It’s always sad to see publications close, even when you know that the publisher has already made the decision to stop publishing. I started this morning optimistically, enjoying David Manners’ view that there has been “one heck of a turnaround” in our industry. Then I was brought down to earth by the following email:

Dear M Maynard,

Our parent company, Reed Elsevier, announced in July of 2009 its intentions to substantially exit its Reed Business Information U.S. publishing business, while retaining other businesses. Over the past several months, multiple publishing brands have been divested. On April 16, 2010, we announced the closure of the remaining publishing brands and their associated products and services. Consequently, the April 2010 issue was the final issue of Semiconductor International Magazine and our web sites will cease operating as of April 30, 2010.

We are proud of the role we have played in informing our industry over the years and it has been our pleasure to serve you.

Regards,

The Staff of Semiconductor International Magazine

I know that publishing faces a very challenging future, even if the recovery proves to be strong and sustained, but even so I wonder whether some publishers might be wondering if they were a little too hasty in making decisions to close publications. At Napier, we’ve seen our clients deliver very impressive results as we pull out of the recession, and I hope that a recovery in marketing spend across our industry will help ensure the security and stability of the electronics media around the world.

Tags: Digital Magazines and Print Publications, Online

In our industry there is always a debate about whether engineers or journalists make the best editors, Personally, I think both can be successful, but as an engineer myself I’m always going to be particularly pleased when another techhie succeeds. So I was delighted when I got a chance to interview Ian Poole, who started his Radio-Electronics.com site as a sideline, and has seen it grow to the point that it now attracts more traffic than many sites from mainstream publications. Ian has a lot of interesting things to say about running a site, SEO and online advertising.

So you are an engineer who has decided to move into publishing. Are you nuts? Haven’t you heard about the financial challenges facing magazines?
Well in many ways I probably am nuts – but I have always enjoyed investigating how new technologies work and writing about them. As for the challenges facing magazines now, I would agree that things are very difficult, but at Radio-Electronics.com we have relatively low operating costs so I think we will be able to weather the storm and establish ourselves as a major player before long. Our aim is to carve a niche for ourselves now, allowing people to take advantage of good advertising rates especially at the moment when times are hard – but keeping them low even in the long term.

Why did you decide to start Radio-Electronics.com? Did you always want to make money from it?
No not really – tracing the site right to the very beginning it all started with some free web-space that came with an email address. Wanting make use of it and experiment with the Internet, I decided to use it to advertise some books I had written. This lead to becoming an Amazon affiliate, and then to attract visitors I needed to create good content. Taking out the Radio-Electronics.com domain name around 2002, the site has grown over the years and we now are developing it full-time.
We are now focusing on reaching the electronics engineers who make the fundamental technical decisions. The by-line for the site is “Resources and Analysis for Electronics Engineers.” We are taking contributions from industry experts to provide analysis, technology trends, case studies and the like, and this is under-pinned by the reference material which is written in house. In this way we aim to provide a useful knowledge resource for the engineering community

The site has just run Google ads until now. Why didn’t you try to get display advertising?
Up until recently, we have been doing quite a lot of electronics engineering consultancy work in addition to running the site. During this period Google Ads have been a good way of providing a small revenue without the need to commit time to going out to sell the advertising space. Selling advertising takes time, so we focused our activities on providing good content for the site.
Now we are devoting virtually all our time to the website, have decided to sell advertising to bring in the revenue needed to develop the site further. To help with this we have installed a full advertisement management system, upgraded the site, and now we have the ability to sell the advertising space properly.

What’s the difference in revenue between running Google ads and display advertising?
Google Ads are a great way of running small advertising campaigns on a low budget. However we have been trying to create a top quality website where top line companies feel happy to advertise. Unfortunately Google Ads do not provide much revenue – typically eCPMs less than £1, and often comparatively irrelevant advertisements come up on the pages. To enable the best results to be achieved we believe we need to work with the advertisers on an individual basis to place the best advertisements in the best positions. While many publications charge CPM rates above £70 dependent upon the position and ad format, we are significantly undercutting this, while still aiming to provide a good service.

Are the costs of running display advertising just the commission for the sales team?
A good question! And to give a straight answer – no. While we have to pay the advertising sales team, we have also invested a huge amount of time in creating good quality content as well as developing the appearance and functionality of the site. We plan to continue this trend but to do this we need to finance the site and grow it accordingly.

Google is planning to resell display advertising space in a similar way to their AdWords content network. So why are you recruiting sales people?
There are a number of ad marketplace sites out there. These are fine, and we may well use them to a small degree. However, to develop effective advertising campaigns, the advertising needs to be properly tailored to match the site and advertiser. This cannot be done so easily through the marketplace platform which is good to high volumes of advertisements to generalist sites. We are aiming at a niche market where content has to be up to date and highly technical to attract the right visitors. This type of site does not lend itself well to the marketplace approach.

Radio-electronics.com has got some impressive traffic figures without much promotion or a sister print title. How did you do it?
We have tried long and hard to create good useful content. We have seen the traffic rise, particularly in the areas where we have spent time providing the best content. We are always aiming for the “best on the net” (and we hope we achieve it) and this seems to pay off. We have seen traffic rise steadily and we now regularly serve over 300 000 pages a month.

Do you think print magazines have a future? What about digital distribution of magazines?
I love reading print magazines, but they are all finding it more difficult these days. I think there will always be some magazines around as we all love to read from paper rather than a screen. However I feel that the majority of electronics titles will go digital-only in one form or another before too long. I suppose that is one of the reasons why we have never considered having a paper version of Radio-Electronics.com.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time, when you’re not writing about electronics?
I have plenty to fill my time – for example our daughter is getting married later this year so there is plenty to do in organizing that. However I also enjoy many other activities and pastimes – reading, music (of many sorts), eating out, travelling and photography – we visited some friends in South Africa last year and also went on safari for which I just had to get a long lens for the SLR – fortunately I managed to get some shots I was really pleased with. In addition to that we are also involved with our local church.

What’s your favourite gadget?
Mmm that’s difficult – possible the camera, or may be the iPod. Not sure which.

Tags: Editors, Interviews, Online, UK

Apple announced last week that they were introducing a new mobile advertising format, the iAd. The new adverts will work on the yet unreleased iPhone OS 4 and run on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. AppScout gives a good overview of the limited information about iAds that has been made available to date.

Although mobile adverts are usually associated with consumer advertising (all the demos Apple gave were of consumer ads and in-game advertising is probably the going to be the biggest user of the format), I think the new format could have a significant impact on our industry, and many other technical B2B markets. Here’s why:

Trade press publishers are increasingly looking towards digital distribution, and many are talking of iPhone/iPad reader applications. iAds presents an opportunity to charge a premium for rich media advertising at a time when most marketing managers view adverts on digital copies as less valuable than print.

iAds will allow more control, allowing advertisers to be sure that their advert has been seen. This will overcome the concern of many advertisers that people will not view the page on which their advert is placed (a situation that is analogous to placing ads in a print copy, but one that appears to concern marketing managers more in this age of measurable digital marketing).

iAds will present a revenue opportunity to the companies providing the digital magazine technology. As competition hots up in the digital space, I expect the cost of publishing digitally to drop dramatically (in fact it’s pretty cheap already), and any way of increasing revenue will be jumped on by the likes of Nxtbook, Ceros and the many other players in this market.

iAds will allow a pay-per-impression approach for advertising associated with digital magazines. In one stroke the question of digital magazine readership disappears, making advertisers more comfortable about advertising in digital copies.

Tags: Digital Magazines and Print Publications, Misc Marketing, Online

I love the announcement that I’ve just got from Weka: it starts “There is nothing special in a trade publisher relaunching one of its websites.” Absolutely true (I rarely write about relaunched sites). But it was great to see such a realistic and honest press release – and it did convince me to read the whole announcement!

Weka went on to point out that although relaunches weren’t special, they felt that Elektroniknet.de was special, and I guess you can’t argue with any publication that is number one in its market.

Great announcement from Weka – clear, honest and in everyday English (not corporate PR code). Oh, and nice job on the website relaunch – looks great and even someone with my limited German can find what they want quickly and easily.

So I guess this is proof that you don’t need to dress up an announcement to get someone to write about it. I suppose this means I should look again at that release I’ve just written!

Tags: elektroniknet, Online, Weka

What do you do when you have created a pile of great video content? ICC Media, who have been building their library for some time, think that the answer is to create a video portal. The publisher has just launched www.Embedded-News.tv (and credit to them for also registering www.EmbeddedNews.tv). I’m sure that the importance of video is going to continue to increase in importance, and congratulate ICC Media for making the most of their content. ICC has also done a good job of linking to the video site from their main www.embedded-know-how.com site.

Tags: Germany, ICC Media, Online, Video

Sadly the online publication WhatsNewinMobile.com has closed. When I wrote about the launch, I liked the concept of a publication that covered topics “from chipsets to handsets – and beyond”, but it appears that this vertical approach didn’t find favour with sufficient readers or advertisers. The site is already down.

Tags: Online

EE Times Group put on an interesting presentation during Embedded World to talk about their plans for the future, and clearly most of the future is online. They plan to launch a social networking community called EE Life (although to be honest it really seemed to be a revamp of their existing forums).

The focus for EE Times is clearly to reach people – particularly in Europe – through online activities. Of course the situation is confused by the fact that EBP, publisher of EE Times Europe, is effectively competing for the European online audience (and arguably the worldwide online audience). However, I was pleased to see that EE Times Group seems to be trying to identify new approaches that deliver value to both the audience and advertisers.

I was particularly interested to hear about some successes with webinars that require attendees to pay to attend. If EE Times can negotiate the path between ensuring that content delivers great value for money for the audience whilst still providing a platform for the company presenting (i.e. the “advertiser”), then this could be a great source of both revenue for EE Times Group as well as providing an engaged audience for the advertiser. The test will be whether EE Times has the strength to stop companies turning these events into puffy product pitches. I hope the approach works, and would expect to see other publishers follow suit.

It’s interesting that EE Times Group is openly saying that the time where all online information is free is about to end. Paid-for webinars are just the start of the content for which they will charge, and the group is following in the footsteps of some mainstream titles, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. Although this isn’t going to make me many friends amongst readers, I think that paywalls for high quality information are inevitable. Of course the question is where the bar will be set: I guess the line will be different from one industry to the next – and suspect that engineers might be very reluctant to part with money for anything but the highest value content. I can’t see sites that simply use press release information and derive most of their traffic from Google getting paying subscribers, but it’s not clear whether curation of good content will be enough or if people will only pay for unique content that is written in-house and that adds substantial intellectual or technical value.

I guess the good news for publishers is that publications in our industry have – and still do – get paying subscribers. Examples range from Microprocessor Report, a publication I subscribed to when I was an engineer and that now costs more than $1500 for an annual international subscription to local language titles such as ElectroniqueS and Elektronik.

EE Times Group also gave a “sneak preview” of their embedded research study. Of course it’s great information – it always is. Like most people at the event, however I was disappointed that the slides were rushed through so quickly that it was impossible to take in all the data – I didn’t know whether EE Times Group wanted us to know the results or not! However it was great to see that FreeRTOS was included in the study for the first time, and can now claim to be “the world’s most popular RTOS”. FreeRTOS isn’t currently a Napier client, but what Richard Barry has done amazes me, and I’m more than happy to give him a plug!

Tags: EE Times, Online, Social Media

EE Times Europe has refreshed the layout of the website. The new design maintains the familiar EE Times look, so readers should not have any major problems with the new site.

At the same time EBP has quietly shifted from the EETimes.eu domain to surprisingly unwieldy electronics-eetimes.com. The old local domains such as eetuk.com route to individual landing pages, although the content on these pages is the same as the site’s home page. This presumably allows EE Times to easily reverse their decision to drop the local sites.

Quite why the European site has chosen to switch domains hasn’t been made public. A quick whois lookup shows that the ownership of all the “old” domains has not been transferred to EBP, suggesting that perhaps they didn’t gain control over these domains when acquiring the rights to publish EE Times Europe.

A quick search on Google for “EE Times Europe” brings up results from the old eetimes.eu in first place, eetuk.com is next, and then results from eetimes.com appear. The new domain electronics-eetimes.com makes its first appearance at seventh in the SERP. Searching for “EE Times” didn’t produce any results from the new domain until the third page.

Of course this is early days for the domain and the old eetimes.eu domain continues to redirect to the new domain, so I don’t expect any immediate problems other than perhaps email newsletters getting caught in spam filters until recipients whitelist the new domain. The long-term implications, however, are interesting. Presumably EBP is trying to increase the total traffic to the EE Times Europe site, rather than focusing specifically on growing a European audience. Whether this is what advertisers want remains to be seen. I’ll also be watching to see if EE Times Group decides to do anything different with the “old” domains.

Tags: EE Times, Online

I’m delighted when publishers see new technologies as an opportunity rather than a threat, particularly when they use that technology to launch new media products. A great example of grabbing these opportunities is the launch of Electronics-video.com, a new site that provides a YouTube-like resource of videos that are all relevant to our industry.

I’m a great believer that video will be an increasingly important medium for B2B technology marketing. Like any other medium, however, distribution is the key to success. Although there is good distribution through some of the existing publications, as well as other sites such as Dev-Monkey that are focussed on video content, I think Electronics-video.com fills a glaring gap in the market: attempting to provide a resource of all relevant video content along with basic curation into channels, and have been talking to the site owners for some time about the idea.

In addition to allowing anyone to upload relevant videos, the site also allows users and publishers to pull videos from YouTube. This approach makes it really easy for marketers to post once on YouTube and then pull in the video to Electronics-Video.com. By avoiding the need to upload twice the site saves time and will – I’m sure – encourage more people to upload video.

Given that much of the content will be available on other sites, Electronics-Video.com needs to deliver just one thing: views! If the site can deliver a reasonable number of views, and if the various paid-for promotions that the site plans to offer result in a significant number of views, then I’m sure it’s going to be a great success. I’m optimistic about the future of the site – in fact the first two vendor channels are both Napier clients!

Tags: Electronics-video, Online, Video

I’m delighted to see that Electronics Weekly has launched a blog about test and certification that is written by our client TRaC. The engineers at TRaC have superb knowledge about this subject, which is not surprising considering they are the leading UK test and certification company. They’ve been supplying posts to EW for some time, so the blog already has some fascinating posts.

Tags: Blogs, Clients, Electronics, Electronics Weekly, News About Napier, Online, UK

ED Europe was the first magazine in the European electronics media to opt for an entirely digital distribution, a move that has been reasonably successful, particularly in terms of readership as they achieve one of the highest open rates in the industry. Despite the popularity with readers, they have attracted relatively few advertisers, a problem that I believe is down to their instance that advertisers us a text box format.

Not any more! I’m delighted that Penton has decided to let advertisers use conventional display formats such as full page and half page adverts. Although the landscape layout will mean most advertisers need to modify their copy, they will be able to place adverts with graphical content and a corporate look and feel.

I’m delighted that Penton has made this long-overdue move, and I’d predict that the option of a more conventional layout will increase the number of companies placing adverts in ED Europe during 2010.

Tags: Advertising, ED Europe, Electronics, Europe, Online, Penton

Many agencies are experimenting with social media: at Napier we’re very active using a range of online tools to improve our communication and that of our clients. I’ve recently received a copy of an extremely interesting dissertation about the use of social media by PR agencies written by Sophie Plastow that is based upon new rese4arch. I’d thoroughly recommend that anyone working in or managing an agency reads it: if you want a copy you can request one from Sophie.

Tags: CIE, Clients, Email, ESE, google, Misc Marketing, Online