• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, July 2, 2010

For the magazine industry, the Internet has been a challenge from the beginning. When Time Inc. launched its doomed Pathfinder collection of online magazine brands back in the mid 1990s the hope was that this World Wide Web thingie could be just another publishing platform. In truth, almost every aspect of the magazine industry didn't map well against Internet culture and media. The monthly editorial cycle was immediately challenged by the 24/7 Web. Web pages are butt ugly compared to magazine layouts, so most brands lost their natural immersive strength. Worse, magazines generally were aspirational media. Editors deliberately talked down to readers and offered lustrous images of fashion, taste, literacy, lifestyle that actually were one or two socio-economic rungs above the typical reader, and we loved them for it. This top-down approach to content ran into the brick wall of interactivity and user-centric Web culture.

Then add video and you have an industry that was royally screwed by the Internet. Online magazines suddenly found themselves competing with cable networks, online portals and network TV, all of whom were gushing video content. Getting onto real-time publishing cycles was hard enough. Now they had to be cable networks too? When magazines did start their rich media programs, many of these assets languished in video ghettos that users barely knew were there.

But magazines finally are starting to get it and are leveraging their own assets well. Entertainment Weekly has a great slate of shows featuring their own columnists and editors doing clever watercooler banter over last night's shows. Forbes has a superb feed of news and analysis videos refreshed throughout the day. Fashion magazines like ELLE and Vogue know that a good behind-the-scenes cover shoot clip is gold in viral circulation. But some publishers are also learning how to integrate video with the editorial and to do so with a bit of magazine panache. Hearst has been on a video tear in the last year, redesigning sites to feature video content and upping the quality of its programming.

The new Seventeen.com that relaunched this week is a good example of video being pulled into the experience of a site rather than ghetto-ized into a dreadful "video" section. Now virtually every page has a clip, often high-lighted as the "hot video" in the celebrity news section or "today's video" in the beauty section. Hearst executives tell me that the ubiquity of video opportunities on every page has resulted in sharp spikes in usage. But even more importantly, the magazines are learning to apply some of their own print savvy to the format. The Hearst sites discovered that if you treated video like a print content feature and gave it a detailed splash page rather than a play button or a random thumbnail, users tended to interact more. Now at Seventeen a video player on a page looks like the opening page of a magazine feature, with image, explanatory headlines and a foreshadowing of what service or celeb content is within. This is no small matter. As most video hyper-distributes around the Internet and embeds on any page, it is usually displayed as a random freeze frame that looks like a video engineer's editing deck. Most Web video players still look like incomplete dweeby science projects.

Magazine brands got hammered by the Web in many respects and took a long time getting up to speed. Their traffic generally lagged behind many Web endemic and TV rivals. Even as some of these brands came into their own online, achieving scale in their video programs continues to be a challenge. But they do bring to the video game something it does sorely need, a little more polish and editorial finish. The lesson here is simple but needed: treat video as if it were content ... not just video.