Monthly Archives: May 2008

247% growth of digital publications reported by Gilbane Group – & that’s before we launched YUDU Freedom!

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The first industry wide research report has been published by Gilbane Group, offering ‘Growth, Trends and Best Practices’ of the digital magazine and newspaper industry. Drawing on audited data and information from YUDU and other digital publishing players, the report highlights 247% growth of publications that have gone digital since 2005, with over 3,200 publications now in circulation.
 
Interestingly, Gilbane Group estimate that this number will rise to over 8000 by 2009 – but this report was written before we launched Freedom! We’ve almost hit that number of publications in less than one month of going live, highlighting that the introduction of our free online digital publishing system is moving the industry forward even faster – great news for publishers and readers alike.
 
The report includes over 20 case studies of best practice, including some of our very own clients’ success stories , including Welco, a large catalogue publisher for industrial products, Navy News, a magazine aimed at the Royal Navy and other service personnel, and GradPlus, who produce Gradlife, a job opportunity and career information magazine for graduates.
 
The number of publications offering a digital edition has increased by 277% between 2005 and 2007. Interestingly, and in accordance with our own data, the number of business to business publications offering subscriptions has increased by 327%, a much faster rate than business to consumer publications, which have seen an increase of 233%. The number of actual subscribers has increased by 315%. The report stated, “When content is aligned with a readers job responsibilities, digital subscriptions are more popular”.
 
The report concluded that digital editions are best used in conjunction with a website, as part of almost every digital publishing strategy, and that the two should be well integrated and co-ordinated.  Gilbane believe that while digital publishing is still in its early stages, innovation to date has been impressive and technology will continue to improve.
 
YUDU have already committed to continuous development. And with the introduction of Freedom, we have seen the market for digital editions grow substantially in just 1 month. And this is just the beginning… there is so much more to come from YUDU that it will only get better!

And once again, a big thank you to our customers who took part in the Gilbane study, we really appreciate your help.
 

Improving your documents with YUDU, How to add web links to your PDF files

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Whilst hopping in and out of our London and Clitheroe offices, I thought i’d post a quick blog to help users of YUDU Freedom with their PDFs.  I’ve received a lot of good feedback over the last month, and we’re working on changes to help people get better results (including accepting other formats).

This blog, however, is to do with web links, URLs, or whatever you may call them.  Because we’ve made YUDU Freedom so simple, the tools used typically to add these manually are no longer needed – instead, you can add them up front in your PDF file.

* Note that if you embed the fonts in your PDF file, and the text is something like www.something.com or someone@somewhere.com, our system will pick it up and link it automatically – .

However, the above doesn’t match all cases, as very often you might want to have a picture go to a website, or some text in a paragraph.  The PDF format allows you to add these additional links, and if you add them, we’ll automatically pick them up after you upload.

For instance, in Acrobat, you would open your PDF, click the link tool then drag out a region on the page you want to link.  Click ‘Open a Web Page’ in the dialog box that appears, type in the URL (or copy-paste), then click Ok.

When you upload that PDF (after saving it) to YUDU, we’ll link that area when it gets converted to Flash.  Easy!

If you haven’t currently got Acrobat, a free 30 day trial is available

A big thanks from YUDU

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A big Thank You to all those that have come on to our site and published something. We had a daily target for the number of documents published by June (almost 2 months from launch) which we had smashed by the the end of day 2……..so much for forecasting!

There have been some great blogs and some very useful development ideas, which we will drop into our forthcoming releases. We are now entering into our 4th full week and we can see the reading stats rising as you put these publications on your website or send out the link on email.

This is how the internet should be… free and easy… and it’s great to see so many making use of this site. Oh… and I’m resetting the June targets!

Richard

How Do YUDU

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The champagne was flowing for the YUDU team again last week…after winning our fifth award in as many months!

This time it was for ‘The Most Innovative Media Product / Platform’ at the How Do Awards, held at Manchester United’s football grounds. It was a great awards do and so nice to see lots of familiar faces from the Manchester media scene.

On the same night, YUDU was also awarded 2nd place for the ‘Best Use of Technology’ at the Travolution Awards in London. I’d like to say a huge well done to two of our clients that were nominated as finalists for their YUDU digital travel brochures, Gold Medal and i-to-i Meaningful Travel.

Previous awards and accolades in the last 5 months include:

  • Supplier of the Year Gold Award, Revolution Awards
  • 13th Fastest Growing Digital Media Agency, Media Momentum Top 50
  • Most Promising Business of the Year, BIBA Awards
  • Business Innovation, BIBA Awards
  • Also finalists for The Freshest Digital Innovation, Fresh Awards

I’ll be adding pictures and details of these latest awards to our digital awards brochure as soon as possible.