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Digital Publishing Blog by PressPad Posts

Digital Magazine Platform Comparison Between Mobile Apps and E-kiosk Flipbooks

Digital magazine publishing is the art of adjusting the content type and distribution platform to the changing readers’ demands, and technological development. No matter what type and size of a publisher you are, finding relevant distribution channels is an integral part of your content marketing strategy. A well-chosen platform brings together special, profiled readers who are actively interested in your brand and are willing to subscribe.

Our 10-year experience has shown us how many publishers, when looking for a distribution platform for their content, face a question – should I choose a mobile app or an e-kiosk flipbook? To dispel the doubts, we decided to point out the main features of both of these solutions – each of them is unique, and meets specific needs.

What kind of needs?

See and find out which solution is tailored to your publishing activity.

Three Truths We Found After Analyzing Almost 300,000 Visits to Digital Magazine Websites, You Need to Know

The digital publishing goal is converting website visitors into subscribers and then into buyers, resulting in increasing the sales of online editions on computers, tablets, and smartphones.

The road to achieving this leads through systematic data analysis, understood as deep insights, what provides better knowledge about the visitors’ real needs, and understanding what attracts them most. The result is contributing to engaging readers in content, and building a loyal audience which is a long-term investment worth all the efforts. To succeed with revenue, digital publishers need to understand readers’ behavior and aspects of the online selling process.

Only then they can manage their website effectively, prepare the most engaging content, publish in their rush hours, and in the effect, build strong relationships, earn subscribers, and drive revenue.

There’s not a quick solution to achieve it. However, this process is worth the effort, the more so, there’s a free tool that helps to unveil all the secrets – Google Analytics.

We analyzed ten different digital publishers’ websites gathering around topics like lifestyle, finance, sport. Thanks to Google Analytics we collected data which comes from the last 12 months – from March 2020 to March 2021.

Here are the most intriguing conclusions we received that might be significant for digital publishers and their monetization process.

10 Years of PressPad – a Story of How to Change the Magazine World Thanks to Digital Publishing Platforms

PressPad celebrates its 10th birthday this year. It is an opportunity to take a trip down memory lane: summarize achievements we got, mention key moments we experienced, talk about challenges we faced. Therefore, we’d like to invite you to read this article, which will allow you to get to know our story better, find out what motivates us, and maybe make you want to create a digital publishing future with us.

Have you ever experienced a moment of suspension when someone asks you what you were doing yesterday and you don’t remember it? It is a strange phenomenon in which we can’t recall what happened literally moments ago. What’s more interesting, sometimes we keep in mind what happened a few years ago better than a day before.

Let’s go back in time… 10 years.

It’s 2011. What does the world talk about?

After 25 years, The Oprah Winfrey Show ends. Many people will miss its sense of humor and wisdom or tens of millions of dollars worth of “Oprah’s Favorite Things” giveaways. The whole world sings “Rolling in the Deep” together with a singer who is a revelation of the music scene – Adele. The word “blockchain” is used in print for the first time. The same year Steve Jobs dies, and Apple Inc. becomes the most valuable company in the world.

This year our story begins. It is the starting point of a series of events that we hadn’t even dreamed of then.

We’d like to invite you to accompany us on our sentimental journey. Hop in!

Digital Typography Guide For Magazine Publishers

Digital typography is a natural phase in the development of writing that has been going on for centuries. Even if at the beginning the technique of arranging type was something that had a pure utility function, it became a part of visual art over time. Choosing the right fonts, the size of the letters, and the space between them are the challenges that every creator of texts, magazines, or websites must face. All of this is to provide people with the pleasure of reading at the highest possible level while maintaining the principles of usability, convenience, and uniqueness of the content. This article has been written to help you achieve these goals.

In the beginning there was the word. Or a letter, in fact. Or actually, it was the typeface. Johannes Gutenberg – does that ring a bell for you? The moment he invented the mechanical movable-type printing press is considered by Europeans to be the beginning of the printing era.

That was the time when it all started.

There was a boom in printing along with creating new characters, designing typefaces, and layouts. Over the years, typography has entered every aspect of our lives, and now (although you probably don’t pay attention to it) it’s absolutely everywhere and surrounds us from every angle of daily life. Don’t believe it?

Look at your books and their spines with the titles; open your kitchen cupboard and peek at the product names on their boxes; dig at the name of your fridge inscribed on its door; enter the shopping center and focus on the names put at the shops’ entrances. Do you already know what I’m talking about?

Today, apart from the traditional typography used in print, its digital counterpart has an equally important place in designing and preparing publications.

Whether you are a publisher, designer, creator of a magazine or a website, or just a font fan, go deeper into this digital typography guide to be able to prepare a stunning online publication.

Mobile App Development Continues — Introducing a Brand New Magazine App for IOS

The mobile app development took us a while but it was worth waiting.

PressPad, a mobile app development company, has entered the new year with a bang, by announcing a new mobile magazine app for iOS. This is another step forward in the company’s evolution which is a follow-up to the redefinition process of PDF-based apps. Their new product is not only a nod to publishers who want to reach readers using iPhones and iPads, but also a stress on the role Apple plays in PressPad apps’ development, since their beginnings.

If someone asked you what you associate with Apple, what would you say? The world’s famous bitten logo that is a masterpiece of design? Charismatic founder Steve Jobs, whose image we all remember as a man in a black turtleneck and jeans? Or maybe devices such as iPhones or iPads?

For magazine publishers, Apple is much more than the above few associations. It is an opportunity to charm over a billion App Store visitors with content in the mobile version. One of the paths leading to this goal is through PressPad’s new magazine app designed to more effectively reach iPhones and iPads users, and to offer readers facilities that go far beyond the print sphere.

If you want to reach readers using iOS devices with your PDF content, be sure to check what new things we’ve prepared for you.

Special Time for Publishers and PressPad is Coming

The passing year along with the global pandemic and world wide lockdown forced publishers to take bold steps in running their businesses to stay afloat. Those were mainly the radical acceleration of the shift from print to the digital distribution of all types of publications and redirecting the monetization activities from advertisements to the subscription model. Both of these transformations seem to be strong foundations for the further industry’s development in 2021 – the more so as the future of digital publishing looks bright.

We cannot deny that 2020 has been a challenging time for many different brands. The good news is that it’s coming to an end. Today, with hope, excitement, but also anxiety (what an explosive mixture!), we are waiting for the new. What publishing experts predict is that the next year will be based on the further development of subscriptions strategy, mobile content delivery, and distribution channels expansion.

Today, we’d like to show you something that will make the vision of the publishing future be dominated only by positive feelings. We’ll prove that 2021 promises to be a generous year for publishers, and explain why PressPad is preparing surprises for them.

Check what 2021 will bring to you.

What Does Apple App Store Tax Reduction Mean for Publishers?

The App Store Tax reduction becomes a reality. “Apple announces App Store Small Business Program” – this headline appeared on Apple’s website yesterday bringing many small and medium-sized company owners a lot of excitement and hope. The released news means that publishers will receive a 15% reduction on the App Store tax from in-app purchases. All this to ensure higher profits for the vast majority of publishers selling applications and services on the App Store.

The program will launch on January 1, 2021, and Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said that it has been created to “help developers fund their small businesses, take risks on new ideas, expand their teams, and continue to make apps that enrich people’s lives.”

That’s one small step for Apple, one giant leap for publishers.

Come and see what you need to know about the new App Store tax.

What Does the End of Adobe Flash Mean for Digital Publishers?

Some people think of it with a tear in their eyes; others claim with relief that it’s a natural necessity that had to come some time; the rest feel the excitement of looking for new solutions. The end of Adobe Flash Player planned on December 31, 2020, is already a certainty. It will bring digital publishers new, exciting challenges in their business functioning.

In 2007, Mark Anders, back then an Adobe employee, described the Flash as a new publishing tool of the century, and pointed out how it changes the digital world: “We have let more people publish – whether it’s blogging or having a MySpace page, or uploading to YouTube”. He probably didn’t expect then that a decade later Adobe would announce the death of this technology.

Although it cannot be denied that Flash had a huge contribution to the development of Internet websites and digital magazines, its time has come to an end. Today we are getting ready to say goodbye to this technology for good.

What does it mean for publishers who have used digital publishing platforms based on Flash?

How to Reach 3.5 Million Readers in a Year? Romania Insider Case Study

For online publishing businesses, establishing different digital distribution channels and building an engaged audience around a brand are as important as preparing high-quality content. Taking care of all these elements gives a chance for commercial success and profitable digital sales. A mobile app plays a major role in this venture.

Many of PressPad’s customers are following this path of development and achieving great results measured in the number of readers and subscribers. Today we’d like to present to you Romania Insider, a news website whose efforts are leading them to reach over 460,000 readers from all over the world every month (February 2020; with a peak of over 800,000 readers in March 2020) and over 3.5 million people from all over the world every year (2019).

Who are they and what’s the secret of their success?

Let’s take a peek behind the curtain.

PressPad Has Launched a Brand New Magazines App for Android

In PressPad, we’ve published hundreds of news apps, thousands of digital issues, and served millions of readers, worldwide. Drawing on years of practical experience we are putting into publishers’ hands the brand-new advanced mobile app, enhanced with useful features and modern look. The goal is to distribute magazines on Google Play even more effectively.

Building this digital publishing solution we decided to focus on PDF files usage. The reason was that this format is well known and mostly used by publishers and authors as sources of online content. This is also a good foundation to create a dedicated mobile magazine app available for Android smartphone users.

Are you curious about the effect?

Come and see what PressPad’s new magazine app solution looks like.