One of the core elements in Zmags platform for digital editions is the page-flip feature. Although it looks simple, the page-flip function is what makes the media unique. It imitates the content as it would be presented in the real world, and that is important to the way your readers consume it.

Less choices – more information consumed

The page-flip function ensures that navigation options are limited. Unlike a regular website, where visitors are presented with vast options and need to figure out where to go by themselves, a digital edition only provide options to flip pages forward. So readers browse their way through the digital edition page by page and stop if a headline, image or any interactive feature catches their attention. The results: Far more pages viewed and more total time spent on the edition per reader.

In the whitepaper “Growth and usage of e-paper solutions”, analyst and former IAB Europe board member Jon Lund looks into this topic. By analyzing statistical data from major providers of advanced page-flip solutions in comparison to regular website traffic, he finds a remarkably high number of pages viewed per reader:

A user views, on average, 31 pages per visit as opposed to only 10 pages per visit on the “normal” Internet.
In other words: Digital editions are capable of more than tripling the number of pages viewed per reader.

At the same time, readers spend less time per page in a digital edition. In the whitepaper, it is revealed that the average time spent per reader is 10.6 seconds. Combined with quick load times and easy navigation, these findings show that digital editions are consumed very much like their cousins from the print world.

Read more about digital readers’ behavior in this free whitepaper.