MMG to take on America
Hot on the heels of the launch of electronicsBOM.com, MMG has announced that Electronics Sourcing North America will be launched in April 2010. The title will launch with a circulation of over 40,000 electronics purchasing professionals, a new list that the publishers say has been 100% telephone researched from orginal SIC codes.
The launch pad for ESNA will be at the "Electronics Distribution Show" in Las Vegas and the circulation, editorial and design will take the same approach as Electronics Sourcing UK & Electronics Sourcing Europe.
It's great to see the MMG continue to show confidence in our industry, and have the courage to continue to launch new products despite the economic situation. I hope that their confidence proves well-founded and that they show the US that magazine publishing is really not dead!
ED Europe Newsline - first issue
The first issue of the Electronic Design Europe Newsline was published yesterday. Interestingly Penton has chosen to deliver an email with a link to a URL, rather than an HTML email. It also appears that the link doesn't include any tracking information, so we won't be able to get unique open rates (although open rates can be tracked). Despite this, the email should at least look right for all recipients, rather than suffer the HTML mangling of various email clients.
The first issue includes an in-depth editorial about soft error rates, a contributed article and three news items. The newsletter format also includes text adverts. It will be interesting to see how successful the newsletter is - in particular how many people click through to the web page - but first impressions are pretty positive, and it's great to see Penton's commitment to quality editorial.
PCIM had more exhibitors and larger floor area!
Don't they know there is a recession on? PCIM 2009 managed to increase the exhibitors from 252 to 257, and to increase the floor space from 10600 to 10700 sqm. Although the growth is modest, given the current economic situation, and the fact that PCIM 2008 also showed growth over the previous year, the results are truly impressive.
Unsurprisingly, the number of visitors shrank, from 6493 to 6133, although this 5% drop should also be regarded as an outstanding performance. The exhibitor survey also revealed that 97% of exhibitors also plan to be at PCIM 2010, which says a lot about the quality of visitors to the event.
SupplyFrame launches Twitter tool
I'm still not sure about Twitter. OK, so it's great for following Lance Armstrong, but is it really a going to be a good business tool? SupplyFrame is definitely innovating, by providing a twitter interface to allow engineers to request data via twitter (@datasheeter). The service cleverly returns a TinyURL of the search results to whatever you send as a direct message.
Although a neat idea, I'm not certain of the benefits of twittering a search term and then clicking through to the results page, when the same objective would have been achieved by simply using the search box on the site. So far a number of people seem to have experimented with the service, but it will be interesting to see if SupplyFrame can enhance the service to make it really useful in the long term. Despite my reservations, I'm really impressed to see a publisher in our industry find a way to use Twitter creatively.
Weka launches Energie&Technik
Weka's Markt & Technik team is launching a new publication, Energie&Technik. Interestingly Weka has chosen to position the publication as "powered by Markt&Technik", rather than branding the magazine as M&T special issues. The editorial focus will be on energy sources – such as solar heat, photovoltaics, wind power - and new battery technologies as well as fuel cells and energy harvesting.
NEW attendance figures down on 2008
Perhaps not surprising in the current economic climate, the attendance figures of National Electronics Week were 1750 (excluding delegates and press), about 200 down on last year. The show itself was considerably smaller - the organisers say it was 40% smaller than the previous year - which clearly accounts for a fall in attendance. Despite this it's a little disappointing to see that the tie-in the Electronics Weekly (Electronics Weekly Live) failed to deliver a boost in visitors.
What's more valuable – EE Times or The Simpsons?
There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about advertising around The Simpsons being more expensive for online broadcasts such as Hulu than on traditional television. Apparently the CPM (cost per thousand viewers) is $20-40 for a slot during The Simpsons on mainstream TV, whilst online services get about $60.
This got me thinking: for $60 you can get a video advert on Hulu. You own the screen whilst your advert is running, and the online services don't let viewers skip the adverts. In the electronics industry, you're talking about very different CPMs. On Elektroniknet, the rate card cost of a full banner (468 x 60 pixels, perhaps 1/15th of the page or less, and sharing the page with at least 2 other adverts) is €125 - about $175. If you want to buy a welcome advert on EE Times, the $7500 rate card cost is going to get you around 28K impressions - a CPM of almost $270, and the viewer can easily skip the advert.
Does this mean that the electronics websites are a rip-off? Obviously not. You're going to get a much better quality audience to advertise components from EE Times or Elektroniknet than you would advertising to viewers of The Simpsons. It's simply better value to pay the higher CPM on electronics sites. But with broadcasters such as Sky in the UK keen to profile their customers in greater and greater detail so that they can serve them "customised" advertising, and online video services able to use profiling from other sites, how long before we're getting adverts for FPGAs or DC-DC converters appearing when we watch The Simpsons? When mainstream sites are able to profile for specific industries, we're likely to see a lot of pressure on the pricing of advertising on industry-specific sites.
YouTube adverts for everyone
I'm a strong believer that online video will grow in importance, and that increasingly electronics companies will use the medium for demonstrations, tutorials and presentations. At Napier, we've got a studio and video editing facilities that allow clients to produce broadcast-quality HD video.
Now YouTube has opened up the use of Call-to-Action overlays to everyone, having tested the approach with a number of partners. This will allow a link at the bottom of the video to drive potential customers through to an online store page, which could allow engineers to buy the development kit being shown in the video. Quite how this will be funded in future will be interesting to see, but now there is even less reason for companies to delay the generation of video content.
Recession hits UK-based titles
The last job I would want at the moment is to be a publisher. I'm amazed at how well they continue to run their businesses in a time when not only is there huge change in the delivery medium (the move from print to online), but also when they see a dramatic drop in revenues due to the recession. For this reason I'm trying not to write about the problems, but to focus on the successes that publishers continue to deliver.
Despite continually looking for good news, it's clear that the recession is hitting UK publications hard. Electronics has combined its July/August issue, and appears to be pushing readers to switch to a digital version; Michelle Winney is leaving CIE; EDN Europe has switched Graham Prophet to a part-time contract; and I even heard a source at Electronics Weekly muttering that if the name wasn't "weekly", then the frequency of the magazine would have been reduced.
Clearly these are tough times for publishers in all industries, although controlled circulation titles do seem to take the biggest hit in a recession. In a recession the same principles of good marketing still apply: getting the right balance of different marketing activities will produce the best results. I'd urge marketers to take an integrated approach to campaign planning at all times, rather than simply seeing the advertising budget as the easiest thing to cut: it will make your campaigns more effective! When publications with outstanding editorial content begin to struggle, it should concern everyone in the industry, not just publishers.
Napier research into social media use – preliminary results
I started work on a project to look at the use of social media by engineers some months ago, which has produced some interesting results. We're sponsoring research that is being conducted by Chichester University and although the fuill analysis won't be available until the end of July, I wanted to share some of the initial results with you.
To date we have received almost 300 responses to the survey, providing a sample size that is more than sufficient to draw clear conclusions. Some of the provisional results are:
61% believed social media was a useful business tool, although 28% were blocked from using these tools at work
30% currently use social media for work, 44% for personal reasons, but a surprising 46% don't use social media at all
Only 5% use Twitter more than once a week, whereas 28% are frequent users of Facebook
Linkedin is the clear choice for business use, with 24% using the site more than once a week
The most popular form of social media for business use are forums, with 45% of the respondents using forums for business purposes.
The results will be available in a month's time, so if you want to make sure your get a copy of the report when it is available, please email me.
ilb2b.it relaunched
The web portal for the Italian magazines Elettronica Oggi. EO News and EO Embedded (as well as several other automation, mechanical, energy and environment titles), ilb2b.it has been relaunched. I'm really pleased to see that the site takes advantage of social media opportunities, with space for comments on stories as well as easy links to share the content on social networking sites from Twitter to Digg.
The publishers promise future enhancements, the most interesting of which is the opportunity to launch digital titles hosted on the portal - such as EO Web - as well as web seminars, forums and the possibility of pay-per-service. Pay-per-service is particularly interesting as it offers a new revenue stream for publishers, and I will be keen to see if the portal can make this approach a viable commercial venture.
An easy approach to touch-screen information systems
Carrying boxes and boxes of data to trade shows and other events (and carrying the unused ones back) makes no sense. Although you'd probably bring a few printed items, visitors really want electronic data. I've seen many good implementations of touch-screen information systems at shows and in company receptions and training centres, but typically they require quite a lot of programming and configuration work.
Recently I saw the system from InfoAktiv, which simply allows you to drop files in a directory structure, and the system does the rest. It will also record as leads the details of people that request literature to be emailed (and send the emails automatically). It's a great system, and I'd recommend that you check it out if you have a show or other event coming up.
ED Europe to launch email newsletters
Penton has announced that email newsletters branded "Electronic Design Europe NewsLine" will launch in July. The newsletters are design to complement the existing website and digital (PDF) magazine, offering the benefits of pushing information whilst providing a higher frequency than is possible with the magazine. The newsletters will promote the multimedia content on the website - ED Europe's video content is a real asset and I'm sure that this will help increase the traffic to the videos significantly.
The plans for the magazine are a little less clear. It appears that the frequency will be reduced, which I guess is not surprising in these tough times. Rather than committing to a specific frequency, it appears that Penton will take full advantage of the flexibility of the digital distribution. Paul Whytock, Editor in Chief of ED Europe told me:
"Frequency of Electronic Design Europe NewsLine and the Electronic Design Europe Digital edition will not be set-in-stone like traditional methods of producing B2B publications. Electronic media is by its very nature fast and flexible and Penton Media’s philosophy as it expands its electronic media properties is to fully employ those attributes in the best interests of its readers and advertisers.
The Penton Media Electronic Design Group produces multiple newsletters and digital publications on a regular basis and Electronic Design Europe NewsLine will join Electronic Design UPDATE, Microwaves & RF UPDATE, Mobile Dev & Design, Defense Electronics and Auto Electronics as part of that portfolio."
I'm not surprised that it appears Penton will cut the frequency of the magazine - with only one advertiser supporting the last three issues, it must be tough. Despite the pressure, ED Europe hasn't switched to offering traditional advertising formats: whether this proves to be an inspired move to ensure that recipients read more pages because they are not "put off" by advertising and have the high quality ED Europe editorial on every page, or if it simply discourages advertisers is something that only time will tell.
Embedded Systems Europe rebrands and focuses on UK
Embedded System Europe is to rebrand as Embedded Systems Design, mirroring the branding of it's sister title in the US. More importantly the September and October print issues will only be distributed to the 12000 readers in the UK: if you are based in another European country, you will only get the digital issue. This move follows on from the decision that the July/August issue would be "folded into" EE Times.
TechInsights say that there are two reasons for the decision: firstly to ensure good promotion of ESC UK, and secondly to encourage some of the advertisers that liked Embedded Systems Engineering's UK circulation to start spending on the merged title.
This is a interesting move: TechInsights claim they already have a digital circulation of about 30K subscribers, but clearly the move is cost-driven, although it does appear that some of the advertisers in Embedded Systems Engineering were not happy with the new pan-European format when the title was bought and merged with Embedded Systems Europe. I believe, however, that promotion of ESC has to be a secondary reason: publishing a magazine is an expensive way to promote a show! The good news is that we are promised that European content will remain a significant part of the magazine.
TechInsights remains optimistic, saying that they "Hope to continue with Nov and Dec issues the same way". There is even a promise of some of the European print circulation returning later in the year to promote the ESC and IP/SOC 09 even in Grenoble.
Print is only half-dead
A long time ago, when print still ruled the roost and online advertising brought in a pretty small proportion of a publisher's revenue, Napier started looking at the page counts of magazines. With the current economic downturn and the move to online I thought it would be worth sharing some of the findings of this ongoing research.
We didn't have time to track the total page count of every magazine, so created our own magazine page stock market - the Napier Page Index (NPI). This index includes 18 electronics magazines published across Europe, and we simply track the page count per issue of those magazines, with the page count of January 2001 providing an index base of 100. This was set when times were still pretty good: the last recession didn't really hit page counts until January 2002. If a magazine closes, we replace it with the nearest equivalent.
Given the general feeling of gloom perhaps surprisingly the page count index is still at 53 - only 47% down on 2001 and only 22% down on March 2004. Of course there have been some closures and some titles have cut frequency, but I think this is a surprisingly good result. Having said that half the pages means [roughly] half the print revenue: with the increase in printing and postage costs, this is a very significant fall in income.
Perhaps surprisingly design books have performed the worst, now delivering less than half the number of pages they were eight years ago. News-orientated titles don't do much better, and some of these have cut frequency significantly. The most surprising result was that product books are delivering more pages per issue than 2001: I can only think that this is influenced by a smaller sample size and the fact that they face little competition from other product books.
Not surprisingly the pan-European titles have suffered the least damage, presumably as smaller budgets drive advertisers to pull out of local-language titles. Germany has seen the biggest fall in page counts, dropping a scary 61%, and no longer has the highest average page count - an accolade that now goes to Italy. This has to be due to the overcrowded market: there are more titles in Germany than any other country.
Overall, however, I was surprised that the page counts of magazines hasn't collapsed further - most people seem to believe that page counts are one third or one quarter of what they were in 2001. Despite the advent of the Internet, page counts are only 25 to 30% down on 2002 - the last downturn in the electronics market.
Clearly in the long term magazines must do something different to survive. We've seen EE Times use digital distribution for a significant proportion of the circulation and other magazines - such as Electronics appear to be doing the same. If digital versions can woo back advertisers who made cuts in the recession then magazines have a future, although I'm sure that this will require more accountability, tracking and measurable ROI: all things that digital magazines have the potential to provide.
For more information on the research, send me an email.
Another creative advertising promotion from funkschau
Without doubt, the most creative advertising promotions in our industry are developed by funkschau. Hot on the heels of offering big discounts to older advertising buyers, the title is now offering a great promotion for newer companies (and it's not a bad deal for older companies either!). To celebrate the 2000th issue (2000 issues - that's amazing!), the magazine is offering all companies placing a 1/3 page or larger advert in the 2000th issue (funkschau 16/09) a discount in Euros corresponding to the year the company was founded. So Napier, which was founded in 1984, would receive a discount of €1984.00.
The magazine is also promoting the email newsletter, offering text ads at special rate of €2,000, an offer that will remain available for 2,000 hours from publication of 2,000th issue!
I love the fun promotions from funkschau, and wish that other titles would think up more creative special offers: perhaps there should be a prize for the most creative offer of the year?
Good adverts will cost less on Digg
... at least that is the idea! Like many social networking sites, Digg is concerned about adverts pushing some of its users away, so they have come up with a great solution: users rate the ads, reducing the price of advertising that users don't mind seeing (for more information see this article on Venturebeat). It's an interesting idea, and may be key to keeping traffic levels up when the cost to a user of switching to another service is minimal. Although it is always good to see innovation in the world of advertising, it also suggests to me that Digg recognises the potential fragility of its business if a better alternative became available.
I'd be surprised to see such an approach in our industry, as websites pull in users because of high-quality, unique content. If, however, editorial teams continue to get squeezed, and sites increasingly populate their content with cut-and-paste press releases, then who knows?
ElectronicsBOM.com goes live
ElectronicsBOM.com has gone live. This new website - from the publishers of Electronics Sourcing - aims to be a resource for the electronic components buyer.
over 1,500
Overall the site looks pretty good - it certainly has impressive content, with more than 1,500 articles posted when the site was launched. The idea is also a good one, although it may need some time until the site can really offer value to purchasers.
Although the two sites take a different approach, SupplyFrame is the obvious competitor to ElectronicsBOM, although SupplyFrame's main focus is engineers. Despite this, I would expect purchasers to use both sites, typing in descriptions of parts to get a list of suppliers and possible devices (with ElectronicsBOM providing stories whilst SupplyFrame serves up data sheets).
SupplyFrame has been established for a considerable time (although they have yet to get rid of the "Beta" tag), so you would expect it to have considerably more content. In fact the difference is huge - just try typing in "8-bit microcontroller" or "D-type connector" into both sites to see the difference.
The content, however, may not be such an issue for ElectronicsBOM. I would expect that the content is more easily indexed by Google, and with many purchasers using Google as their first stop for search ElectronicsBOM could build a decent flow of traffic.
SPS/IPC/DRIVES extends hours
Exhibitions in Germany are different. No only are visitors more organised and methodical in their approach, but sometimes their belief in the show is so strong that they will visit in their own time, after work. SPS/IPC/DRIVES - which already extends its opening hours on the middle day - has decided that this year's event will stay open to 7pm on the first day as well. Good for visitors, but it's going to be a tough show if you're manning a booth!
Call for papers: AdvancedTCA/MicroTCA summit
The organisers of the telecommunications-focused AdvancedTCA/MicroTCA Summit have issued a call for papers. The summit will be held from 27th to 29th October in Santa Clara and if you would like to be there, you need to get your proposal in by 26th June. Proposals can be submitted either by email or through the online submission form on the website.
Google's search business
Thanks to SupplyFrame for pointing me to this interesting article on ten things you didn't know about Google's search business model, which apparently started with an advert for lobsters! An interesting read.
Global SMT & Packaging wins award
Congratulations to Global SMT & Packaging, which recently received the Media of the Year Award from SMTA China. Trevor Galbraith, Editor-in-Chief, was presented with the award during NEPCON China.
In another move, SMT & Packaging "went live" with their SMT TV channel, when they streamed two presentation and two panel discussions from SMT/Hybrid/Packaging in Nuremberg, Germany. Although most websites in our industry have begun to embrace video content, it's great to see sites begin live broadcasts: this is surely not only good for the website, but also great promotion for the show. Trevor Galbraith promises more live broadcasts for, "new product launches, factory openings, training and maintenance videos”.
e-Legacy nominations now open
The e-Legacy Awards 2009, organised by IML, are now open for nominations. Although other awards in our industry are increasing their focus on environmental awards, these are the only ones that focus completely on how companies improve the human, natural and built environment. The categories are:
- Medical Advances Award
- Investment in Education Award
- Investment in Training Award
- Investment in the Environment Award
- Environmental Design Award
- Contribution to Sustainability Award
- Contribution to Security Award
The deadline for entries is 30th July, and all that is required is a short overview of your product or innovation.
I have to admit that when these awards were first launched, I was concerned that IML may have problems attracting sufficient high-quality entries, but have been proved completely wrong. As companies are increasingly keen to highlight their environmental achievements, these awards continue to go from strength to strength.
Global SMT & Packaging closes UK site
Sad to see that Global SMT & Packaging has closed the UK site yesterday. Although the UK content is still available on the global site, it appears that the low level of advertisers targeting the UK specifically meant that a separate site was no longer viable. Global SMT continues to support the local sites for Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea and Mexico.
SENSOR+TEST 2009 attendance
The organisers of SENSOR+TEST 2009 have announced that they attracted 537 exhibitors and "approx." 7000 visitors. The exhibitors number compares well against the 562 exhibitors in 2008, but the visitors have dropped by about 11% from the 7900 visitors in 2008.
Given the state of the economy, the attendance is not a bad result. interestingly the organisers come up with a very positive spin in their press release, claiming "In times such as these, when companies uphold a strict travel policy, often only employees with concrete projects are allowed to go to trade fairs. Thus exhibitors confirmed that the high quality of the visitors has increased even more, resulting in discussions at the stands that related to very concrete projects."