Many magazines, which initially packed their tablet editions with interactive features, have had to curb them in the face of a growing (and costly) number of devices to develop for. But GQ is going the other way with a new personalization feature. Called MyGQ, the technology developed in-house will let readers save, share and click to buy content from GQ’s iPad edition.
While many magazine apps have editorial sharing features, the same can’t be said of ads (73 percent of magazine apps enable edit to be shared via email or social media, while only 9 percent of them have social sharable ads, per research firm McPheters & Co.) Adding an ad-sharing capability was a natural next step for a fashion brand like GQ, though, whose readers find the ads of high value.
GQ hopes that people will spend more time with the app and drive traffic to GQ.com once they start saving content to folders and sharing links with friends. But it also sees an advertising benefit. While other publishers let advertisers on their digital editions include a link in their ads gratis, Condé Nast charges $5,000 for the privilege. Until now, GQ has been selling five to seven links per issue, and the hope is that more advertisers will buy them, knowing there’s the possibility that users might disseminate the ads to their social networks. Procter & Gamble is the first client of MyGQ, which gives the advertiser a folder that it can populate with its products and include Web links or buy buttons.
“It incentivizes the advertiser to buy a link because users can ‘work’ for them,” said Brendan Monaghan, associate publisher of GQ. “I think that this will drive a lot of link business.”
MyGQ launches with the April edition, which is available March 26.