PDF Content + Tracking the Next Big Thing for Publishers
The flagging economy launched torpedoes at the grand old-media Condé Nast fleet yesterday, sinking Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. The moves—including a rumored 180 layoffs connected to those magazines—come as the publishing industry struggles to invent new models to derive income from its content, one of them rumored to be a Hulu-type digital store.
Help is on the way, and indeed it may already be here for some beleaguered publishers.
Interactive PDFs are an emerging format for porting paper publications to electronic editions. Not only do PDFs incur zero printing and shipping costs, they also lock down layouts for advertisers and magazine designers frustrated with graphic-design limitations posed by the user-controllable look and feel of web browsers. Their main drawback? They tend to be money losers or zero-gainers.
We’re guessing Adobe plans to put the ability to track content, inside PDFs as a way to make ads in PDF editions more valuable. It took a huge step toward accomplishing that when it announced intentions to acquire web-metrics aggregator Omniture for $1.2 billion last month.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen didn’t come out and say point-blank that his company plans to bring web-style metrics tracking to PDFs. He did, however, say in the company’s Sept. 15 financial analyst call that “our customers have been asking us to help them deliver more effective solutions for assembling and delivering targeted web content…that can be measured and optimized.” That, he said, and monetizing web content.
Publishers looking for a head start on PDF metrics tracking don’t have to wait and see how Adobe will integrate Omniture’s code into its applications a year or three down the line. Right now they can check out Vitrium’s docmetrics, which can be tested on a single document and used to measure how readers use their PDFs as well as collect leads for subscriptions and advertisers.
Putting in trackable ads just might be the missing link that could give publishers the ability to port the financial model driving print-ad revenue to PDF editions. It’s still going to be tough to get readers to pay the same cover price they would for a print magazine, especially given all the free content available on the web. Less printing costs and more ad revenues, invariably, will bring down cover prices for electronic editions.
As more and more print publications teeter on the brink of insolvency and there’s less and less competition, someone’s going to come up with a winning model that will work. Looks like Adobe’s betting a billion that it will involve PDF. Vitrium’s here, now.
