Bloggasm

This graph comes via Business Insider

Some advertising numbers from the Business Insider piece:

We’re up 20% in digital ad revenue YOY 2011 compared with 2010, Jan-May.

We’re up 219% in digital ad revenue comparing Jan-May 2011 with Jan-May 2009

We’re up 20% in the # of campaigns we’ve carried in digital Jan-May 2011 vs Jan-May 2010. Very high end, blue chip accounts like Bank of America, Apple, SAP, Porsche, Mercedes, Jaguar, Cadillac, Lincoln, Goldman Sachs, HP, Siemens, Accenture, IBM, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines etc.

Since 2008, digital has grown from 16% of total ad revenue to 40% last year and is on pace to get be 45% this year.

In last 12 months we’re up 89% in custom digital work – either building creative or building custom campaigns that go beyond banners and boxes and that’s an increasing focus for us (might be able to build in the new ad units story here), this on top of a 3x increase in the previous 12x period.

This year, our front-line sales team has changed from 10% of them coming from outside a traditional, print background to 30% coming from outside a traditional print background.

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From the New Yorker:

As of this morning, that is changing. We can now offer subscriptions on the iPad, and we can give our U.S. and Canadian print subscribers access to iPad issues at no additional cost. Before long, we hope to be able to give the same access to international subscribers beyond Canada and to existing digital-only subscribers.

Golf Digest has also released a subscription model.

“Readers who do not yet subscribe to the print edition may go to www.golfdigest.com and with their print subscription they will receive access to the digital edition,” a spokeswoman told me via email.

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As a web app, Fortune500+ joins what seems to be a slowly rising tide of apps that run in web browsers instead of the operating systems of particular devices. Magazines, like others, have introduced many apps specifically for the iPad. But magazines have also published a couple of web apps so far, such as Sports Illustrated Snapshot, a free daily photos app that sells extra content, and Skiing Interactive, a free app that updates weekly over the summer and goes daily again in October. “I think you’ll see that more and more apps will go this way,” said Daniel Roth, managing editor at Fortune.com.

Why Rush for an iPad App? Fortune’s New Web App Starts With Your Browser

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A week ago, the New Yorker released a free Jonathan Franzen essay that would have normally resided behind its paywall. The only catch? You had to “like” its Facebook page and access the story through the social networking giant. And you had to do so within the one-week time period the story would appear.

The move was widely covered by the news media, likely adding an even larger boost to the magazine’s fan acquisition. The results? When I wrote my initial post, the Facebook page had about 202,000 fans. As of today — one week later — it has 218,000. So a growth of 16,000 new fans, or 8%.

How much are these new fans worth? According to various studies, the acquisition of a new fan is worth anywhere from $3.60 to $136.38. I’d guess that these new fans would be worth a lot less than those who liked the page organically. As businesses who use Groupon are quickly finding out, people who come in for a cheap deal rarely return when that deal goes away. It’s also worth noting that any future free stories wouldn’t be met with as much press coverage, so it’d be interesting to measure the growth of the next free story.

I’ve emailed a New Yorker spokeswoman and will update if she responds.

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For an article in Forbes, I interviewed Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News & World Report, about his decision to abandon the print weekly and monetize the company’s rankings data. It’s an interesting example of how a news company diversified its revenue streams and shifted its editorial vision

But what’s most interesting is the new direction Kelly has taken the magazine, making it essentially a data-driven consumer resource. “So [U.S. News owner Mort Zuckerman] bought it in 1983 and there were three pretty successful news magazines — Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report,” he told me. “Around that time, people start to say, ‘Is this really going to survive?’ By the late ’80s you have cable TV and instant news and a big change in the landscape, and people were like, ‘What’s the purpose of a news magazine?’ So one of the things we started doing was to focus more not on pure news content, but on consumer content.”

This wasn’t a completely alien concept; shortly after purchasing the magazine, Zuckerman had launched its college rankings, which have gone on to become the most widely respected and cited rankings of American universities. By the the mid-2000s it was shifting more radically in this direction; today it has rankings for hospitals, automobiles, high schools, and even mutual funds. By doing so, U.S. News could get its hands on something that most other news outlets don’t have: hard data.

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WWD has an interesting trend piece about print magazine editors who abandoned the ink for digital, only to return to print again.

But over the last year, a funny thing has happened. Guzman gave up hope that her start-up would become a real business and started a job as editor in chief of Martha Stewart Living on Monday. Needleman lost excitement for her start-up and joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal, launching its new weekend sections and eventually taking over its glossy supplement WSJ. Holley left Yahoo and its robust Web traffic to rejoin Condé Nast as editor in chief of Lucky. And then there’s Brown — her second issue of a relaunched Newsweek hit newsstands this week.

We are still squarely in the middle of the transition between print and web, which makes instant blockbuster success of a new online media site unlikely. From reading the article, it seems most of these editors merely suffered from impatience. The allure of print still runs deep.

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Newsweek creative director Dirk Barnett told WWD recently that in the wake of the magazine’s new redesign he’s prepared for the “haters.”

“The second I took this job I was like, the one thing people are going to destroy is the design,” he said. “They’re just gonna rip it to shreds. No one’s going to be happy with it. Because it’s Tina Brown. Anything Tina Brown does, there’s haters.”

But why shouldn’t there be? Brown has a long history in the magazine industry, but her success rate is spotty (she’s often credited with aiding The New Yorker toward profitability, yet it didn’t reach this stage until after David Remnick took over). Her Daily Beast merger with Newsweek has made little sense to anyone, and despite a number of high-profile interviews with her about the relaunch, she’s offered no real insight into how she’ll make Newsweek relevant again.

I recently picked up a copy of Newsweek for the first time in ages while in a waiting room. The paper-thin issue was stale and lacked any sort of news value. The feature articles were barely three pages long. The op-eds no more spectacular than what you’ll find in Politico.

And then with this relaunch we get a….cover with Hilary Clinton? A change in fonts and some added photography are not going to save a magazine that has long passed its expiration date in the media ecosystem. Why didn’t Tina Brown just focus on making the Daily Beast a profitable entity instead of weighing it down with an old media albatross?

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