B2C Boating Enthusiast Site Combines Magazine-Style Articles with Multimedia Content to Attract Subs and Ad Revenues

Publisher Glen Justice describes how Mad Mariner created a successful consumer boating enthusiast site with a hybrid business model. Discover how their experiments with

Quick Overview

Based on our exclusive interview with Publisher Glen Justice, we describe how Mad Mariner created a successful consumer boating enthusiast site with a hybrid business model. They use a wide variety of low-cost content (such as blogs, videos, slideshows, podcasts and reader surveys) to drive 70,000 monthly visitors. Those vistiors can subscribe to get full access to an archive of longer, magazine-style articles. Discover how their experiments with social media and audience surveys are driving lots of that traffic — and see our five suggestions for how they could improve the site.

Company Snapshot

Founded: 2007
No. of full-time employees: 4
No. of freelancers: 70+
Model: Hybrid, 90% advertising and 10% subscriptions
Monthly Unique Visitors: 70,000
HQ: Washington, D.C.

Target Audience

The typical reader is a male boat-owner with an average age of 55. Two-thirds of readers have a household income over $100,000. Only 8% of the readers are women, even though the team has worked hard to attract more female readers.

Content Model

The site bills itself as a “daily boating magazine,” and as such posts at least one new, long-form (up to 3,000 words), magazine style article every day.

“We created the site for people like me — obsessive boater types who get a new magazine, chew through it in three days, and then have to wait 27 days for the next one,” says Justice. “We give you something to read and occupy your mind during that time.”

Justice and his managing editor are the only staff writers, so they rely on a team of 70+ freelancers to write most articles. Those contributors include reporters for major newspapers (including many contacts from Justice’s days as a newspaper reporter) who write about boating on the side. Others are journalists who specialize in maritime writing. Justice also taps boaters who aren’t professional writers to share their stories about a specific voyage or boat-repair project.

Rounding out the site’s content each week are several blogs, a weekly slideshow of boating pictures, a weekly 30-minute podcast, and a weekly video (about 3-minutes each). Much of the audio and video content is generated during trips to boat shows and other industry events, where a reporter can record several interviews with boaters, expert sources, and vendors. That way, the team has a backlog of raw video that can be edited and posted throughout the year.

Each day’s feature article is open to all readers the day it is posted. The next day, it goes into the archive and is available for subscribers only. Blogs, videos, and podcasts are always free.

Revenue Streams

This is a hybrid-model site, with the majority of revenues coming from advertising.

Subscriptions

Justice launched the site with a subscription component to provide a stable, recurring revenue stream. They keep things simple by offering only an annual subscription for $42.50.

However, they run frequent special offers with significant discounts, such as the current “Winter Special” price of $16.50 annually.

“We keep the fee low, set it for a year, and do our best in that year to engage [subscribers].”

Advertising

The site also uses an unorthodox, “flat rate” advertising model. Advertisers choose a 3-, 6- or 12-month package for one price ($450, $400, or $350 a month). Then, they work with a member of the Mad Mariner team to develop a custom advertising plan that includes any mix of site banner ads, email newsletter ads, video or podcast ads, and even social media promotions.

“The boating industry as a whole is not extremely online savvy and have not rushed to embrace online tools,” says Justice. “We made it easy by offering a flat fee and giving you the one-stop shop.”

Marketing Tactics

The team promotes its weekly content in various channels to drive about 70,000 unique monthly visitors to the site. Major promotion and traffic channels include:

Organic, viral and direct traffic

In the early days of Mad Mariner, Justice bought search advertisements to drive traffic. And while those ads did attract visitors, he says they weren’t very well qualified.

Instead, the team has focused driving traffic with content that attracts links from other boating sites, or goes viral through sharing between boating enthusiasts. For example, the team created a Boat Show Blog to pump out posts with dozens of photos and videos from all major boat shows. That blog received a writing award from Boating Writers International.

The team also thought about what kind of interactive features would appeal to their audience (Justice notes that there are already several large, successful boating message boards, so those alone wouldn’t make the site stand out). Through trial and error, they discovered that their audience *loves* to participate in surveys and polls.

The team now runs several a year, ranging from an annual year-end boating survey (covering demographics, costs, safety, etc.) to special topics, such as “scariest moment on the water” or a new “water weenie” survey (about bad boating manners and mishaps). The Water Weenie survey alone attracted more than 1,300 respondents and got 490 of them to contribute 500 word essays for a special Water Weenie report.

Social Media

Combined traffic from social media channels is typically among the top-10 monthly sources of referrals. Justice says his team got serious about social media at the end of 2008, and now operates a YouTube Channel for its videos, a Flickr page to promote slideshows, and a Twitter account with 6,200 followers.

They use Twitter as the primary channel for sharing new article headlines, podcast and video announcements, and links to the site’s blogs and other social accounts. Justice says he tweets at least four times a day, but between original content and retweets can often reach 20 tweets a day.

“It takes a lot of energy and time, but for a place that produces as much content as we do, it makes sense,” he says. “It’s a great tool to get the content out and bring people to us.”

Email Newsletters

The site also uses its weekly mail newsletter to keep readers coming back to the site (both paying subscribers and visitors who take a free trial receive the newsletter).

The weekly collection of headlines and links to other content achieves 30%+ open rates and is a significant source of traffic for the site. “We’ve found that people really use that newsletter as a guide to Mad Mariner.”

Free Trial

Subscriptions are marketed through a 30-day free trial that’s advertised in both the left and top navigation bars on the homepage, and on barrier pages when visitors access premium articles.

The trial does not require a credit card — and the 30-day length has also been a subject of debate among his staff, says Justice. However, he says he based that trial term on his own experience: If he stumbles upon a site through search or a shared article, he rarely revisits that site within a week or 14 days. He set up the longer term to make sure visitors who accept a trial have enough time to come back and experience Mad Mariner’s content.

Technology and Vendors Used

The Mad Mariner crew is big fans of low-cost, off-the-shelf products to produce their content and run the site. Their tools include:

Drupal: The content management system on which the site is built
http://drupal.org/

Google Analytics: Web analytics software
http://www.google.com/analytics

HootSuite: Primary social media dashboard to manage social media posts
http://hootsuite.com/

Tweetdeck: Backup platform to manage social media posts
http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Webalizer: Web server log analysis program
http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/

Windows Live Movie Maker: Video editing software
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-movie-maker?os=other

About Glen Justice

Justice is a longtime newspaper man who covered politics in the New York Times’ Washington Bureau. But when he wanted to get out of the news business after 18 years, he combined his journalism background with his lifelong passion for sailing.

Although he knew that much of the content would be free, he included a subscription component to support the in-depth, magazine-style reporting at the core of the site’s editorial output. “We went with subscription model because original content has value,” he says. “You’re sending wrong message to readers if you say every single thing you do is free.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

We think other magazine publishers could learn from Mad Mariner’s willingness to experiment with new content and business modes. Whether it’s their pairing of traditional, print-style journalism with interactive and multi-media content, their commitment to learning the ins and outs of social media, or their unorthodox approach to selling ads, Mad Mariner has succeeded by combining digital-native ideas with traditional publishing tactics. Above all, we applaud them for ignoring the conventional wisdom that consumers won’t pay for web content and building a subscription component into the site from the get-go.

But paying a little more attention to subscription-site best practices could deliver a big payoff. Our five recommendations:

#1. Improve lead generation by putting a prominent email newsletter opt-in box on every page. Currently the only way to subscribe to the newsletter is to sign up for the free trial.

#2. Require a credit card for the free trial. We’ve talked to a lot of publishers who’ve found that a free trial that doesn’t require a credit card is almost not worth doing. They just don’t convert as well as trials with a card.

#3. Conduct A/B testing on subscription pricing. That $16.50 special is awfully low, and the site has plenty of traffic to test whether they can charge a little more without hurting conversions.

#4. Redesign the homepage. The current page is cluttered with large images, making it hard to tell what’s premium content, what’s free content, and what’s an ad.

#5. Consider a self-serve/autorenew model for the low-end advertising package. There is a lot of costly staff time involved for an account that’s only bringing in $1,350. Creating a credit-card purchase form and letting advertisers use an online tool to select where they want their ads to appear could free up the staff to focus on higher-end accounts.

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