Comment Long story short: You're barking up the wrong tree (Score 1) 298
You want to translate your tried and tested hardcopy business model over to the internet. Well, you can't.
You need a new business model altogether. Literally altogether.
Currently your entire income depends upon the inheritant slowness of distributing your hardcopy from point A to point B. It takes time and money to print, ship and display your magazine. But on the internet moving your content from point A to the rest of the alphabet and beyond takes practically zero time and with practically zero cost.
So your first thought is to create some kind of artificial barrier or to maybe rely on the aging and, frankly, woefully out of date copyright law to protect you.
Neither of these will help you make sales.
First, encrypting your pdfs or signing them with some kind of DRM only makes it harder for people who want to give you cash to give you cash. Second, the internet is a living creature that perceives any barrier to the free transfere of data, like your magazine's content, as damage and wiill route all traffic around this damage and away from your ad space. Third, do you have the money to persue the millions of people who have downloaded your pdf "for free"? No, the best you can do is pick a leaf out of the woods.
So what do you do?
1) Forget everything you know about publishing a magazine. Literally none of it applies to the arena of the internet.
2) Look at existing companies that turn a profit. Like Google. Many people wrongly think Google make money by selling ad space. They don't. They sell user profiles. They collect every bit of data, mine it and compile profiles on every angle they can think of. When you know within a few dozen metres to the millisecond who is currently using the internet to learn about dark chocolate covered digestive biscuits that are on offer with 50% extra free... well you can charge biscuit companies a fortune for that information. How much do you think Google charges to compile a report on your target demographic? Just think about it.
3) Information is consumed differently on a web page to how it is consumed on a piece of paper. For a start pages are viewed in all kinds of formats from your tiny phone screen, to a monitor on a desk, to a snippet headline on someone's twitter feed or facebook wall. PDF is fine if all you're doing is sending it to a printing press but it is terrible if you want your content to look good on every consumable medium there is. The Bible on this subject is a book called "Don't make me think". Go and buy it now.
4) Your unit of sale can no longer be a monthly bundle of stories contained in a paper ensemble. On the internet, your unit of sale is page hits and landing page conversions. You need to make it easy for people to get to a specific article. They need a link that takes them directly to that article that is easy to copy and share. They need buttons that enable them to share it on twitter or facebook or whatever. The more people linking to you, the less people that will be linking to someone who has copied your content. Your landing page should make it easy to drill down to a specific article. The easier you make it for the user, the less they have to work for it or think about it, the quicker and more often they'll be viewing your article AND your ad space. So you want to release your articles in a way that generates maximum repeated traffic.
5) Hire someone full-time and on professional level pay to manage your social media. They will get you a twitter and a facebook and a blog and a forum and some box of magic and they will get people to follow a link to your articles and to your ad space. It's a real job.
6) Forget about the people who take your content for free. Literally forget about them. They aren't worth your time and money. The film idustry would have us believe they would have made x billion dollars more last year if every person who pirated their movies had paid for them. But the truth is the people who "pirated" the movie we're never going to pay for it no matter what the circumstances were. They just wouldn't have seen the movie. So concentrate on the people who will give you money, or have the money to buy the stuff advertised on your site. All you're doing by "investing" in DRM or content protection is spending money on people who don't want to give you money. See how ludicrous that is? You see don't you that an investment is when you spend money to attract people who WILL give you money. DRM, therefore, is a scam. Like pyramid schemes.
7) Don't try to do it all at once. Maybe if you had bottomless pockets you could pay IBM the money to design your website, setup the server infrastucture, organise the node caching, create an easy to use interface for your content management system, etc, etc and all the other gubbins it takes to make a profitable website that hits the ground running. Maybe. You've got to start small. Especially if you don't know what I mean when I say content management system. Even amazon started with a shitty website with a grey background and garishly coloured text. Focus on the best bit of your magazine and make that work first. Like showcase your main article. Release a new article once every 30 days divided by the number of articles in your print magazine each month. Search your backlog of articles and rehash them. Basically start with something managable.
8) Commit to the long term. If this is going to work you've got to be prepared to wait a long time. It takes time to build up content. It takes time to build up a user base. It takes time to raise the value of your ad space.
9) Be consistent. The internet has a very short attention span. So if you aren't releasing content regularly then people will forget about you. They'll stop following you on twitter, unfriend you on facebook, remove you from their morning internet routine. People have got to wake up in the morning and want to type in your address because they know that today you've got something new for them. Even if it's only a picture of your cat.
10) It may not happen. Be prepared to fail. For it to all be a complete waste of time. For you to resign yourself to the ailing sales of your hardcopy magazine and the prospect that you're just another victim of the new industrial revolution. Get over it. Retire from the business. Take a year off. Have you tried dressing up like a giraffe and going to a festival on a sunny day?
