Value-added advertising with digital magazines

For a magazine publisher, a Zmags publication acts as a bridge between the magazine's website and the printed version.  A Zmag combines the best of the online and offline worlds. The reader is left with the impression of having read a magazine, but also has the opportunity to immediately connect with any advertisers of interest. Graphic Publishing, a company out of Australia, picked up on this notion and uses an online version of their magazine to complement the original print.

Digital magazines at low cost

“We offer our digital magazines for sale at around one third of the price of the printed issue. In addition our subscribers are given free access to the digital issues. Although our digital issues will never replace our printed issues, we love to be able to offer our readers an additional medium by which to read our magazines. Our readers now always have the digital magazines within reach”, Nikki Ernst, Online Manager at Graphic Publishing tells.

Challenges traditional business model

The market for digital magazines is new, so Graphic Publishing is focusing on long term strategies. The company expects digital magazines to have such a big impact that it will eventually change the traditional business model of the publishing market. The solution from Zmags provides Graphic Publishing with additional advertising media for their advertisers. This is done by placing links on the adverts in the online version that redirects to the advertiser’s homepage.

Nikki Ernst explains: “We offer our clients a value-added advertising package that includes print, online and digital. Before each release we setup links in the digital magazines by using Zmags Publicator. If our advertisers afterwards would like to know how their advertisement was received by readers, it is easy to access the statistics and check the number of outgoing clicks on their advert”.

Graphic Publishing releases 13 magazines a year from its different titles and has so far produced four Zmag digital issues. For this purpose add-ons are added as follows:

• Basic Statistics
• Geographic Statistics
• Link Manager
• Auto Links
• Video Manager
• Text Recognition

Graphic Publishing was started in 1984 and is currently one of Queensland's largest, independent boutique publishing companies. Located in Brisbane, Australia this family run independent publishing house proudly produces coffee-table quality titles, releasing a new magazine 13 times each year.