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Software for Publishers and Trade Media

We run a publication, so this comes from using one

We run a trade publication. It has an editorial calendar that slips, an events listing somebody has to maintain, and an audience of dealers and regional managers who read almost entirely on a phone, usually while doing something else.

So our opinions about publishing software come from using it rather than from specifying it, which mostly means we are sceptical about the parts that demonstrate well and get used twice.

What breaks here

  1. The editorial process lives in email and a spreadsheet

    Commissioned where, due when, with whom, at what stage — spread across inboxes and one document that is accurate on the day it is updated. The platform handles publishing beautifully and everything before publishing not at all.

  2. The reading experience is designed on a desktop

    Then the audience arrives on a phone, on a weak connection, with a page carrying three advertisement slots and a video header. The bounce is blamed on the content.

  3. Advertising is sold by hand and reported late

    Positions negotiated over email, trafficked manually, and reported to the advertiser a month afterwards in a format they did not ask for. Renewal conversations start from a weak position because the evidence arrived slowly.

  4. Events sit in a separate system, or in none

    For trade media, events are frequently the better business — and they are run on a registration form, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group, disconnected from the audience data the publication already holds.

  5. The archive is unsearchable

    Years of genuinely useful reference material that nobody can find, including the journalists who wrote it. Each piece is published once, surfaces for a week and then effectively ceases to exist.

  6. You know almost nothing about your readers

    Page views by article, and little else. Not which segment of the trade they are in, not what they return for, not which ones an advertiser would pay most to reach.

What we build for it

  • Custom publishing platforms — built for the title rather than a bought theme bent into shape, which is where most publishing sites become slow and unmaintainable
  • Editorial workflow from commissioning through drafting to scheduling, in the same place the article is published from
  • Events alongside the content, sharing the audience data rather than keeping a separate list
  • Advertising and sponsorship management, with reporting an advertiser can see without asking
  • Registration and segmentation, so you know which part of the trade you are actually reaching
  • Search across the archive that makes old work findable and useful again
  • Newsletters and messaging on the channels a trade audience actually opens

The part most publishers miss

In almost every vertical there is a tool the readers would use every week — a calculator, a specification lookup, a comparison, a visualiser. Something that does a small job they currently do badly on paper.

Building that into the publication changes what the title is. People arrive for the tool and stay for the articles, they come back on a schedule set by their work rather than by your publishing calendar, and you learn considerably more about them than page views will ever tell you. For an advertiser, an audience that uses a tool is a different proposition from an audience that reads a page.

We have done exactly this with our own title, which is why we raise it early rather than as an afterthought. In our experience it is a better audience strategy than more articles, and it is almost always cheaper than the content budget it replaces.

What this means for your project

We will ask what your readers do for work, not what they read. The tool worth building comes out of the first answer, and it is usually obvious to them and invisible to everyone else.

Speed on a phone is a requirement, not an optimisation. We would rather argue about an advertisement slot at the start than explain a slow site afterwards.

The other industries we work in

Tell us what you publish

Describe your title, your audience and what they do for a living, and we will tell you how we would approach it.

Start a conversation

Tell us what you are building

We will tell you how we would approach it, and whether we are the right fit.

Start a conversation