Mr. Magazine

Online magazine web sites at Hearst are helping the company’s print products, says Chuck Cordray VP and general manager at Hearst Magazines Digital Media. In an in-depth interview posted on PBS MediaShift blog site, writer and freelancer Mark Glaser interviewed Mr. Cordray on a variety of topics related to print and online. Two highlights from the blog-in-depth interview:

“The print subscribers who subscribe online are generally eight to 10 years younger on average than the ones who subscribe through the traditional methods. The online people are finding us sooner. And of the online subscribers, more than 90% of them are brand new to the Hearst subscription world — they’ve never subscribed to any of our magazines before. They look the same as our other subscribers but we’re getting them earlier.”

“The likelihood of an individual online visitor to subscribe [to a print magazine] has gone up more than 50 percent,” he said. “We have had sites that have doubled their propensity for an individual visitor to subscribe. This isn’t about cannibalization, it’s about brand experience. If you have a good experience in print, you might try out the mobile experience. If you have a good experience online, you might subscribe to the print publication. This is about brand reinforcement, not about cannibalization.”

To read the entire interview with Corday click here.