Yes, that’s the terribly tacky name for the next session where Michael Elliot, International Editor and Deputy Managing Editor of TIME magazine is talking to us about all the TIME branded products. Finally, someone’s talking about magazines.
Bite-sized, just for you:
- Magazine market is very healthy.
- Circulation: 3.25 million a week in the US, a little over 1 million internationally.
- Best selling issue: the annual top 100 most influential people.
- Made a decision to reduce the circulation by 18% because it was becoming financially untenable to maintain. (How?) Did a thorough redesign.
- Completely changed our conception of what time.com was doing and what it’spurpose was.
- Advantage in magazine world was that it was never addicted to classifieds like newspapers.
- Time.com has relaunched as a 24-hour news site with editors passing on responsibility from New York to London to Hong Kong. Went from irrelevant in rating 10 years ago, now n top 10.
- Averaging 80 million page views per month, 9–10 million uniques, vast majority are not TIME readers.
- Realised people didn’t want localised versions so bundled TIME Europe and US etc into one.
- Can geotarget advertising for different audiences around the world, so they do pay attention to global audience in local ways.
- Changed print publication day from Monday to Friday so the print version has become a weekend read.
- Key to success is building community – as has been said over last few days.
- Strong columnists who can develop strong sense of community; daily blogs; up to the minute news from the campaign trail.
- Do what we do best and link to the rest.
- Take advantage of multiple media: interview with Gordon Brown last year, did two-hour interview for text and then said, can we do a TV interview? Did a 20 minute video interview for immediate upload.
- Difficulty with the business model: trading analogue dollars for digital cents.
- Hopes that decline in legacy business is shallow enough that new media model can take up the slack.
- Just in case you missed it yesterday, video is the future.
And running out of battery again (damn Macs) so I’ll be back later…