At least 10% of sales of magazines are sold on the cover. You see something you like or that interests you and you pick it up. You also know by the cover that it's a new edition.
It's critical to magazine and newspaper sales to "sell off" the cover.
And the current issue of the excellent Economist, has that. Great cover, great design.
What's worth considering is that we don't change our website homepages every month? So that when people re-visit, it looks the same whereas if we did change it, visitors would see it being different, more interesting, more topical. Like magazines, like newspapers.
Even a new front video on your homepage each month?
Is there a lesson here from traditional publishing for digital for once?
Interesting story in The Sunday Telegraph by way of an interview with Andrew Cave, Head of BBC Worldwide.
Interesting because the BBC is THE quintessential traditional TV broadcaster and yet, in this digital age, they've had to become more commercial. In fact BBC Worldwide with turnovers of 1 Billion Sterling, contributed 174 million stg to the BBC itself - 10% of the content budget - by selling content overseas.
Programmes like Sherlock (224 markets), Doctor Who, Top Gear, Ripper Street and so on. They also licence shows such as Strictly Come Dancing.
So their investment in drama is really paying off with 35% of revenues coming from US broadcasters with their major customers being Netflix and Amazon Prime.
So what you see is something of a switch away from creating programmes for themselves into selling programmes for digital. In fact, you'll see BBC Worldwide creating programmes not for broadcast on BBC but to re-sell under their quality brand.
They're becoming commercial content makers in a serious way through embracing digital media rather than being protective of it.
And that's the future for traditional broadcasters. Rather than create content to show, create content to sell. It's a different focus but digital media are opening up a market that's hungry for content.
