Thriving in the Digital Future: The Mequoda Keynote Presentation, Live from Napa Valley
What’s a better way to kick off Tuesday’s sessions at the Mequoda Summit in Napa Valley than to discuss the digital future? This keynote session, hosted by Don Nicholas and Kim Mateus posed questions to the audiences, discussed popular trends and theorized about the future of the online publishing industry.
Some of the information shared in this session may surprise you. For example, if you have a print publication like a magazine, and an online presence, do you think your online audience should be a smaller subset of your magazine audience? The answer is no. Your online audience should be a “Superset” of your magazine audience, standing between 5% and 10% larger online than in print.
And what about the top publishers in our industry, how much do you know about them? People.com is the biggest “magazine” website online. Meaning, of all the websites carrying a magazine brand, People.com holds the largest online audience with a unique monthly visitor count of 8.7 million. But even with that level of success, do you think People.com is a top 50 website on the internet? It is not. Even with revenue of around $1.6 billion and almost 9 million unique monthly visitors, People.com isn’t in the top 50. In fact, there is no American magazine brand that is represented by a top 50 website, according to compete.com.
Think about that for a minute. People.com is hugely successful, yet it isn’t in the top 50 websites on the net. It’s a pretty amazing piece of information in my eyes.
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The future belongs to Multi-platform Publishers
Some Legacy publishers are starting to figure out how to utilize the internet. They realize that using the genius of modern technology to reach consumers is absolutely necessary. Online content, live events, webinars, webcasts, and podcasts are only a few of these possibilities.
The three components Don stressed during this session that will allow media brands to succeed in the future include being multi-platform, digital and global.
Paying attention to what is emerging and popular will also encourage success. We have discussed these before and they are not going anywhere soon.
Overall importance to focus on
Where is the consumer acceptance going to come from? This is a question you should ask yourself while contemplating the digital future. If you want to thrive in it, you will have to deliver on a number of platforms to accommodate the tastes to all of the possible audiences you have. Not everyone wants written content, especially with the ability to have content on the go with mobile devices. Appease these audiences and evolve with technology as you do so. We think you will be satisfied with the results.
Thriving in the digital age has a lot to do with the content you can offer. For more on creating content and taking part in content marketing, be sure to attend our Content Marketing 2010 webinar on April 13th at 12:30 ET.
