I used the stats from this post as a way to jump into the whole issue of response rates in digital magazines and how they are being audted.

http://jgordon5.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/do-digital-magazine-open-rates-matter.html

Josh Gordon

You have some good points about the quality of readership for digital magazines. If controlled circulation is important, then it is difficult to give the same value to readership from other sources such as social media. The numbers I have quoted should not include any sources other than the subscribed readers – effectively reducing the readship stats.

I take what you say about readability, although with a decent monitor, many titles are – in my opinion – pretty readable today. I’m sure that as both the magazine’s technology and the display technology improve, the readability will get better.

Finally I completely agree with your plea “don’t kill the website yet”. In fact I don’t see digital magazines ever killing websites: I believe that magazines and website do different jobs, and are used in a completely different way. In the long term, when the reading experience of digital magazines is good, then I’d see both digital magazines and websites working in synergy.

Mike

The problem is that the readers who are invited via email by magazine publishers to open the digital version represent their core audience, probably comprised of subscribers to the print version and other carefully pre-selected individuals. If they don’t open the magazine, you have a serious problem because you need to control how your readership evolves over time. You can’t really control who will post a link on facebook and Twitter and when. So, your readership could drop dramatically a quarter, dragging ad revenues down and possibly killing a title.

Frankly looking at digital magazines like the example you have listed in the article, I can understand why people refrain from reading them; they are quite simply to hard to read. If magazines and newspaper had been printed in a format that required readers to carry around their magnifying glass with them, both media would have die a long time ago. Even the social networking sites of the time (beauty salons, pubs, etc…) would not have been able to save them

Digital magazines have a future because they are more in tune with our digital lifestyle. But publishers need to do a better job at providing a pleasant reading experience. So, don’t kill the web site yet. The future digital magazine could be a fusion web site / publication.