SubHub is stating a simple truth about digital publishing when it compares conventional printing on paper to the Internet. The lessons are here not only for conventional publishers but for custom publishers as well. Custom publishers — companies that create and manage publications (i.e. marketing tools) for nonpublishers — are an esteemed part of our community. They provide service, eyeballs, work, and a really neat (if not necessarily new) paradigm. Whether using the single sponsor or multi-advertiser approach, the editorial and demographic focus they provide tends to rock.
Even so, SubHub may be showing a bit of the future of custom publishing. The company’s stated mission is to provide “an affordable solution for publishers who wanted to control their own site and have the option to make money in different ways from their content. . .[the site would be] comprehensive yet simple to use; fully managed, but would leave the publisher in control.”
Granted, most SubHub clients seem to have deeper roots in products and services than in content. Neverthless, the SubHub tools enable smaller businesses to do their own custom pubs.
I took a look at SubHub's website and if they can do what they claim, I would be very impressed, but I doubt they make as easy as they say. I work for a large newsletter publisher (32 titles)which better remain nameless :-) and we have been building a platform for multi-revenue publishing for several years and it is much harder that it looks.
ReplyDeleteI 100% agree with your point, and our research supports it, that the future for specialist information publishers is to build audience and then generate multiple revenue streams. Good print trade and specialist magazines do this well already (ads, special offers, subscriptions, sale of reports, events, etc.), they just seem very bad at transferring these skills onto the web. Maybe the technology is to blame and just maybe companies like SubHub are on the right track?
@Norman: Thank you for mentioning SubHub on your blog. We've been working hard on our offering for a long time and while there's plenty of work to be done, it's coming together well. My roots are in publishing (seven years at Newsday in New York) and all of us here really believe in the power of the internet to enable content owners to reduce costs and make more money publishing online. The key is providing tools that are easy enough to use and hopefully we've taken some good steps in that direction.
ReplyDelete@Mike Hanbury: We appreciate your visiting our site. You're right, it is very hard to build a platform with multiple revenue streams, and content management, and membership, all integrated within a simple user interface. We haven't perfected it yet (that's why we have a growing development team) but we have spent several years on it. The key is that this is all we do -- we don't publish anything of our own, so we don't have multiple activities and legacy systems to deal with -- we just concentrate on the platform and getting it right.
Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
SubHub