How to scale a digital magazine
Technical and Strategic Keys to Scaling the Digital Version of a Magazine or Newspaper.
3 mins read
Most common challenges in Digital Magazines and effective strategies to overcome them
Do you know what you need to do to grow your audience? Or why you have a certain number of subscribers rather than a different figure? Or the reasons why they subscribed or stopped reading?
In the following articles, I have aimed to outline the most crucial aspects of scaling a magazine, with a strong focus on effective technologies and strategies.
Although my expertise extends beyond media, having developed numerous projects for the Vocento/ABC group, and served as Head of Digital for Monocle magazine in London, has significantly deepened my understanding of the digital dimensions of this sector.
To keep this concise, I have focused on the following key areas:
- Content: How to structure and create content to optimize reach, minimize time, and eliminate bottlenecks. How to avoid errors during the publication process.
- Advertising: How to structure, manage, and measure it, and ways to maximize revenue.
- Audience: How to enhance their interaction with our content, convert readers into subscribers, and encourage recommendations. How to manage this process effectively.
- Communications: How, when, where, and how often to communicate. Ensure respect for preferences and legality.
- Analytics: Knowledge is power—Measure everything, optimize everything, particularly focusing on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
- Design: How to design in a structured manner to reduce development time and enhance user engagement.
- Technology and Tools: How to integrate components effectively so that everything functions seamlessly. Which tools to use for each of the previously mentioned points.
As you may already know, advertising is the primary source of revenue for digital media, followed by paid subscriptions.
To effectively sell advertising, we need to generate and ensure consumption of content. The greater the volume of content, the more advertising spaces we have. Ultimately, the larger our audience, the more revenue we can generate from these spaces, whether by charging more or through increased views and clicks.
With the first three points, we generate volume. Through communications, we manage the frequency of consumption.
Analytics allow us to measure quality and make necessary adjustments to volume and frequency among other metrics.
Thanks to thoughtful design (UI + UX), we not only boost content consumption but also simplify tasks like subscribing.
Finally, with cutting-edge technology, we optimize all preceding elements and automate tasks.
Before We Begin...
What challenges might I face when managing a digital magazine?
Managing the online version of a magazine is no easy task; indeed, it can be as complex as managing a print publication, with vulnerabilities such as hacker attacks, potential damage to online reputation through comments, unexpected server cost overruns, legal issues, changes in search engine algorithms, and constant technical errors.
Additionally, the immediacy and urgency of digital publications often lead to human errors in the publishing process.
Our goal is to ensure that, despite these complexities, the business operates smoothly like clockwork and continues to grow.