According to Erasmus, the jump into digital was part push and part ‘leap of faith’, although he is quick to point out that virtually everyone involved with media acknowledges that ‘digital is the future’, so the ‘faith’ part of the decision to convert two well-established niche print titles into digital-only offerings was one around timing more than the issue of ‘going digital’, which he believes is inevitable for virtually all current print publishers.

“Industry sources say that around 70% of print titles now produce some form of digital version,” says Erasmus. “But many of these are what I would call ‘digital dongles’, which is not a derogatory remark but an observation of fact - they are digital add-ons provided by publishers who don't really know how to handle the growing digital domain and the inevitability of the dominance of digital publication in the face of rising paper and other print-associated costs.”

“Having been under pressure from some of our readers, especially those of Simply Green, to avoid paper altogether, we had already tried for-sale versions of the magazines in the digital space. This was done in various formats, as we, like everyone else, tried to figure out how to make our offerings work for our readers online, while also making them cost-effective in that space. It turned out to be "mission impossible", with no Tom Cruise to save the day,” he adds.

“The core problem is that people simply will not pay for online information of almost any kind - with a very few highly specialised exceptions. This is why ebooks have for the most part been sold for cents rather than rands or dollars - people might pay 99c for an ebook, but they are highly unlikely to pay much more for it, unless it already has a track record and is trending in the popular imagination, in which case the next step is back into the print domain, as in the famed case of 50 Shades of Gray.”

“Having tried different formulations, we had already decided in 2012 to offer totally separate, unique digital versions of our two titles,” explains Erasmus. “The original plan for 2013 was to offer 4 issues for each title in the digital zone, on a free-to-reader, advertising revenue funded model. The content had to be unique and not merely a repeat of the print editions for this model to work. It meant much more work for our team but we thought we could do it, see how it went and then ease deeper into the digital-only space sometime after 2013. As things turned out, that was not to be.”

“Last year began with many major clients going back into marketing and ad-spend planning as a consequence of a loss of consumer confidence and a drop in spending over the 2012 festive season following the Marikana incident and the farm riots in the Western Cape. Somehow these two sets of events, widely separate geographically and by cause, converged in many people's minds to cast doubt on the country's economic outlook. The knock-on effect was felt immediately by us, with several major clients who had booked advertising space in the print editions of both titles pulling out or simply failing to come up with artwork and material when our first deadline rolled round. We pushed out going to press but one can only do that for so long and, in any case, we were racking up overhead costs in the meantime. Something had to be done.”

“Meanwhile, our digital and web manager, a South African living and working in the UK, had assessed an approach to us which had been past onto him as a major opportunity for our digital offerings. It was from Microsoft's regional arm Howzit MSN for us to provide content from both titles to various parts of their site. With nearly 7 million users at the time, it was obvious that we could not ignore that opportunity, since we could feed back from the content provided to them using links to editorial in our titles. This meant more eyes on our digital pages but it also meant we'd be working more or less flat out for Howzit MSN merely to provide content - and online, as everyone knows, content is king if you want eyeballs on your site or whatever else you are offering. The obvious answer was simply quit the increasingly costly and problematic print space for the digital-only arena - and allow our content provision to MSN to be part of the driver for a new digital readership for both titles. The short summary is that it worked - and far better than we expected,” says Erasmus.

The proof, he says, is in the stats.

With Simply Green, at the time of writing, having repeatedly passed the 80 000 to 90 000 reads/views mark on its last five issues of 2013, that title looks set to go well into the 100 000 reads/views number range during 2014. These are exceptional results as far as digital magazines go, says Erasmus, who has been tracking this issue very closely.

“In fact we did so well that, as far as we can tell, we appear to be among the top 10 titles in the world in our class (those that have moved direct from over-the-counter sales of print editions to free-to-reader, digital-only production). That's just amazing. We were hoping to be averaging above the 50 000 reads/views number for both titles by year's end, but considering that we started effectively from zero in April 2013 with our first free-to-reader digital offering, which resides on the leading digital magazine host portal ISSUU.com, we have far exceeded our hopes and expectations. Indeed, we feel that we've cracked the digital versus print conundrum faced by so many publishers,” he adds.

Simply Green has to date managed an aggregate figure of 564 444 reads/views for its eight issues published in the digital space in 2013 and 2014, for a per issue average of 70 556 reads/views. Overall, Odyssey Magazine has performed even better. Issue 5 of that long-standing title (in print since 1977) clocked up 358 272 reads/views as of current time, illustrating the potential ‘virality’ of free-to-reader digital publishing – and one of its key attractions. In all, Odyssey has managed 818 186 reads/views in eight issues for an average per issue of 102 273 views/read per issue since its digital-only debut.

“But that having been said, there are still major challenges to be faced by publishers taking this route,” says Erasmus.

One of them - a key challenge - is that things are moving so fast in terms of new developments that even recent graduates of top academies and training centres for media planners, account executives and buyers, or those who have been involved in the digital space for several years, are finding that their questions to publishers do not yet match what publishers are doing. Routinely, publishers are questioned on how many unique users there are for websites, and how many click-throughs ad campaigns enjoy on average. These questions are, obviously, based on standard knowledge about rating the performance of websites and content therein. They have, however, very little to do with what publishers are doing.

“In our neck of the publishing woods, it's all about eyeballs on pages. Complicating things is the fact that host sites such as ISSUU and its main competitors have taken a position that they will protect the privacy of their readers above all other considerations when it comes to providing publishers with performance data and related metrics of their titles. Consequently, they have made their sites opaque to independent analysis tools such as Google Analytics. And they run algorithms on most of their metrics, for reasons still not entirely clear to us but for internal reasons. As publishers we can draw down general trends and broad-stroke information from these metrics. So we know, relatively, which pages perform better in any particular issue, and we can see that on average we have about 82-85% SA-based readers, with the balance drawn from the rest of the English-speaking world, mainly.”

“But as far as raw data is concerned, we can only offer agencies and clients the reads/views numbers (which ISSUU refers to as ‘impressions’) and that's what we're using,” explains Erasmus. “We'd love to take full advantage of the inherent capacity of the digital space to get metrics on everything and anything, but clearly there are competing agendas which restrict that information access. Initially this was very frustrating for us but with the folks at the recently established IABSA have confirmed what we have said in this regard. In effect, we are more or less back in the position we were in when in print with regard to circulation and readership as measured by ABC and AMPS, the new metric of ‘reads/views’ being the digital equivalent of a combination of print titles' circulation and readership.”

“This is not in itself bad news, nor is it an inadequate measure by any means, because what we are doing in effect is still creating compendium of a variety of carefully selected, edited and crafted content, from features to industry- or interest-specific articles through more general news pages, plus, of course, advertising. In this regard we are exactly like print magazines, except we exist in cyberspace as opposed to physical space. And then we have the advantages of being removed from print and distribution cost and other constraints. We are now producing the biggest magazines by page number in our history - one or two issues have even run over 200 pages. Ironically, while people were saying our switch to digital meant we'd have to cut back on story length and the number of articles per issue to produce mags no bigger than 50-60 pages (all based on historic trends with e-newsletters and previous attempts at e-mags), it turns out that our readership patterns within a specific issue are almost precisely the same in pattern as is classically the case for print titles - more front-end pages read than in the middle, with a small spike in reads towards the end of the issue.”

Erasmus says that he and his team are more than happy with their switch to purely digital publishing, as are most advertisers, even though the opacity of their host site to metric analysis means a simpler performance assessment figure than might be expected in the digital domain.

“We are, in some respects, back where we began with respect to our readers. Since our host site says they cannot and will not reveal anything at all about readers - for privacy reasons, as they don't want readers moving away from their site because they are getting spam or other post-read harassment by publisher and/or advertisers - we have only the overall exposure numbers as a useful measure of our reach. That's pretty much what you get in print. You can establish with fair accuracy what your circulation is and can get some sense of the ratio of readers to each copy bought, providing a readership figure. In print you can only really tell if people like what you do by ongoing circulation and readership figures. You can't get any meaningful demographics - except by indirect derivation - on your readers, at least not without a very serious expenditure of time, money and effort involved in extensive surveying. The same applies to our titles in the digital space, with the great added advantage of not only avoiding most of the hassles of distribution (SA's limited bandwidth and linespeed issues being an ongoing limitation, but one that's being addressed and is likely to ease with time) but also obtaining our overall exposure to readers from our host site in a single figure representing everyone who's taken the time and trouble to click through to view the mag. It's very close to an ideal situation for us, given that both titles have a very strong leaning towards earth-friendly ways of doing business, including reducing one's carbon footprint as much as possible. This matches with our readers' requirements and interests and so this digital space is clearly the best for us at this time.”

Beyond the current conditions in terms of challenges facing publishers, both in South Africa and abroad, Erasmus says there is a looming ‘doomsday for print as we have known it’ when it comes to glossy magazines.

“Because of our close association with industry leader Sappi, we are well aware of trends in global coated paper production. In short, there's a move away from coated papers, which are currently heavily under-priced because of a global glut since the 2008 downturn, in favour of the much more versatile alternative product termed chemical cellulose or dissolving wood pulp, for which there is growing demand. Found in a very wide variety of consumer products, the latter product is set to become by far the largest output of Sappi and other global paper producers. This means that coated papers are shortly going to go from over-supply to under-supply, in all probability, leading to a massive spike in paper prices - perhaps to double current costs in the next two to three years. This will mean the death of the era of having the luxury of having a choice as the consumer from a great many glossy mags on supermarket and bookstore shelves, with the few survivors charging perhaps two to two and half times what is being currently asked over the counter for their print editions.”

“When that time comes, publishers will either have to bite the bullet and go where we have gone - or they will have to shut titles down, as is mostly happening now. It will be very interesting to see how this all unfolds, but either way, we now know that the digital space can and does work for publishing, with some specialist knowledge and precise tweaking of the old print model, and the realisation that in the digital space you cannot expect people to buy your work, only to read it. The revenue has to come from those who stand to gain through the increased low-cost exposure that digital offers. When you stop to think about it long enough, as we obviously have been forced to do, then the logic of the situation becomes overwhelming. With consumer trends showing that under-30s are increasingly consuming media according to their own schedules and tastes - a bottom-up consumer trend which is directly in opposition the top-down, outdate model of media production and distribution. And they are doing so preferably or even exclusively in the digital domain. This makes it even more apparent that digital is not only the future for publishing, it is more or less the only future in which publishing as we have known it will take place.”