Content Wise

Consumer Reports Thrives Online

Consumer Reports, one of our designated Transcendent 10 publishers, just got some nice ink in the New York Times business section. CR has extended its brand into  a compelling online resource, complete with interactive product selectors and entertaining, ad-debunking videos.

According to the Times's article:

...it has three million paying subscribers online--up about 60 percent in the last 18 months--which experts say may be the largest number in the industry.

Publication Sites That Transcend Print: ConsumerReports.org

How do you make a publication Web site transcendent? The basic strategy is simple, even if the execution usually demands a lot of effort:

Invent content and tools that are exactly what your audience craves but that can only be presented in the specialized environment of the Web, not in the pages of a print publication.

ConsumerReports.org, the latest addition to our list of the Transcendent 10, follows this strategy big-time. For consumers seeking practical guidance about products, the site is an amazing power tool.

How highly do Web visitors value the online re-invention of this venerable publication? A few numbers tell the story.

• CR Online now has more than 2.5 million subscribers, each ponying up $26 a year. Editorial Director Kevin McKean believes that's the highest number of subscribers to a paid content Web site. For comparison, the Wall Street Journal Online has 770,000 subscribers; the New York Times' TimesSelect service has 550,000. (Consumer Reports the magazine has just over 4 million subscribers, roughly one in 10 of whom subscribe to the site as well. <--Please note this correction, from an earlier posting that mistakenly reported "one in five." A stand-alone print subscription also costs $26.)
• Subscriptions to the site are growing at about 20 percent a year.
• The site gets 3 million to 4 million unique visitors a month.

Here are two quick examples of what makes this site so transcendently great.

1) Smart slicing and dicing of print content
At one end of the spectrum of publication Web sites is the "dumb dump." Text-based material from the magazine or newspaper or newsletter is simply shoveled into HTML pages. It's grey, hard to read online, and unreceptive to interactive rummaging.

At the other end are ConsumerReports.org's customizable ratings charts. Going far beyond the usual searchable archive, these online charts provide a friendly and powerful way to drill into CR's wealth of ratings, reviews, and advice about whatever appliance, gizmo, or tool you're thinking about buying.

Consider, for example, the site's customizable chart for refrigerators. (You'll need to be a subscriber to actually test drive this example.) Using the tool's slider bars and check boxes, prospective buyers can customize their view of CR's guidance, and shorten or lengthen the list of products shown, by any number of criteria. These include brands, price range, overall ratings score, and--most impressive to us as recent refrigerator shoppers--product-specific features such as cubic feet of capacity, exterior finish, and the option of a water dispenser.

This is one of the most dramatic examples we've seen of transforming past print material into a tool that simply cannot exist within the covers of a magazine but becomes a true killer app on the Web.

Granted, not every publication has the raw material to fuel an online product selector. But most niche publishers are sitting on treasure troves of text-based information that their audiences would love to have creatively repackaged into an interactive tool. What have you got?

2) A video demo worth more than a thousand (text) words
Beyond the imaginative re-purposing of magazine content, ConsumerReports.org has recently begun pushing its coverage, and its editors, into a wholly new medium--namely, video. It makes perfect sense. The magazine does a commendable job in its printed evaluations. But for someone in the market for a new vacuum cleaner, for instance, there's nothing like watching technicians put a bunch of different models through their paces over a thick, soiled carpet.

Check out the video buying guide on vacuums. In the little box titled "Consumer Reports Video," click on "View video." (Even non-subscribers can see this.)

We wish we had watched the guide's first segment, on "Light Cleaners," before we spent our money on a robotic vacuum. The sight of the little bot aimlessly wandering the room, blindly bumping into table legs and walls, and leaving most of the dirt on the floor--that's some powerful consumer information. And it's perfectly suited to an online (as opposed to in-print) presentation.

Again, not every publication covers a field that lends itself to such hands-on demonstrations. But aren't there certain subjects within your niche that you could explore most effectively using video? In this YouTube era, it's a good bet that your Web audience would like to see some of what your editors and writers are seeing out in the field.

Please let us know how your site and other sites that you like are transcending print. And keep pushing.

Publication Sites That Transcend Print -- Nature.com

The most important challenge facing publication-related Web sites--and still the most difficult one--is transcending their print roots.

We're not talking about simply repackaging the static text and graphics from a magazine or newspaper into a Web-friendly form. Naturally, print-derived content should be presented so Web audiences can scan it, easily navigate through it, e-mail copies to friends, print it out, and flexibly search archives. But these days, that's like saying a car really should include tires and a steering wheel.

Enter the Transcendent 10. This is the first in a series of postings in which we'll feature 10 publishers who are extending the "brand DNA" of their publications onto the Web in impressive ways. These savvy folks have considered the special powers of the Web (interactivity, data bases, always-on accessibility, quick turnaround time, multimedia, social networking...) and answered this question creatively:

What information/activity/service/mode of communication or participation would the Web allow us to offer our readers--stuff they'd kill to get--that we could never offer them in a print medium?

Nature.com
Nature.com, the first of our Transcendent 10, is the online extension of the prestigious scientific journal Nature and its cousins in the London-based Nature Publishing Group. This is a huge effort. If we tried describing it all, there would barely be anything left for the remaining nine "Transcendents" to demonstrate. So here's a rundown of some of Nature.com's most interesting elements...