Postfully Yours

Print publishers are working to personalize the content they deliver to their subscribers. While they adjust from the top down, our users are creating personalized publications from the ground up. Mass customization is coming to the print industry from both directions, and it’s fun to see.

Wired ran a promotion last month asking readers to submit cover photos for their July issue. They’ll be producing 5,000 different covers from those photos. It’s an exciting experiment in reader interaction, but it falls short of what they describe as the “Holy Grail” of print media: personalized and targeted publication.

We saw another example of this with the issue of Reason where every subscriber received a personal edition with a satellite photo of their home on the cover. More intriguingly, Reason customized certain articles and ads based on the subscriber’s location.

I know from personal experience that this is an extremely difficult process. I spent a few too many nights sleeping on a print-shop floor working on the Reason cover. Despite the potential, it’s been hard to overcome the technical challenges. And efforts have been limited to the occasional test or promotion.

Postful’s users, meanwhile, are delivering extremely targeted publications at a very small scale. We already have users sending print copies of their blog articles to relatives who aren’t online. Some have automated this process with rss-to-email feeds or even compiled posts into mini-newsletters.

The potential for this is exciting. There aren’t too many steps from personal newsletter to small magazine. While the larger magazines work through the logistical intricacies of personalizing a product designed for mass runs of hundreds of thousands, the smaller ones can scale upward with a product meant from the start for individuals. Meanwhile, both can make use of the same web-based ad marketplace.

I don’t know whether the large magazines will adapt before the next generation of dynamic newsletters and magazines establishes itself. The one thing that’s certain is that the print world is changing. As I’ve said before, print isn’t dying, but the media apparatus built around it is. Print is just a delivery vehicle, one that is finally being incorporated into our digital life. We’re proud to have Postful play a part in that.

It will be fun to see how this develops as our users lead the way forward.

photo credit: Gastev