From print to a digital platform with subscribers: Ciencia Hoy magazine

Asociación Civil Ciencia Hoy publishes the bimonthly science magazine of the same name, written by researchers from the Argentine science system, with decades of print archive.

The problem with an archived magazine is not publishing the new issue: it is that everything published before still has value and is unavailable to anyone without the printed copy.

And the operation has to pay for itself.

• Reach limited to print: each issue reaches whoever receives it, and stops there.
• An invisible archive: decades of science writing that could not be read or cited online.
• Revenue to sustain: subscriptions and issue sales had to work in the digital channel.

A science magazine nobody can link to loses exactly the readers most likely to cite it.

We migrated the magazine to its own platform with a subscriber area and payments, and treated publishing and promoting every article as ongoing work.

The site copy follows the magazine style guide, so changing the medium did not change the voice.

The platform

• Self managed WordPress site with a subscriber area and online payments.
• Every issue loaded with its articles, authors and suggested reading.

Publishing is not enough

• Articles from the current issue alongside pieces from back issues and short news items.
• Each one optimized for search, shared on social channels and bookmarked.
• A newsletter sent every twenty days to the reader community.

Making the magazine sustainable

• Single issue sales of back numbers added in 2017.
• Themed volumes on marine and agricultural sciences, plus a subscription to Ciencia Hoy for kids.
• The archive stops being a storage cost and becomes a sellable catalog.

Architecture and technology

• Self managed WordPress with subscriber area, online payments and single issue sales.
• Sustained publishing and promotion, with per article optimization and a recurring newsletter.

Learn more about digital marketing and software development.

The site became a reference that universities, schools and government bodies link to.

Starting point

• Magazine available only in print, with the historical archive offline.
• No subscriber area and no digital sales.

What was achieved

• 32,059 inbound links from 2,325 referring domains, as of May 2017.
• 634 links from educational sites and 196 from government sites.
• 4,495 indexed URLs.
• Subscriber area with online payments and single issue sales of back numbers and themed volumes.
• A newsletter every twenty days to the reader community.

Strategic impact

• 634 educational and 196 government links are authority you cannot buy: you earn it by publishing.
• Selling the archive by issue turns decades of content into a revenue stream.