If you run a tra­di­tional printed mag­a­zine or news­pa­per you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing why your read­ers are escap­ing in favor of the dig­i­tal media, start­ing read­ing news on blogs and news por­tals, twit­ter, flip­board or any other online media.

Most of the tra­di­tional read­ers are will­ing to get con­tent they are inter­ested in for cheaper, maybe free on the web, and espe­cially fresh news from peo­ple directly involved into events or prod­ucts. When they go online for news they find over­whelmed with con­tent, which is updated and real-time, but pre­mium is not there. Authors with well crafted con­tent and qual­ity authors are not giv­ing away things for free.

Any printed mag­a­zine tran­si­tion to the dig­i­tal plat­form must take care of a mobile read­er­ship under­stand­ing, mix­ing App fea­tures with mag­a­zine style expe­ri­ence. Con­tent is another time king of the sce­nario, with easy of read­ing, beau­ti­ful design and easy to pur­chase content.

We are in the hybrid era of online pub­lish­ing, with a mix of web and printed con­cepts to deliver the next age online con­tent to readers.

The Asso­ci­a­tion of Online Pub­lish­ers pub­lished a sur­vey based on the opin­ions of the top 37 pub­lish­ers cov­er­ing about 1,500 pub­li­ca­tions about 2011 trends for con­tent rev­enue generation.

Sur­pris­ingly the web and smart­phone plat­forms are still con­sid­ered as plat­forms to deliver free or fer­mium con­tent to read­ers, where all the pay­wall exper­i­ments sub­stan­tially failed. Adver­tise­ment net­works are still the first rev­enue gen­er­a­tion model for web­sites even though click through ratios are low­er­ing and ban­ners are gen­er­ally con­sid­ered annoy­ing by readers.

Ratios are under 1% in most of the best imple­men­ta­tions as well as pay per click per­for­mance do not reach the level of tar­geted adver­tise­ment specif­i­cally agreed and devel­oped between pub­lisher and advertiser.