by Herman Manson (@marklives) Zeddit aims to help print media transition to digital channels. We aren’t talking websites or digital flip-page magazines but taking the print product, and all the resources pushed into its content and production, and leveraging them online in a way that makes the best use of the functionality and readability of the web.
Jonathan Harris, the CEO of Zeddit, has a long history in print media. He launched Real magazine, a black women’s general-interest title which took on the established media houses in South Africa, in 2004. Media24 bought into the magazine and promoted Harris to CEO of Thought24 which published True Love, Move! and Real magazines. He also ran Media24’s Developing Market Division but left at the end of 2011 to launch his own entrepreneurial venture.
MarkLives recently chatted to Harris to find out more about how the Zeddit platform aims to leverage the social power of magazines to make them more engaged with readers and easier to find in the online wilderness.
MarkLives: What is Zeddit and what are its objectives?
Jonathan Harris: Zeddit is a better digital magazine platform built to merge print and digital content into one feed and improve discovery, revenue and engagement.
From websites to social media and apps, magazine content is increasingly fragmented making it hard to manage and monetize. By creating a single feed publishers can leverage all of their content all in one place. The result? More power, less fragmentation, better monetisation.
ML: Will your primary customer base will be print publishers?
JH: Most publishers these [days] have print, web and app — so our market is strictly magazine publishers managing the transition to digital.
ML: Part of your offering is the ability to convert pdf files into a web-friendly format. Doesn’t that simply bring a print-design ethos to a digital environment and, if so, why would that be good?
JH: Longer-term magazines will no doubt be designed responsively using HTML5 or a similar format, but we are not close to that yet, so the asset most publishers have is still the pdf. It is the foundation for most replica apps, which are the dominant magazine-app format. We convert pdfs to html rather than large image files, which most apps solutions rely on, but our approach is actually very different because of the way we deliver the content via a feed.
I think the biggest problem facing magazine publishers isn’t page design but the legacy of the issue as a delivery format. It’s a counter-intuitive container for any form of digital content. By breaking magazines down into a feed of articles and creating non-linear (not front-to-back) ways for readers to navigate them (article links, hashtags, links to writer profiles) we create an experience that is built for digital.
It also means publishers can leverage all of their content to improve discoverability and create a feed that’s dynamic. We enable them to curate articles from current and previous issues by giving them the flexibility to publish individual articles whenever they like.
ML: Your platform seems to be doing the exact opposite of the Zinios of the world. What’s wrong with their models?
JH: Their models are constrained by the old print-business model, and have not moved to reflect the changing nature of content discovery and engagement. For example, content is a publisher’s best marketing tool, right… so making sure articles get discovered is priority number one. But the legacy model means articles get lost inside issues, buried in digital newsstand apps, published once and are pretty much impossible to find! That’s very limiting for effective content marketing.
One of the things we do to change this is use rich meta data and the latest integrations with platforms like Flipboard, Pinterest (article pins) and Twitter (Twitter cards) to enable publishers to very quickly create a network of articles that are shareable, all link back to their magazine feed and drive great social discovery.
ML: How will media clients be able to monetise their content on Zeddit?
JH: Overall, we’re looking to generate higher, better-quality traffic to magazines. This is monetisable in a number of ways when you begin to explore the analytics around this traffic. From a pure ad perspective, however, publishers can still include their print ads when they add articles — so more eyeballs. These are actually better-value eyeballs as you can report detailed daily data on how that article performed, based on readers’ actions and page views.
Secondly, as part of our Advanced Publisher Program (APP), our platform enables native advertising. Publishers can do their own deals, we don’t touch the revenue, and advertisers can post native ads against individual articles, which then become part of the feed. These contributions all have detailed reader-action data attached to them that can be reported daily.
Thirdly, also part of our APP, we enable publishers to serve ads into their feed wherever and whenever they want.
ML: You talk about blurring the lines between readers and writers. It doesn’t seem like something many editorial teams would embrace — what is the case you put to them?
JH: So here you are talking about reader contributions, also part of our APP. Zeddit allows editorial teams, by default, to add contributions like posts, images, video and links to published articles. As far as including reader contributions, editorial teams can set different levels of control over what gets published and I have actually found that this gives them the level of comfort they need to begin to experiment with this. Some teams are happy to leave readers to post whatever they want, others decide to approve every contribution. We make it easy for them to do that.
What teams do recognise is the value of their audiences as potentially rich content producers — this thinking has been advanced by Forbes, Huffington Post and Gawker Media. The bottom line is they know that, if they don’t find ways to get readers more involved with their magazine using tools like contributions, other competing digital spaces will do.
This type of content is also really powerful. For example, instead of publishing an article once and forgetting about it, contributions create a way to develop stories on the social web. They also promote sharing, help new readers discover magazines and build engagement as readers follow contributors/magazine bloggers. But that’s only part of the story. By focusing on activities that are brand-building, published, and republished articles and contributions create high-quality organic links to article feeds and build all-important reputation for magazines with Google. Currently, this isn’t happening effectively enough. It’s early into launch so these signs are very encouraging.
ML: Have you started signing up publisher clients yet?
JH: We are talking to publishers and starting trials with some household names. We are also seeing small- and medium-sized publishers creating magazine feeds.
ML: Once most publishers have transitioned from print to digital, what happens to your business model?
JH: Well, if we’ve been part of that there is a return for us there, and that transition is a very long slow curve. But I guess the question is: What kind of business are we long-term? Like any business that has a social component, our long-term value is data and analytics — I’d like us to be amongst the businesses that begin to see a rich-data map of reader actions/connections (not just page views/downloads etc) around magazine content — from there, better content discovery and delivery based on specific interests and building hyper-targeted native and traditional ads are two good outcomes that have value. No one is doing this yet so it’s wide open. I think magazines are a potentially rich social space, given the deeply engaged reader verticals; someone just has to connect the dots.
ML: Will you ever offer a sales-house function with revenue share for your publishing partners?
JH: That’s hard to say, but I don’t think a revenue-share model is a good one long-term; it’s messy and higher risk. I guess I would come back to my previous point about data and how that is used and then valued.
ML: How did you manage to get back for this venture? Can you tell us a little more about Zeddit journey as start-up so far?
Bootstrapped to date. The journey started back in 2012. I built a product that, at the end of the year, I felt wasn’t disruptive enough. It was a hard decision but I decided to kill that and build something I felt was trying to answer some of the toughest questions about the future of magazines and [being] first to market was important to me; we’ve achieved this.
ML: Why did you decide to base yourself in New York?
JH: Actually started in Singapore for the emerging business and development environment. I now have a presence in London and New York on the client-facing side. As far as me personally, I will be based in London for the next six months, travelling between there and NYC.
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