Home > News > Introducing Squidoo Magazines (and GoodVeg)

Today Squidoo is rolling out a brand new project. We call it Squidoo Magazines. The first magazine is called GoodVeg (powered by Squidoo). It’s a beautiful digital collection of great writing, recipes, news and personal stories of vegetarian living. More on GoodVeg below.

Throughout this Fall season we at Squidoo will be launching a dozen more magazines on different lifestyle topics.

We put together this lens about the Squidoo Magazines concept. I expect the most interesting part for readers of SquidooHQ will be the section that addresses what a lens gets from participating in a magazine, also reposted below using GoodVeg as the example:

If you have a lens in one of our vegetarian topics right now, and that lens is above a certain LensRank, you have been included as one of our very first featured lenses in the GoodVeg magazine. We sent all of you an email about it in advance of this release so you know why your lens looks fresh and green overnight! Seth and our new Magazine Managing Editor will be hosting a conference call for you pioneers tomorrow, for those of you who can make it. Details coming to you via email soon.

Here’s what GoodVeg lenses look like. Click the image to see the live example. Plus a few more!

Obviously, right now this magazine is very niche and very small in terms of the number of lenses that are relevant and included. For anyone who might not have a vegetarian lens (I don’t, for example) and might not get to participate in this first magazine, I’ve organized a short Q&A about Magazines in general.

Q: How many more Magazines are you going to release, and on what topics?

A: Beyond this first GoodVeg pilot magazine, we’ll be releasing more verticals like this over the next few months. We’re basing our topic selections on traffic trends, editorial gut, sponsorship-ability, and whether there’s a decent number of existing lenses on the topic with a market space for many more. Then we’ll assess how the first dozen magazines are working, to what degree they help bring more readers to high quality lenses in those niches, and if the model merits a stronger push in this direction. It’s possible it won’t. It’s probable it will.

Q: Why build something new like Magazines, when there’s so much work to be done on Squidoo’s core offering: building and maintaining lenses?

A: We work on projects in parallel all the time. Our team is small, but we make sure that we always have a schedule that allows innovation (like magazines) that might push us somewhere new and risky, while also assigning a significant chunk of the schedule to fixing bugs and making smaller innovations to the entire lensmaking system. We’re very aware of features that need updating, and eager to work on ways to streamline both the basic and advanced Squidoo experiences. We’ve found we work best when we do some of that, plus some new stuff, side by side.

Q: Who is allowed to contribute lenses to a magazine?

A: Anyone. You. Your friend. Your Uncle Shlomo. When you make a new lens and pick a topic for it, we’ll let you know if there’s a magazine related to that topic. If there is, you can decide if you want in or out. You can also edit your topic selection for existing lenses, to move your lens into a magazine. For example, if you have a vegetarian lens that for some reason is not in one of our vegetarian topics right now, you can simply edit it to join the Food and Cooking > Vegetarian topic (just for example) and the lens will become a Good Veg eligible page.

Q: What if you never release a magazine on a topic I like or make lenses on?

A: This will probably be the case for 90% of our members and lenses. Right now we’re trying to see if the magazine ecosystem we’re building even works, then we’ll look at ways to scale it. There’s not going to be a magazine for every niche interest under the sun. Squidoo itself is the longtail magazine for all those interesting and unique stories and topics.

Q: If you’re selling sponsorships for magazines, does that means lenses in a magazine get more money?

A: We’re selling sponsorships for magazines because we believe there’s a better ad experience out there for topically-related pages and communities like these. Sponsorships will be replacing the current display ad set up, not in addition to.

Q: If lenses that belong in a magazine get significantly more traffic than lenses not in a magazine, won’t that skew LensRank (of which traffic is a factor)?

A: If it turns out there is a disproportionate amount of traffic to magazine lenses than to any other lenses, and if it looks like it is enough to visibly afflict LensRank as a whole, we will make a change. However, since traffic is one factor of many that make up LensRank, and since there are a million ways someone can find a lens and interact with it (some Squidoo-sponsored, most not) and since LensRank updates on a rolling basis, we’re not betting that magazines will pollute our LensRank system.

Q: Can lensmasters build their own magazines?

A: Never say never. Our strategy right now is not about that though. We encourage lensmasters to continue putting their hearts into creating the best, most unique individual lenses on the topics they love. That’s what Squidoo is for. And by all means, yes, get creative with ways that you can organize your lenses for optimal readership without waiting for anyone else. Create Tumblogs or Twitter accounts for your niche lenses, for example…

Squidoo Magazines are a new way for us, on our side, to help organize social web traffic and communities around some Squidoo content. You build great content, and we’ll keep playing with ways to help more people find your lenses via different entry paths on the web. We think that’s a pretty good goal.

You can read more about Squidoo Magazines here.