In a surprising move, NatMags has axed its teen girl digital magazine experiment called Jellyfish. The project, which lasted just 20 weeks ( the average life expectancy of a Box Jellyfish ironically) was, according to Duncan Edwards "...extremely valuable but we could not see a sustainable business model emerging. We have learnt a great deal about digital and email marketing, which will prove to be useful for our core business."
Which of course means that they couldn't get any ad support. The decision to close the title will likely surprise many, who have touted the online teen market as one of the major growth areas of digital media. However, the company had decided to refocus Jellyfish at an older age group of 18-to 25-year-olds and said it was still in a test period that was slated to run until September.
1 comment:
I think Natmags should be ashamed of themselves. Firstly, they did not produce anything innovative as they simply copied Monkey's format and secondly, they obviously did not put enough effort into ad sales to sustain the business model.
Their excuse 'The magazine is delivered by email and suffered delivery problems with Hotmail, which NatMags said accounts for 60% of the world's email programmes. Hotmail's spam filters were blocking Jellyfish, even when it was requested by users' just illustrates their total lack of expertise in email marketing. After all they are not 'sending' the magazine itself, just a bog standard email with a link to the mag.
Also 'In addition, Jellyfish uses Flash animation, which made it more likely to be blocked by corporate servers and therefore difficult for women to view at work' is simply not true.
Good riddance I say.
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