Warners the magazine services group have built up a community for hobbyists with interests in model railways and traction systems. They also have archives of 20+ titles on the Exact Editions digital platform and are steadily working to build various digital communities around the magazines, in art, family history, animals, as well as modelling.
As interest in model railway titles has grown, Warners have attracted an online community of enthusiasts who read the digital versions of the magazines and also share content through a subscriber-only World of Railways portal on the Warners site. Community users who come to the magazines and archives through this route never have direct contact with Exact Editions (we have no information on them and no way of counting or identifying them). Warners manage all the access and e-commerce around the resource.
Exact Editions can straightforwardly support this type of requirement because it is a streaming service. Streaming is a jargon word — but it concretely means two things:
(1) the service gives direct online access to pages rather than per-issue downloads; and equally important
(2) the Exact Editions access has always supported multi-user accounts as well as individual subscriptions.
We call this type of support for a publisher a White-Labelled solution. The publisher is in complete control over who has access to the resource, and the Exact Editions database will churn away delivering access to all the page requests or search requirements that come from the publisher’s site. So there has to be a trusted and automated connection between the publisher site and Exact Editions servers to make this work. Some work on implementation and testing is necessary. There are of course some running costs for Exact Editions, but the system is in many ways simpler than supporting a customer directly, and it is highly convenient for the publisher in that additional resources which may have nothing to do with Exact Editions or magazines can be plugged in behind the paywall to grow community content as needed. In this example the Warners community has contributed heaps of Trackplans and a stock of explanatory Videos. This is a useful example of the way in which digital magazines can sit happily alongside other forms of digital media (paper plans and video clips), but under publisher control.
White-Labelling is also brand friendly since the magazine will look exactly how it looks in print. The digital experience will feel very familiar to readers who have subscribed to the print magazine.
So far the publishers we work with have primarily used White-Labelling to host magazines behind a paywall on the publisher’s own website. But the technique could be used for syndicating a magazine resource to another web service (eg a sports, food or travel magazine to a newspaper site or a music title could be re-directed to subscribers within a music service). We have not yet encouraged our partner publishers to do this, but sport and music would be commercially attractive fields for digital magazine syndication. Issue by issue, or whole archives as required.