Time Discovers That Customizing Print Magazines Is Hard
from the not-so-easy dept
Last month, Time Magazine made some news with its plan to experiment with custom print magazines called "Mine," where subscribers could pick and choose from a collection of magazines to create their own semi-custom magazine. Think of it as an extremely limited RSS aggregator on paper. Sorta. Except... apparently Time is still working out the glitches. The first editions were sent out this week, which is when people noticed that what they got often had nothing to do with what they asked for. In other words, "Mine" became "Yours" or "Some Guy's." Perhaps it's best to stick with the RSS aggregator.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: customization, magazines
Companies: time
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breaking!!!!
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Digital paper
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvtxupQmRSA
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Swing-and-a-miss
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Re: Swing-and-a-miss
Is killing journalism... and brought a whole new life to the internet.
People want reporting they can trust.
Almost all of the 'major' news outlets, discarded truth and trust, decades ago.
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Bad Ratios
I wondered for a while why print media didn't just sell ads online to pay for content the same way they sold ads in print, but I'm sure that's why.
Can you imagine following a link online and ending up on a page of nothing but ads with a link at the bottom to yet another page, and so on 10 times before you ever got to the content? It would be the last time you ever went to that site.
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Everything has bugs
I think this is a rather clever thing for Time to try. OK, they had glitches during rollout - so what else is new? I see no reason why this kind of thing can't work. Advertisers crossed over to printing out unique mailings for each recipient years ago. Sure, that's more expensive than sending out copies of the same supermarket ads - but the technology is there, even for very large campaigns with complex, multi-page, full-color material. As soon as you've cross the line to generating the page content direct from the digital description - rather than first producing, say, an offset plate and then generating page copies from that - it's "just" a matter of how fast you can generate new digital content. And machines have gotten very, very fast at that.
Whether this actually helps Time in the market is an entirely separate question. It really comes down to where people find value in Time. Obviously, they traditional *have* found value - they've bought subscriptions. Whether the combination of a traditional very good delivery medium - easy to carry, doesn't need charging, costs very little to replace if you lose it - with digital-age choice of content is something people want enough to pay for ... well, we'll just have to see.
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The future is now
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personalization
Clearly there is a real opportunity for someone to develop the interests or content selection process beyond 5 simple questions (eg., do I crave sushi or pizza?) to help the reader and publisher understand what content that the reader wants to see, and perhaps even pay for, in print.
Great to see leadership in action.
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