What’s wrong with most digital magazines

We’ve been working on digital magazines for about four years now, so they don’t seem like such a new format to us. But if you look across the Web, you’ll see a lot of bad examples of the format.

Not “bad” so much as wasted opportunities. What other digital magazines seem to forget about the format are two main things:

1. It’s on a screen
2. It’s still a magazine

I know these points are obvious and so don’t mean much on their own, but let me explain.

It’s on a screen. Why are you creating your magazine in the same way you make the print magazine and just uploading the PDF? First of all, the dimensions are all wrong – it’s a portrait image on a landscape screen. No one likes to scroll up and down on each page. Secondly, in order to read anything - because people still read magazines – you force people to zoom in and then out again to see where they are.

So we’ve got two really bad experiences going on in a single screen: scrolling up and down repeatedly and also zooming in and out. It’s no wonder people don’t like to read digital magazines.

It’s still a magazine: Then there are those that create the PDF for the screen (thank you) but then make this hideous, boring, flat, amateur-looking “magazine” with clip art, and try to compensate by running annoying Flash videos and audible page turns. The latter is a gimmick, the former attribute has yet to be proven as something that will attract and engage readers. We link to videos outside the magazine, but I’m not sure you want to watch it within the magazine.

Wait, scratch that. Watching it within the magazine would be great, but we have yet to see this function well. If it loads quickly, the video screen is usually very small. And if it’s big enough it takes forever to load.

The thing is, this digital mag thing has potential. Here’s a list of its top attributes:

1. Cheaper to print. Because you don’t print it.
2. Cheaper to distribute. Notice on these first two I didn’t say “free.” They still require a lot of work, but the cost is exponentially lower.
3. More… pass-along-able. Yes, you can hand your print magazine to a friend or float it in a doctor’s office for a month, but you can post a link to a digital magazine on Facebook, Tweet about it, email it, add it to a comment, add it to your LinkedIn page… think of the reach.
4. Linked up. Think of the potential of “link journalism.” And think of the power of an ad with a Web-specific call to action a reader can actually act on with a click.
5. Long-form content mixed with compelling design. You can’t get that on the Web the way you can in a magazine.

We’re obviously fans. If you think you’d like to explore the benefits of a digital magazine for your organization, please let us know.