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Trend: Consumer generated magazines
Written By Josefine Koehn on Sunday, December 23, 2007 at 8:37 PM | In Lifestyle Trends, USA
Innovative publishers get consumers to fill magazine pages.
Trend Description
The idea behind consumer-generated magazines is to publish some of the exponentially growing mass of free online content while empowering the consumers themselves. This process saves the costs for writers, photographers, and ad sales staff – and harvests the productivity of online communities. So far, high-gloss luxury magazines are the most popular consumer-generated publications, but a variety of different kinds are cropping up.
Cases:
JPGmag.com
JPG is a user-generated on-demand photo magazine. Photographers and amateurs can submit their favorite pictures in high resolution according to a wide range of themes and topics — fashion, split seconds, democracy, etc. Online readers vote for their favorite submissions appearing on JPGmag.com. Then a tiny staff on ten builds the magazine and lays outs the pages for the winning submissions. If a submitted photo is included, the image taker gets a free year subscription and $100. So far about 50,000 magazines are printed six times a year, which are sold for US$ 6 at the newsstand. The annual subscription costs US$25. Online versions are free and can be downloaded and printed as PDF files of the entire magazine. Participants have to sign up, to be able to submit, upload, and vote.
8020 Publishing
8020 Publishing wants to empower its communities to participate in all aspects of the magazine’s content creation. Advantages are lower costs and closeness to the audience, which can be engaged on different levels. In fact, what was once “the audience” is now taking the leading role in the process of the magazine’s development and is invited to contribute, to critique, and to vote on the looks and the content of each publication. 8020 Publishing now also publishes JPGmag.com. They also publish Everywhere Magazine.
Trend Impact:
The web has proven itself as the perfect place to organically grow real communities, and to connect people to one another. By embracing this online community concept, 8020 publishing and JPGmag.com are about to create the next publishing empire. They are the first publishing house of Web-generated print magazines.
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