Modern Magazine Web Editions – Vertical Magazines

Vertical Digital Edition Magazine Platform

Modern Magazine Web Editions – Vertical Magazines


For Magazine Publishers
Digital magazine service launching soon! Vertical editions magazine publishing platform info
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Magazine Publishing Evolution
The dawn of the modern magazine is upon us! The future of digital magazines is not what most people envision based on the current horizontal digital edition layout of pages automatically generated from a traditional print layout design format. It’s been a year since we wrote about modern magazine media formats defined and the writing was already on the wall for continued evolution of digital magazines based on the way users had already been interacting with their other digital content and social applications.

Digital Magazine Becomes Magazine
It’s time to inspire and to be inspired by the elevation of the magazine in digital format. We utilize the category classification term “Web Editions” to distinguish the designed vertical UX digital magazine format from website magazines, PDFs, e-magazines, and digitized print layout magazines in recent years branded as “digital editions.”  Vertical Magazines and Web Editions, are transitional bridge terms just as “Digital Magazine” helped the publishing industry to understand the service platforms and process of extending their magazines online to digital formats 10 years ago.  Magazines are now perfectly positioned for growth to digital maturity benefiting from mobile design usability principles plus viewport improvements in phone and tablet device hardware.  This is the magazine era where purposeful digital design of periodic advertising and editorial content are presented together in a format that provides material value to magazine advertisers and readership. By 2025, the industry as well as business and consumer audiences will once again return to the single word descriptor of “Magazine,” to represent the prominent digital deliverable.

My modern definition of a magazine supports traditional value elements and allows for modern digital UX characteristics to authenticate magazine media beyond the print medium in the vertical publishing user experience pattern.

Modern “Magazine” Definition:

– A periodic compilation of sequenced relative materials and edited content published in a designed format.

– David Blankenship, Advontemedia Inc.

Magazine Innovation Challenges
Magazine apps don’t work for the small to mid-size publishing business models, especially the B2B magazine. Business and consumer users find multiple magazine platform newsstand apps complicate issue delivery with a less than friendly mobile device issue presentation. Traditional digital editions as print replicas don’t meet modern web standards for expectations of device independent usability. Website magazines as collections of articles within a CMS miss the cornerstone foundation of the magazine as a designed linear UX product. Magazine advertising is also often a critical business model element properly positioned as intermission for editorial content and should NEVER be replaced by generic banner ads lacking context to the brand experience within the designed digital magazine presentation. And lastly, the print magazine is challenged with limited portability, durability, and it’s high physical production and delivery cost will always limit it’s utilization as a brand extension for most modern and future magazine media brands.

Vertical Edition Magazines
The required user interface improvement for digital magazines is the transition to a vertical flow (vertical scroll) content experience and not horizontal page flipping. The linear presentation structure of the vertical edition provides the always valuable and unique “magazine experience.” Several innovative web published articles, including the New York Time’s Snow Fall have received acclaim for their impressive storytelling in a longform web format and these examples provide a glimpse into the future of modern journalism and presentation of content where digital is the default publishing medium and the reader UX provides content engagement and aesthetics to support the magazine niche.

Vertical Digital Magazine Editions

We have started building vertical edition magazines today and know many others are also embarking on production of magazines in this vertical flow user interface format where ample opportunities exist for publishing business growth based on design and technical publishing team skills.  The new marketing brand for our full service “Vertical Editions” platform will be announced soon.  We will perform the issue production of this new format for publishers and offer self service models later.  Publishers may begin using these new web editions as their main “digital edition” or might choose to begin the service as an additional device independent access version optimized for mobile presentation and readability.  And we expect that many new publications will launch exclusively on this modern magazine edition presentation platform and stage the issue access from the publication website.

Long live the Magazine!

Ready for a new kind of digital magazine edition – then you’re ready for “Vertical Editions”

Watch for updates about our innovative vertical edition magazine publishing platform and let’s create the future for designed content our readers love!

Visit VERTIQUL.COM