Web magazines that replicate the print experience – will it work?
A feature in Campaign Middle East alerted me to what’s being billed as the region’s “most advanced online magazine” – RubberDuck – and the online publishing platform that it’s on, called Ceros.
What’s Ceros? It’s a way of reading online magazines that mimics the print page turning experience with interactive features like little games, videos and the ability to clip pages.
A scan through the website reveals an impressive array of clients who have signed up, ranging from giants like Wired (UK) down to more niche titles like Burlesque Magazine and Horse Link. Contract publishing titles from the likes of Virgin Media, Bridgestone Tires and Scandinavian Airlines also feature prominently.
Even the UK Government has got in on the act, using it to produce a Swine Flu leaflet.
Is this the future of online publishing – a way of combining the best of the print and digital worlds?
No doubt about it, the user experience is impressive. It just looks very professional when you flick through the titles. It’s also the sort of stuff which is very attractive for marketers wanting to do more than just slap in a display ad.
For me however, the jury is still out.
The key question surely is, are online magazine readers looking for a media-rich solution, which Ceros certainly provides? Or, in an era where device’s like Apple’s iPhone have made reading news on the mobile a reasonably good experience, are they looking for ways to read good content with a minimum fuss?
Commenting in Campaign, Mohamed Elzubeir of Dubai consultancy Mediastow talks about the RubberDuck launch via Ceros:
“I wish RubberDuck all the best but I think they are a few years ahead of their time.” I wonder if the reverse is true and platforms like this are actually a few years behind the time, as evidenced in the rest of Elzubeir’s quote:
“In my experience, the novelty of flash and animation die out quickly, and it all boils down to content, visitors and advertisers.”
Or, it all boils down to the experience and time will tell whether this is the experience readers are after. Especially given Nielsen’s latest stats that you have exactly 56 seconds before people get bored of your site and move on.
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Thanks Simon and I appreciate you coming by. I agree, a lot of web properties fall down on the whole assumption that people want the offline experience online. More often than not they don’t.
Late to the party, but I have a month’s worth of RSS to catch up on (this blog is one of a small number I am making the time to read fully)
I subscribed to Monkey (a ceros mag) for a bit, out of curiousity rather than interest. I hated it. The whole concept is basically a design flaw. It it taking the princples of one medium and trying to transplant it on another (rich text, links and AV are superficial – they don’t fundamentally change the experience). The internet is the internet with its own functions and foibles – these, and not those of print, should be embraced online…
Thanks for the comments Kate, Martin, Gerel. As I said, I personally liked the user experience but I am just not convinced others will feel the same way!
I saw this on ASOS magazine, for me it made it whole lot easier to navigate different content that you wouldn’t otherwise bother finding.
A friend pointed me to content on a service like that a few days ago. Didn’t like it. It felt like a slightly-slicker PDF, used because it could auto-export content designed for print.
Unless it’s about something that’s visually oriented like fashion, then just gimme the content I say.