Innovation That Matters

Personalised music mag

Publishing & Media

Customised content has long been held up as the Holy Grail of digital publishing, and idiomag is making that promise a reality with a personalised, daily digital magazine about music that is based entirely on members’ individual interests. Launched just over a year ago, UK-based idiomag uses a system of weighted tagging to customise both content and advertising to readers’ personal musical tastes. Readers initially name their favourite music topics and weight the relative importance of each of them in the content they will view. idiomag then uses that information to serve articles, tracks, videos and other multimedia content in a high-quality, audio-visual virtual magazine format that readers can enjoy in page-by-page fashion. idiomag has content partnerships with publications including Billboard, 365mag and Hip Hop Nation as well as popular blogs such as Aurgasm and BlogCritics. It has also built up a large team of its own journalists across the UK. As readers rate the appeal of the content they view, idiomag intelligently adapts subsequent issues to reflect those changing preferences. Not insignificantly, advertisers benefit from idiomag’s personalisation system as well, with the ability to serve nonintrusive, full-screen and rich-media advertisements that closely match readers’ interests. A newly incorporated social element, meanwhile, uses Facebook integration to let readers get their idiomag within the social networking site, view their friends’ magazines and capture articles they like, submit articles, and view trends and favourites among the other idiomag readers on the site. idiomag also offers widgets to incorporate the magazine on other social networks, blogs or home pages. Subscriptions to idiomag are free for readers; advertisers are charged on a CPM basis, and revenue is shared with content providers based on their content’s popularity. When readers get the content they want and advertisers reach their target audiences in a targeted way, it really is hard to see a downside. One to bring to other niches, localities and topic areas! Spotted by: Cagla Pakel

Email: andrew.davies@idiomag.com

Website: www.idiomag.com