ABM’s year-end report shows B2B media grew revenue overall, though print ad pages continue depressed

The year 2012 was hoped to be one of recovery for the B2B media business in the U.S., and while total industry revenue did manage some growth, print ad pages continues their decline.

Source: ABM BIN Report

Ad pages fell 6.94 percent for 2012, according to the ABM's year-end report, though December saw declines moderate somewhat, with ad pages down 6.69 percent versus the same month in 2011.

The results, though, have to be disappointing. 2011 eked out a microscopic increase in ad pages following a number of years with declines. B2B publishers have, as a result, been trimming back their magazine portfolios in response.

Overall, B2B media grew 4.3 percent for the year, led by strong trade show growth – by far the biggest revenue generator in the industry. Both data/business information services and digital advertising also grew, with digital ad revenue accounting for 16 percent of all B2B media revenue, according to the ABM (up from just over 12 percent in 2010).

The report for overall revenue in B2B is compiled by the ABM from its own BIN report for magazine advertising, the CEIR, the Center for Exhibition Industry Research report for trade shows, Outsell's report for data and business information, and ABM estimates based on the Interactive Advertising Bureau Ad Revenue Report.

Side note: the association continues to maintain its own website along side its new site at thenewabm.com following the association's merger with the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

Another side note: I've always been skeptical about revenue reports from third parties. Ad pages can be counted pretty cleanly, though things like make-goods and other giveaways end up in the final reports. But revenue reports assume a media property is getting its rate card rates. So it is best to look at both the ad page and revenue reports, compare them and come to your own conclusions based on your own experience.

Distributor brings its B2B magazine 'Chilled' to the iPad in a hybrid digital magazine for the Apple Newsstand

Downloading the first digital edition of Chilled for the iPad one anticipates that the digital edition will be a native tablet edition as the file is over 150 MB in size. But opening the first inside the new Apple Newsstand app one immediately sees a two-page ad spread over two tablet pages, typical of a replica edition.

What the reader gets, though, is a hybrid edition: a digital magazine where the print ads are reproduced exactly as in the print magazine, mostly without any enhancements, and the editorial is reformatted for reading on the tablet.

The digital publishing platform used here appears to be Mag+ based on its navigation and overall look. The initial disappointment is seeing the ads unchanged quickly disappears as the reader moves on to the editorial. Like many first digital issues, it is hard to get advertisers and their agencies to being swapping out creative for the digital edition, and many publishers are leery of crossing circulation audit rules.

But I doubt the publisher of Chilled is too concerned with circulation rules in the same way a consumer magazine normally would be. Chilled is a trade publication, with a vast majority of its readership being bartenders (the rest being consumer), according to the magazine's publisher Jeff Greif. This explains why the magazine is free to download within the Newsstand app.

Left and Middle: a 2-page ad spread over two iPad pages shows that this is a hybrid edition, where the ads are unchanged from print; Right: an article with sliding photos shows that the editorial pages have been reformatted for the tablet edition

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The magazine is published by Chilled Media LLC which is an offshoot of Chilled Distributors LLC – in other words, the beverage magazine is tied to the beverage distribution business. (The app appears under the developer account name of Anthony Graziano, president of both companies, and listed as managing editor of the magazine.)

The tie to the distribution business is a bit like those grocery store publications that contain ads from the food brands – in other words, its good to be on both sides of the business. This is something that we will see more and more of, and while some might call this content marketing, it is a little more complicated than that when we actually see it in print (or digital, as the case may be).

The magazine has had digital editions in the past as the title can be found inside the Zinio digital newsstand. RCS Publisher Services is credited with distribution services in the magazine and they may have had a hand in the digital edition.

The app may just be part of the publisher's overall digital distribution strategy, by creating a hybrid edition they have published a well-designed, easy to read digital edition, making many right choices.

Wanderful Media raises $9 million more in funding from its newspaper investment partners

Just four months ago Wanderful Media, the Los Gatos digital local discovery shopping company, announced that it had added $5 million in new funding. Today, the company acquired iCircular in November, announced that it had raised an additional $9 million. The new round of funding brings its total up to $36 million.

The company which hopes to find a way to save the circulars business for newspapers is backed by 12 major newspaper companies: Advance, Belo, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett, GateHouse, Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, McClatchy, and The Washington Post Co.

Wanderful Media's CEO is Ben. T. Smith, IV, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who was the founder of MerchantCircle (the COO comes from that start-up, as well).

Whether this is just more money circling the drain is to be seen, but the investments by major newspaper companies does follow a pattern whereby newspaper execs outsource their digital media solutions rather than build them in-house. In the print world, newspapers generally eschew any solutions that need outside vendors to succeed. They may not build their own printing presses but they spend millions making sure they are housed, maintained and operated by their own personnel.

In digital, however, newspaper companies have invested in outside firms in attempts to drive classified advertising – with the result, of course, that the category has almost completely disappeared. Worse, the financial commitments made have tied the hands of newspaper executives that would normally have been more aggressive in finding their own digital advertising solutions.

For many newspaper companies, the circular is one of the last profitable advertising segments they possess, the reason many still subscribe to the Sunday newspaper. Last November iCircular, the company many hoped would save the category, and an A.P. initiative, was acquired by Wanderful Media for "less than eight figures" (though that would still represent a large portion of Wanderful Media's own funding). Wanderful had previously bought a print to digital conversion company located in Chico, where it still maintains its development and operations office.

Wanderful's own product is called Find & Save, which for now is a web-based solution found on such newspaper websites as the San Francisco Chronicle. The company says its next move is to bring the solution to mobile and tablet devices where geolocation and push notification services can be employed.

a+ magazine: a free Newsstand magazine launches with some lofty goals; developed, released by f2f 6Sixty Digital

Looking for the first time at a new tablet-only magazine the first thing I want to see is what platform was used to create the digital magazine. Then i want to know in what orientation the magazine is to be read, and finally the file size. Then I can actually start enjoying the magazine itself.

a+ magazine presents some surprises. It's file size of 111 MB is so modest one would assume only one orientation is supported (not true) or that there would not be much interactivity (also not true).

The magazine was founded and is edited by Smokey D. Fontaine, which the app itself was built by f2f 6Sixty Digital.

The new publication is free of charge to download and subscribe to thanks to Toyota. The app opens up to the words "powered by Avalon" and the first issue itself is packed with ads for the Avalon. Launching with a single sponsor is a great way to go, something that I would think B2B publishers might want to try. Usually single sponsors are the way to go when trying to build up paid circulation to the point where ads can be sold, but by going with a free circulation model the publisher probably can hit that point much quicker
The new digital magazine's mission statement makes pretty interesting reading:

At no other point in history has digital culture been so clearly visible.

At no other point have clicks, touches & swipes so clearly defined what we like, love and feel about the world around us.

The rise of digital has brought with it an opportunity to express ourselves in ways never thought possible, to create and dream and match our imaginations with boundless possibility.

But there is a price to be paid...

The digital moment has also brought with it a transience, a nagging feeling of emptiness built into the pixels that flash across our irresistible screens.

So where is the experiencer that gives us something to truly remember? Where is the platform that dazzles us with the beauty of our creativity?

The answer is here...

There is more but you can go ahead and read the rest in the free digital magazine. A variation of the mission statement can be found in the app description, as well.

The new app has been sitting in my iPad for a couple of weeks. Since then an update has been issued to fix bugs. The app is universal, which I'm not sure was a good idea being that the design does not support the iPhone 5. Launching a digital magazine that can also be read on smartphones is a huge temptation for many publishers, I'm sure. But unless the publisher is designing a "The Magazine" or 29th Street Publishing type of publication it is usually a big mistake (though I like the original BJPhoto app that used Mag+ to create its mobile edition).

Hearst's Esquire magazine launches weekly tablet editions inside their Newsstand app to attract new readers

Hears Magazine's Esquire has begun publishing weekly tablet editions inside of its iPad Newsstand app. The weekly editions will be priced at $0.99 a piece, but will be free to those readers who already are subscribing to the iPad edition and will appear every Thursday other than on the week the main magazine becomes available.

Of course, print readers, who already are forced to subscribe again to access the digital editions, are once again locked out.

"Esquire Weekly is a little gift," writes editor in chief David Granger inside the first weekly edition. "To you, yes, our readers on the iPad. But to ourselves, too. Every time we expand Esquire's purview, each time we find a new way to broaden the topics we cover and morph the ways in which we cover them, it offers us new opportunities that always, sooner or later, surprise us by blossoming into something we really like, something really good."

The new weekly edition is, as you'd expect, not a massive issue. But it contains a fair, and maybe even generous amount of material. This isn't a Kindle Single, this is an actual tablet weekly magazine.

The design is consistent with Esquire's native tablet design (they are using the Adobe DPS) and is not overly complicated. But Esquire's staff is large enough to handle this (easy for me to say, right?) and so the added real estate can serve not only editorial purposes but advertising ones, as well.

Further, this move will reinforce Hearst's not so subtle attempt to drive readers to digital delivery. Though they do not say so, their policy of forcing print readers to choose between the postal service and Apple's Newsstand is leading to Hearst being able to brag about its digital numbers while simultaneously driving down print production costs.

"With the evolving ways our app subscribers and Esquire.com readers seek and interact with the magazine’s material, a weekly digital edition provides them with another way to access Esquire’s rich editorial on their tablet in an easily digestible format," Granger said in the magazine's announcement. "The weekly edition blends the best of new and traditional media and includes long-form content, recurring columns, video and more from our renowned writers covering a wide range of men’s lifestyle topics."

As for the app itself, Hearst will need to issue an update soon. Recent reader reviews inside the App Store have been universally bad due to continuing bugs involving issue downloads. The app, come to think of it, may not be the source of the problem, as download issues are often caused by the hosting service, subscription verification services, etc. Nonetheless, readers are not happy about the problems, though the new weekly issues may placate a few of them.

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Here is a brief walk-though the first weekly issue of Esquire:

B2B tablet magazines - Part 2: QHSE Focus Magazine launches new Newsstand app, instantly claims to be the #1 magazine (on the iPad, that is)

Another B2B magazine launch that is using the MagCast platform is QHSE Focus Magazine. The app was originally launched in April but a new app has made its way into the Newsstand, most likely to house two separate editions of the magazine, though there appears to be only one in the library right now.

The app description says that it is the "world’s No. 1 iPad magazine for Quality, HSE, Lean and 6 Sigma Professionals!" but since I am quite sure that it is the ONLY iPad magazine Quality, HSE, Lean and 6 Sigma professionals the claim can be taken with a grain of salt.

Like most MagCast digital magazines the design is pretty simplistic, and not exactly reflecting that it was produced by a seasoned magazine art director. Most of the photography looks to have come from stock photo libraries rather than being shot specifically for the magazine.

The magazine is published by Roman Gurbanov, who is from Kazakhstan and is the QHSE & Sustainability Manager at ERSAI Marine, LLC, according to Gurbanov's LinkedIn profile.

Here is the publisher's own promotional video for the magazine:

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When the B2B online media company VerticalNet was launched in the nineties, the executives went after both B2B print magazine editors and their ad sales staff. Print publishers for a brief time had to try and keep their revenue producers loyal as staffers were lured away with the promise of stock options. Losing an editor was one thing, but many B2B publishers really feared losing their ad sales staffs.

Today, though, with the emphasis on paid subscriptions, I am not seeing many ad people launching their own digital magazines. If they were we might be seeing B2B print publishers react more aggressively to any perceived threat from digital publications. For the most part there is no threat.

But I think that is going to be changing in the months to come. I know of several titles that will be launched this year that could shake things up a bit. The first B2B digital magazine that is launched, for instance, containing ads for the number one company in the industry will get the attention of traditional B2B publishers in a hurry.