The Reimagination

of Publishing

Web publishing: Blogs, Websites

Digital Magazines

Digital Books

Some Key Drivers For Digital Magazines & Books

• Tablets, especially iPad

• Multimedia; interactive, immersive experiences

• Kindle Highlights - easier to make highlights and share them.

• Cheaper, quicker delivery (esp for us in NZ!)

• But... people still love paper books & magazines!

1997 2012

A Brief History of Web Publishing

• Geocities (peaked 1999, when it was the third-most visited Web site on the WWW)

• Blogger, Movable Type, Radio Userland (2000s)

• Wordpress (began to get very popular mid-2000s)

• Tumblr (launched 2007, grew rapidly in 2011)

• Social: Twitter, Facebook (major growth from 2007 to now)

• Now: Medium, Branch, App.net, Svbtle, ...

1. Publishing Is Getting More Casual

• It's now less about composition (being a writer or blogger) and more about expressing your thoughts as simply as possible.

2. Topic Organization Is Finally Happening

3. Moving From Pages to Streams

4. Quality Is In Vogue

• “Our philosophy is that quality begets quality, so we will grow Medium smartly, ensuring that our platform is valuable to everyone in this increasingly mobile, connected, and noisy world.”

Evan Williams, founder of Medium (previously co-founded Blogger and Twitter)

5. Non-Advertising Business Models

• Richard MacManusFounder & Editor-in-Chief, ReadWriteWebeditor@readwriteweb.comhttp://www.readwriteweb.comhttp://twitter.com/ricmacnz