Magazine Publishers of America
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DIGITAL DRIVERThis is another in a series of exclusive interviews with magazine executives responsible for leveraging their brands on digital platforms.
DAN WOODS, Associate Publisher, O’Reilly Media
Dan Woods is Associate Publisher for O'Reilly Media's Maker Media Division, which includes MAKE: Magazine, makezine.com,book publishing unit MAKE: Books, e-tail site MakerShed.com, and Maker Faire, a live event targeting armchair MacGyvers and Ben Franklins. Before taking on that post almost five years ago, Woods served with the Sebastopol, California-based O’Reilly Media’s book unit for nearly two years.
Dale Daugherty, now MAKE Editor/Publisher, first described the magazine to Woods as “Martha Stewart for geeks.” The quarterly, launched in 2005, now has a paid circulation of 95,000, Woods said, while sister quarterly CRAFT, launched early 2006, has 50,000. Their subs are 50/50 paid subscriptions and newsstand, said Woods, who also pens the “Maker’s Corner” column.
Q. Both MAKE and CRAFT magazines and their websites – www.makezine.com and www.craftzine.com – are in the overall do-it-yourself/how-to space. In a nutshell, how does MAKE differ from CRAFT?
A. They’re very similar in sensibility in that both are hands-on and project-based. MAKE is more about people interested in bending and hacking technology and science. CRAFT is more about bending and merging traditional crafts. Demographically, CRAFT skews more female, MaKE more male.
Q. Lots of magazines today look for spinoffs, for instance, in the form of TV or cable programming. Do you have anything in the works along those lines?
A. There’s the "Make:" TV show due January on PBS. Twin Cities Public TV is producing and the Geek Squad is sponsoring. John Park, a Disney engineer, will be the TV host. There’ll be a dozen episodes, I think, for a complete season, though it won’t necessarily air as a weekly series, since PBS stations can air things irregularly. And there’s also Maker Faire.
Q. How did the Maker Faire come about? What cities might you add next – and how do you choose the cities?
A. As soon as we published MAKE, we found that there weren’t any real outlets or venues for family-friendly events to share their interests. We developed the Maker Faire as part science fair, part new-age county fair. In San Mateo, California and Austin, Texas, we chose fairgrounds. For San Mateo, we drew 65,000 attendees. As for where to go next, that’s a question we wrestle with a lot.
People ask us, what about New York and Boston? We’ll always do the Bay Area – that’s home for us. Austin has a major convergence of university, independent film and independent music communities, plus the craft/tech movement – and they invited us down! New York and Boston are high on our list, but the Maker Faire is not something we could do in [Manhattan’s] Javits convention center. There has to be indoor/outdoor space. We light off rockets! (laughs)
Q. In the pop culture, the "MacGyver" TV series and movie Astronaut Farmer all appealed to creative tinkerers. And in education circles, high school and college students compete in robotics competitions and the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. And, of course, garages have spawned garage rock bands and Microsoft. Do you see your Maker Faire in particular as targeting all those audience segments?
A. Yes, but it’s more about building things than competing. Plus it’s a great networking event. By the way, the creator of the original MacGyver series is a frequent contributor to MAKE.
Q. Apart from "Make:" TV, how important is video to your magazines and websites?
A. We do a lot of videos on our site, especially “Make: Weekend Projects.” We get about one million downloads a month of our videos. Generally, we produce one video a week but in the fall, it’s more like two or three a week. We also have a lot of video elsewhere, for example, on YouTube and Vimeo. Our own websites combined draw nearly three million unique visitors per month – two million-plus for Makezine and about 900,000 for Craftzine.
Our project blogs on both Makezine (http://blog.makezine.com/) and Craftzine (http://blog.craftzine.com/) definitely generate the most traffic. These blogs are probably the most exciting things on our sites – people keep coming back for more. We just scour the web for really cool people and projects. We really like Popular Science. We blog their stuff on our sites and they blog our stuff on theirs.
Q. How about audio?
A. We don’t do as much audio. We did a weekly podcast early on but audio doesn’t hold people, particularly for the kinds of projects we do. So we quickly moved to video about four years ago.
Q. Your magazines were among the first available as free iPhone editions via Texterity earlier this year. What feedback have you gotten from that thus far?
A. People love it when they find it that way. We like trying different things. About 80 percent of our total circulation signups come through all the online marketing that we do.
We’ve done other things with Texterity ( http://texterity.com/services/magazines/examples/ ) as well.
Q. Do you get involved in other digital platforms, such as mobile?
A. We’re closely looking at other platforms. We’re pretty technology-agnostic. We’re even doing stuff with Twitter. It’s an experiment and I don’t know where we’re going with that yet. Kindle…, we looked at that too. In addition, iTunes subscribers can automatically download “Weekend Project” videos and the accompanying PDFs each week (http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/01/the_complete_gu.html ).
Q. A number of magazines in the past year or so have dropped print editions but continued online. Is that a viable approach, generally speaking?
A. I think it’ll work in certain specific cases. People love our print magazine. If we make any changes in paper stock, etc., we hear about it. I don’t think online will replace that.
With print and online, it’s yin and yang – they work together. We offer MAKE digital edition free of charge to print subscribers. Even abroad, less than 30 percent of our overseas subscribers opt for digital only, which is not what you’d expect. So I don’t think print’s disappearing. But magazines need to learn to integrate with online.
Q. What do you see as the greatest opportunity for independent magazine publishers today?
A. Any independent publisher with a great idea can develop an online community around a brand quicker than a major magazine publishing company can.
Q. And their biggest concern?
A. It’s extremely challenging just to launch a new magazine and be profitable in circulation and advertising revenue. You’ve got to be super-creative.
Q. Looking ahead, what would you say are your top priorities?
A. Our next big thing is how to get our events localized and bring our brands to local communities in, say, Seattle or Austin. And our ability to integrate e-commerce and retail with magazines. We’ve had enormous success with that already. Online traffic is strong for our store, Maker Shed where we sell kits and projects. Traffic really builds there in the November-December holiday season. For the last three months, traffic has been up an average of 45 percent versus the previous year. A few weeks ago, the store moved to its own dedicated server to handle more traffic.
