It’s amazing what you find when you search for “collection” on Flickr.
I have a new post up at PBS MediaShift, covering a new development at digital magazine company Zinio. Zinio is now creating Content Collections:
Zinio staff highlight a selection of articles from Zinio’s digital magazine offerings, mixing and matching stories from a wide variety of magazines within each collection. Even little-known and foreign magazines are included in the mixes. Readers can then preview individual articles in the collection and choose to buy the single digital magazine issue where an article appeared, or even buy a digital subscription to that magazine.
The idea of blending content from different magazines into one package (eventually purchasable as a single deal) is interesting, but even more compelling is the idea that individual readers will eventually be able to create their own collections and share them with friends.
“We’ve been working on the concept of choosing what you love and being able to share it,” Mullen said. “We want to make it possible for consumers to do what editors do. We can let consumers build [collections] for us.”
What will the role of the magazine editor be in the future? With editors at Ladies’ Home Journal now editing user-generated content, and readers soon generating their own collections of content, we’re clearly seeing some major changes in editors’ tasks and roles.
Read more about Zinio’s new innovation at MediaShift.
Michael Kranitz on May 25, 2012 at 10:22 am said:
Zinio’s concept reminds me of the music industry’s acquiescence to allowing more sales of singles vs. the entire album. I believe this model could work, provided there is a structure to compensate publishers for the fractional share of their magazines being used in the “rollup” issues. There lies the challenge. How do you value an article. By word? Not likely. With interactive magazines, the value might be in a video or audio interview attached to the story.
In concept, I like the notion of magazines picking “distributable” sections of their magazine, but I think the revenue model for creating custom magazines will prove too challenging. Let’s back up a second; the cost of a single publication is between 2 and 4 bucks. Do we really need to parse down magazines and create the equivalent of investment derivatives?
Lastly, I think you have to consider niche publications as an exception. By definition, niche pubs (like ours, RC Pilot Magazine – http://www.rcpilot.com) do exactly what Zinio thinks should be done with general magazines. WE put together stories, all in the readers interest zone, for a fee; the price of the magazine. It’s simple and it works.