10 events and 46 online products (Web sites, podcasts, webinars and e-newsletters) in five distinct vertical categories: broadcast/video, audio, music player, systems integration and K-12 education (publications like Technology and Learning, and School CIO). Then, the company expanded its coverage of broadcast and audio in June 2007 by acquiring Imas Publishing.
Integrating these disparate products is the primary goal of a comprehensive redesign built around a new content management system (CMS) built by New Hampshire-based Ektron Inc. “Currently, along with the Ektron installations, we are using some open-source platforms, a CMS called Article Manager and [one] developed by Minnick [Web Services],” says Ferrick.
While the CMP purchase brought in strong, interactive Web sites and forums, these were nevertheless “relatively dispersed in terms of the interactivity of the Web site, the advertising capabilities and, most importantly, the content management of those sites,” Palm says.
The redesign is key to the company’s Web 2.0 strategy moving forward, he says. By the end of 2008, the company hopes to be able to improve data sets in its consumer publications to match those of its b-to-b products, creating new opportunities to reach out in a targeted fashion through e-newsletters and online features aimed at specific audiences.
E-newsletters have been especially important to this effort, proving successful across the company’s portfolio. Palm says editors want the opportunity to post breaking news to a person’s inbox. Better data collection will allow the company to more easily track what people are subscribing to and recommend products through targeted campaigns and services.
“It’s basically about linking the data points that we have,” he says. “We have raw data for magazines, newsletters—that process of linking is complicated and time-consuming, but we are going through that to better serve advertisers and readership.”
“What we are doing is a large data-mining project where we are looking at the information we have from our print subscribers [and] our newsletter subscribers, and cross-referencing it to see where we have audience duplication,” explains Ferrick. “But we are also layering in the contact information of our users that have subscribed to webcasts, attended our live events and even participated in our forums. The goal, since the audiences of our properties overlap to a certain degree, is to find out the different properties that overlap the most or the least, and then cross-promote our products to that audience. We might find that someone who subscribes to EQ magazine has never been approached about Pro Audio Review, or someone who is very active in the Bass Player forums is not a subscriber to the magazine.”
In response to customer needs, some of the company’s Web sites will be heavily video-based, while others will be focused more on breaking news or blogs.
The redesign is already bearing fruit, according to Ferrick. “With the new CMS we’re putting in place, cross-pollinating across all these sites, we’ve been able to take advantage of the forums we have and link them together,” he says. “Let’s say you’re in our Digital Cinematography forum, you will see content from other [sites]. We’ve really seen our forum traffic grow.”
In the consumer-enthusiast realm, forums have become key to driving people to online features, as well as creating a way for editors to keep content fresh and relevant.
A visit to the Keyboard forum, for instance, reveals posted content from NAMM, including videos of new products and interviews with industry people, which direct users to MusicPlayer.com. “The editors also use the forums to discuss upcoming trade shows and events, and then after the event, they discuss what happened at the event,” says Ferrick. “They also use the forums to hype upcoming features in the magazines or follow-up features that will appear on the site.”
A search function on the forum sites allows new users to find answers to commonly asked questions and quickly learn to navigate the forums.
“Forum content is looked at as a very trusted form of content,” Ferrick says. “Editorial content is expert opinion, but to [use] Videography [as an example], there are [participants in that forum] using the products editors are talking about, and this content helps anyone who’s reading it get the job done. There’s also the social component.”
“Someone who visits our forums is apt to come off [the forum] and spend more time and be more interactive with the site itself and the advertisers, which offers up new opportunities for our advertisers to reach those forum users,” Palm says. “Secondarily, our editors are in there getting story ideas and leveraging these forums to communicate and discuss, as well as getting feedback on our podcasts and webinars.”
In the midst of all these e-products, NewBay has not ignored the potential for driving people to print from online and vice versa. Icons within magazines direct people to Web sites for more content and information, Palm says.
“We are very aggressive in promoting the magazines to our online audience,” adds Ferrick. “With the percentage of our online audience that is coming from the search engines, it makes sense to capture new subscribers in this manner. We are also launching digital editions of almost all the magazines, and this will be another opportunity to promote the print products, but in a different format,” he explains.
“We’re evolving the quality of the content and accessibility of content online,” Palm says, “[but] the biggest thing we’re doing is branding all the media together.”
Effective branding is proving to be the most important factor in driving casual Web visitors to other online and print content, to the extent that the company’s redesign is focusing on this aspect more than such fashionable strategies as search engine optimization (SEO).
“A lot of the brands are so well-established, we actually do better marketing … across [other] NewBay brands as opposed to an SEO strategy,” Palm notes. The company also has not seen great value in piggybacking on other social networking sites such as YouTube; instead, it offers users similar video-sharing and community features through its Web sites, which again allows the company to encourage vertical connections among forums and formats for users already more than casually engaged with content.
“The trend we’re seeing from the redesigns is that the offerings you’re going to put on a site need to be offered on every page,” Ferrick notes. “Videos and blogs [need to be placed] throughout your site, because it seems like site users can get a little lazy and don’t want to click to multiple pages.”
Also important within the company’s vertical structure are live events. “We’re leveraging all of our media to support these events and vice versa,” Palm says. “Our own Government Video Tech Expo, the DV Expo East and West … are [b-to-b] type conferences, not necessarily invitation-only, but appropriate for individuals who are focused on government video surveillance [and] AV, and we market to those groups and reach them through our magazine, newsletters, Web sites. There’s a nice linking there between the brands.”
The various platforms pursued by the company are driven by proven brand strength, market feedback and a desire to comprehensively serve audiences and advertisers by touching them with formats that fill key (and in some cases underserved) market niches.
“[Our mediums] all work together, but they all have different value propositions. Research from ABM [American Business Media] and MPA [Magazine Publishers Association] bears this out,” Ferrick says. “Print is a three-dimensional push, a tangible editorial product that takes up space. There’s a great satisfaction from reading a magazine. When people read magazines, they view the advertising, they discover new ideas and concepts, and dig deeper to get more information. On the other hand, you can’t beat online for timeliness of information, for video and audio replication. [With] events, shaking hands face-to-face, there is nothing that beats that in terms of business relationships.”
NewBay serves as a useful example of a company shaping market-data-driven products for a mixed (consumer, enthusiast and b-to-b) audience without the constraints of calcified internal structures or legacy concerns. For NewBay, it’s all about leveraging brand strength in diverse ways, hitching trusted content providers to a supple and market-tested business model.
NewBay, however, decided not to wait around for the next editions of its musician magazines to hit the racks or be posted online. Harnessing an innovative means of posting real-time video, audio and text originally developed for live updates from concerts, the editors produced live reports from the show floor, interviewing celebrities, previewing the latest gadgets and filming performances and talks.
Before the end of the month, more than 150,000 hits had been reported for http://LiveFrom.MusicPlayer.com, which gained a life stretching far beyond the end of the trade show. Subsequent press releases and articles featured links to the material. Videos brought people to NewBay’s Music Player Network, home of music news, forums, equipment guides and online TV networks wedding popular brands to original content.
The success of the endeavor has led to plans to expand it. “We are building out what we look on as our LiveFrom portal, which will encompass other shows and events that we attend and own,” says Vice President of Web Development Joe Ferrick.
According to NewBay CEO Steve Palm, the initiative represents an excellent example of the company’s efforts to promote audience overlap between various brands and platforms.
“We’re really focused on putting all of our internal and external efforts toward the notion of ‘in print, online and in-person,’ ” he says. “Our goal is to serve readers and business partners in whatever way they would like to get data and news. Everyone in the company is a participant in this strategy. We’re looking at the whole effort—sales, editorial, design—and presenting to our readers and business partners what we can do as an organization. While other groups are fragmenting, we are taking a much more holistic approach. The integration within vertical markets offers more opportunities for the readers.”
Getting More Ducks in a Row
Implementing a new system for standardizing content management and ad fulfillment is a core priority for Palm, who was brought in as CEO in February 2007.
Five months earlier, in September 2006, NewBay, an affiliate of private-equity firm The Wicks Group of Companies LLC, acquired many assets of CMP Entertainment Media, including Guitar Player, Bass Player and Keyboard, as well as business-to-business titles Pro Sound News, Systems Contractor News, Residential Systems, Videography and Television Broadcast, among others. These titles are now part of a roster of nearly 40 magazines, 13 show dailies, 10 events and 46 online products (Web sites, podcasts, webinars and e-newsletters) in five distinct vertical categories: broadcast/video, audio, music player, systems integration and K-12 education (publications like Technology and Learning, and School CIO). Then, the company expanded its coverage of broadcast and audio in June 2007 by acquiring Imas Publishing.
Integrating these disparate products is the primary goal of a comprehensive redesign built around a new content management system (CMS) built by New Hampshire-based Ektron Inc. “Currently, along with the Ektron installations, we are using some open-source platforms, a CMS called Article Manager and [one] developed by Minnick [Web Services],” says Ferrick.
While the CMP purchase brought in strong, interactive Web sites and forums, these were nevertheless “relatively dispersed in terms of the interactivity of the Web site, the advertising capabilities and, most importantly, the content management of those sites,” Palm says.
The redesign is key to the company’s Web 2.0 strategy moving forward, he says. By the end of 2008, the company hopes to be able to improve data sets in its consumer publications to match those of its b-to-b products, creating new opportunities to reach out in a targeted fashion through e-newsletters and online features aimed at specific audiences.
E-newsletters have been especially important to this effort, proving successful across the company’s portfolio. Palm says editors want the opportunity to post breaking news to a person’s inbox. Better data collection will allow the company to more easily track what people are subscribing to and recommend products through targeted campaigns and services.
“It’s basically about linking the data points that we have,” he says. “We have raw data for magazines, newsletters—that process of linking is complicated and time-consuming, but we are going through that to better serve advertisers and readership.”
“What we are doing is a large data-mining project where we are looking at the information we have from our print subscribers [and] our newsletter subscribers, and cross-referencing it to see where we have audience duplication,” explains Ferrick. “But we are also layering in the contact information of our users that have subscribed to webcasts, attended our live events and even participated in our forums. The goal, since the audiences of our properties overlap to a certain degree, is to find out the different properties that overlap the most or the least, and then cross-promote our products to that audience. We might find that someone who subscribes to EQ magazine has never been approached about Pro Audio Review, or someone who is very active in the Bass Player forums is not a subscriber to the magazine.”
In response to customer needs, some of the company’s Web sites will be heavily video-based, while others will be focused more on breaking news or blogs.
The redesign is already bearing fruit, according to Ferrick. “With the new CMS we’re putting in place, cross-pollinating across all these sites, we’ve been able to take advantage of the forums we have and link them together,” he says. “Let’s say you’re in our Digital Cinematography forum, you will see content from other [sites]. We’ve really seen our forum traffic grow.”
In the consumer-enthusiast realm, forums have become key to driving people to online features, as well as creating a way for editors to keep content fresh and relevant.
A visit to the Keyboard forum, for instance, reveals posted content from NAMM, including videos of new products and interviews with industry people, which direct users to MusicPlayer.com. “The editors also use the forums to discuss upcoming trade shows and events, and then after the event, they discuss what happened at the event,” says Ferrick. “They also use the forums to hype upcoming features in the magazines or follow-up features that will appear on the site.”
A search function on the forum sites allows new users to find answers to commonly asked questions and quickly learn to navigate the forums.
“Forum content is looked at as a very trusted form of content,” Ferrick says. “Editorial content is expert opinion, but to [use] Videography [as an example], there are [participants in that forum] using the products editors are talking about, and this content helps anyone who’s reading it get the job done. There’s also the social component.”
“Someone who visits our forums is apt to come off [the forum] and spend more time and be more interactive with the site itself and the advertisers, which offers up new opportunities for our advertisers to reach those forum users,” Palm says. “Secondarily, our editors are in there getting story ideas and leveraging these forums to communicate and discuss, as well as getting feedback on our podcasts and webinars.”
In the midst of all these e-products, NewBay has not ignored the potential for driving people to print from online and vice versa. Icons within magazines direct people to Web sites for more content and information, Palm says.
“We are very aggressive in promoting the magazines to our online audience,” adds Ferrick. “With the percentage of our online audience that is coming from the search engines, it makes sense to capture new subscribers in this manner. We are also launching digital editions of almost all the magazines, and this will be another opportunity to promote the print products, but in a different format,” he explains.
“We’re evolving the quality of the content and accessibility of content online,” Palm says, “[but] the biggest thing we’re doing is branding all the media together.”
Effective branding is proving to be the most important factor in driving casual Web visitors to other online and print content, to the extent that the company’s redesign is focusing on this aspect more than such fashionable strategies as search engine optimization (SEO).
“A lot of the brands are so well-established, we actually do better marketing … across [other] NewBay brands as opposed to an SEO strategy,” Palm notes. The company also has not seen great value in piggybacking on other social networking sites such as YouTube; instead, it offers users similar video-sharing and community features through its Web sites, which again allows the company to encourage vertical connections among forums and formats for users already more than casually engaged with content.
“The trend we’re seeing from the redesigns is that the offerings you’re going to put on a site need to be offered on every page,” Ferrick notes. “Videos and blogs [need to be placed] throughout your site, because it seems like site users can get a little lazy and don’t want to click to multiple pages.”
Also important within the company’s vertical structure are live events. “We’re leveraging all of our media to support these events and vice versa,” Palm says. “Our own Government Video Tech Expo, the DV Expo East and West … are [b-to-b] type conferences, not necessarily invitation-only, but appropriate for individuals who are focused on government video surveillance [and] AV, and we market to those groups and reach them through our magazine, newsletters, Web sites. There’s a nice linking there between the brands.”
The various platforms pursued by the company are driven by proven brand strength, market feedback and a desire to comprehensively serve audiences and advertisers by touching them with formats that fill key (and in some cases underserved) market niches.
“[Our mediums] all work together, but they all have different value propositions. Research from ABM [American Business Media] and MPA [Magazine Publishers Association] bears this out,” Ferrick says. “Print is a three-dimensional push, a tangible editorial product that takes up space. There’s a great satisfaction from reading a magazine. When people read magazines, they view the advertising, they discover new ideas and concepts, and dig deeper to get more information. On the other hand, you can’t beat online for timeliness of information, for video and audio replication. [With] events, shaking hands face-to-face, there is nothing that beats that in terms of business relationships.”
NewBay serves as a useful example of a company shaping market-data-driven products for a mixed (consumer, enthusiast and b-to-b) audience without the constraints of calcified internal structures or legacy concerns. For NewBay, it’s all about leveraging brand strength in diverse ways, hitching trusted content providers to a supple and market-tested business model.
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So what exactly is it about NewBay's approach that could be seen as being even remotely "Web 2.0"? Seems to me like everything they're doing is straight out of a playbook written in 1998. In reading this article it would seem to me that PubExec has no clue as to what "web 2.0" even is. Granted it is a rather cloudy concept to begin with, but that does not excuse you from having to be somewhere in the ballpark... especially if you're going to run it on your cover.
What would be a story worthy of your headline (and cover) would be if NewBay was opening up their data via some kind of API, giving some control over how it gets shaped to users, letting their readers mash it with other services to create something entirely new. THAT would be closer to the "web 2.0" ethos. Or if they DID utilize the existing social frameworks to complement their own offerings (hello YouTube API) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. THAT would be closer to the "web 2.0" ethos. Or if they used that information about their readers to introduce them to each other, to start conversations. THAT would be closer to the "web 2.0" ethos.
At the end of the day those of us that love magazines, that want to see them thrive on the web beyond v.2.0 need to start thinking about this stuff a bit more critically. Publishers need more from you guys than regurgitated buzwords... they need inspiration and ideas.
I understand where your question is coming from, but I think there are some points about the article that were missed -- perhaps we (the editors) didn't call them out enough.
The article's main point was to highlight the strategy that NewBay is putting in place moving forward, not that it has already implemented; it has a base that it is starting from, and from that potential, it has a plan for a comprehensive redesign of its Web strategy ... forums might be "old news" to many publishers, but the key to NewBay's strategy seems to be that its forums are quite successful and it plans to tap the success of those forums (which are considered, I believe, the earliest form of Web 2.0, before the term was used -- enabling users to interact with one another) through a major data minining initiative that will help turn the forum visitors into customers of the company's other products.
The main point is that the article is focusing a profitable strategy that is being implemented NOW ... I think, or hope, that many of our readers will get a great deal out of looking at their own potential for building a profitable strategy out of forums and reader-comment areas, blogs and reviews, etc., whatever the 2.0, or even 1.0, tactic ... it's the strategy behind it that makes it work.
We know many companies have more "cutting-edge" 2.0 tactics than NewBay may have right now, but that's why we didn't call the article "cutting-edge 2.0 tactics" ... It's a strategy to move forward from a point where many of our readers are right now, and we did feel that most companies could learn something from the data mining and branding messages that were conveyed. We have seen that NewBay has had a lot of successes and has a great vision for the future in its markets.
Wow, if only a fraction of all that were true NewBay's web sites would be kick a$$! Nice that the reporter just lapped up whatever Steve and Joe dished out! Did you even visit the sites?