Q: What is best practice now?
A: Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen digital publishing best practice evolve from a glorified PDF to varying degrees of hyperinteractivity to the current practice that might be best described as a simple, content forward, brand experience.
Today, over 95% of magazine publishers still begin the digital edition creation process with a print-ready PDF. This is a meaningful reality given the technological and creative options available to publishers. Notwithstanding, over the years, we’ve seen countless publishers leave to explore custom, interactive digital experiences to only eventually return to a more reasoned, balanced content approach.
Best practice today starts with treating a digital edition as a genuine extension of your brand – a curated, packaged experience that carries your fonts, colours, and editorial voice while taking full advantage of the digital medium. While nearly all of our customers make a replica version of their print available to digital readers, over 75% prioritise mobile content consumption by layering in a clean, responsive content experience for phone readers.
This same balanced approach can also be seen when it comes to digital edition interactivity. Rather than presenting a collection of gimmicky and distracting animations, the majority of digital magazine publishers have settled on incorporating meaningful interactive elements like useful resource hubs, simple listening experiences, and thoughtful video placement. It’s also worth noting that both publishers and readers now have an unspoken expectation that the digital edition experience will meet minimum accessibility and privacy standards.
Finally, for publishers who are no longer printing, we’ve seen the best examples maintain a formatted digital edition experience with traditional pages but designed for digital. They are typically presented in single page landscape orientation with a mobile responsive option, delivered periodically, have friendlier-sized fonts, and are intentionally designed around video and other interactive elements. This curated and structured format best blends the trusted, familiar experience of print with the advantages of digital.
Q: How do you see it changing in the future?
A: Technology is advancing too quickly to predict very far into the future. However, the most immediate opportunity for the digital edition involves AI enhancement. Putting aside the more controversial topic of how AI might play into the content creation process itself, there are several ways AI can create more valuable content experiences for both publishers and readers.
For the publisher, AI offers an unprecedented opportunity to better leverage its archive. Decades of print and digital editions preserve a publication’s voice, design, and editorial choices in full context – but locked in static PDFs and replica editions. New extraction tools can reliably convert even scanned, historical content into structured, responsive articles at scale, turning a dormant archive into an active asset.
Moreover, AI can be a powerful business tool for publishers to routinely interrogate that archive and extract meaningful data.
For the reader, AI also offers an opportunity to significantly improve engagement with publisher content. For example, that newly structured publisher archive can become the foundation for conversational assistants that let readers directly query a publication’s own history to discover new content and truly interact with the brand.
Similarly, for years, publishers have been attempting to meaningfully segment readers and content to provide more relevant (or even personal) content experiences. AI provides an opportunity to easily do just that with automated content tagging and distribution that matches individual readers to relevant content without a manual curation effort.
Other AI advantages include improved article listening experiences driven by incredibly realistic and personalised voice technologies, as well as the ability to now quickly and reliably translate article content (text and voice) to help you reach a larger audience.
Q: What are your three top tips?
Done well, a digital edition is not a diminished version of your print product. It is a living, always-accessible extension of your brand – one that meets readers where they are and helps promote the kind of lasting connection that builds sustainable publishing businesses.
1. Resist the urge to over-engineer. A content-forward, brand-consistent experience beats hyperinteractivity. Start from your print-ready PDF or a page-focused layout, layer in responsive mobile content and meaningful interactive elements, and resist gimmicks that distract from the content itself.
2. Start thinking about putting your archive to work with AI. Structure historical content so it can power conversational assistants, automated content tagging, and personalised distribution – turning decades of static editions into an active asset that deepens engagement for both publisher and reader.
3. Content is still king. Despite what it feels like right now, content (if it is good and focused) is still the key to success. Readers want and are willing to even pay for quality, trusted content. All of the strategies in the world can’t make up for poor content.
About BlueToad
BlueToad offers a flexible and robust digital content platform used by publishers throughout the world. We make advanced solutions simple – like mobile editions, audio articles, AI integrations, and monetisation. We can also help you provide a branded hub of links and resources to keep readers engaged with all of your content. BlueToad’s suite of AI tools include Toady, an interactive chatbot experience, InboxPartner, which streamlines the creation of automated newsletters and GhostDrafter, a drafting tool that harnesses archive content.
Email: hello@bluetoad.com
Website: www.bluetoad.com
This article was first published in Issue # 1 of Best Practice in Publishing, a new publication from InPublishing. Click here for links to the other ‘best practice’ articles from the publication.
