Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Sampling Magazines as they are Published

We have put up a service which is a promotional exercise for the Catholic Herald. Its a browseable, searchable but not properly readable digital sample of the weekly magazine/newspaper which we sell for them as a subscription service. You can try it out from their web pages or from this link:

http://www.exacteditions.com/sample/catholicherald

If a viewer of this sample tries to click through to the full page size, they are politely informed that the 'thumbnail' two page view is the maximum that they get for free. They are then encouraged to subscribe to a print edition or the digital version. We will be tracking the usage of this service and its effect on subscriptions. I predict that the print subscriptions will benefit more than the digital. Its also interesting to note that the classified advertisements are more useful than one might imagine, because the clickable links in the ads are all clearly clickable and usable as navigation aids (the tool tip gives you the address of each link).

Pages entirely composed of classified ads should ideally be available in 'full scale'. Actually, it is not super easy for our system to deliver this. But it should come -- at that point classified ads with all the interaction that they carry in our platform should come into their own as web resources.

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