brand basis. Within the next five years or so, I’d imagine most of our magazines will have an archive of back copies.”
Although all-access archive content
is perhaps the most obvious model for mining a magazine’s longtail, there are likely other options – options key player Hearst may be exploring. “A meaningful portion (of single-copy iPad sales) is for issues that are no longer available for sale,” Hearst president David Carey said. “We have a lot of evergreen content – how can we have that have a longer life now?”
Ask a few Condé Nast titles, like fitness magazine Self, or news/literary mag The Atlantic. Both offer single-copy iPad versions through their own apps. Home and fitness titles, in particular, make sense as single-copy back issues, as consumers track down workouts, recipes, and other content they may have missed during a magazine’s time at the newsstand.
Annuals, serial publications that are a mainstay of the UK publishing industry, provide another strong option for archive mining. With clever use of existing content repurposed to a theme – say, Chinese manufacturing, or best chocolate recipes ever – specially-created tablet issues sold as a series of best-ofs are an excellent way to expand a subscription base without giving away current content. (The Atlantic has been producing separate larger, themed issues based on this model) And keeping a large percentage of current content behind the paywall is important, not only to encourage sales and subscriptions, but to keep single-copy back catalogue sales as well.
Older content may also be a draw in the
online market; The Economist tweets links to older content that may be of interest to a new crop of readers (their 2000
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“If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it properly, and we’ll do it on a brand-by-brand basis. Within the next five years or so, most of our magazines will have an archive of back
copies” JAMIE JOUNING. CONDÉ NAST UK DIGITAL DIRECTOR
piece on the science of aging whiskey is particularly popular). Photography, too, presents a useful resource: well-taken photographs rarely age out of date – a fact National Geographic has made good use of, in both their apps and print tie- ins (a quick Amazon search for ‘National Geographic Calendars’ returns 451 choices).
Similarly, Vanity Fair and The New York
Times feature photographs from their archives – Vanity Fair drives consumers to its social media outlets by using Instagram to highlight older (and most creative) covers.
As publishers dig deep into their
archives, the old adage is proving true that there is nothing more modern (and potentially profitable) than a good classic.