Top photography, leading brand names and a clear sense of style are just some of the qualities associated with glossy magazines. Now a new internet publisher is attempting to replicate this online. The challenge, of course, is that attitudes to and expectations of each medium differ markedly. But the London-based team behind what is now being claimed as the net's first glossy, F magazine, believes that with the spread of broadband the time for a new era in online publishing has come. F magazine is a multimedia magazine targeting 25 to 45 year-old urbanites. With its striking images and vibrant screen design it is an arresting mix of music, speech, photography, film and text and is available to anyone with access to broadband.
Unlike many sites, however, the magazine features an old media-style approach to navigation. Readers are invited to move around the site by turning pages instead of scrolling through content, with page turns accompanied by the sound of a paper swish. Alternatively, they can take shortcuts via a contents page to features presented on double-page spreads.
All content is streamed. Each double-page spread is, in effect, a flash movie. Which means "editorial" is, in fact, a series of self-contained multimedia productions rather than text accompanied by image. And the same applies to advertising which also plays an important role - both for commercial reasons and to underline the magazine's glossy, style-mag positioning.
Advertisers, who buy either a single- or double-page spread, are expected to conform to F magazine's multimedia philosophy by making full use of broadband's potential. This provides them with a blank canvas: it's up to them how they use it to hold readers' interest as they flick past the ads to reach the next editorial page. Pop-up and banner ads, increasingly the source of frustration for many web users, are banned.
Content currently available on the site includes features on musicians such as Nitin Sawhney, Dwele and Shola Ama, the surrealist Mark Ryden, and the Sicilian artist Ida Saitta. A recently introduced online jukebox, meanwhile, allows users to stream new and yet-to-be-released tracks from record labels, including Warner and Virgin, as they browse the site.
The hope is that editorial and advertising working together create a stylish entertainment platform, explains F magazine co-founder Luca Bosurgi. Bosurgi, a venture capitalist-turned publisher, has developed F magazine with Chrissie Adams, a former model and founder of 90s fashion industry magazine New Generation.
"We've made a conscious decision not to develop e-commerce," he adds. "It's about keeping things pure and simple, and keeping our overheads down." And the approach appears to be winning approval from advertisers. Adidas, Beck's, Lee jeans and Harvey Nichols are among those currently using the site.
The magazine's roots lie in a CD-Rom that Bosurgi and Adams created, which was launched as a magazine for students in 2000. "The content we were developing then was ideal for broadband but people just didn't have the internet access to allow them to view such high-level content via the web," he explains.
So the pair regrouped and decided last summer to develop a new broadband version. Between them Bosurgi and Adams have since invested £400,000 in the current incarnation of F magazine, money that has covered investment in the technology needed to produce it and to secure access to a high-speed server based in the US.
To date, day-to-day running of the site has been done on a shoestring, with the content co-ordinated by Adams and the music editor David Newell. With around 200 pages of editorial, images, audio and video, the magazine is intentionally designed as an evolving issue, Adams explains.
"We expect a shelf-life of around eight weeks per feature. All editorial has to be highly visual. What we do is create a multimedia package - a bit like producing a mini feature film - about a subject. We don't like text and try to use as little as possible. If you want to read more about someone, we direct you to their own site - we don't like clutter."
When cash flow improves, Adams adds, the aim is to assign freelances to create a full-blown multimedia production for each feature commission. For the time being, though, most of the editorial is produced by Newell.
The end result is undoubtedly glossy with striking images and hip brands. And the old-media navigational style also sets F magazine apart from its online competition. But to what extent does it represent a new opportunity for online publishing?
Andrew Walmsley, founding partner of leading new media agency i-level, describes it as "an interesting attempt to come up with a different way of laying out a website". But, he cautions: "I always worry about people trying to replicate other formats on the web. One of the benefits of the web is that you don't have to turn pages and navigate in a linear way."
Visually it's attractive and it does provide big spaces for an advertiser, which is appealing - if it can attract an audience, Walmsley adds. "It is a fact that on the web, interruptive [advertising] formats like this tend to get ignored unless there is a reason to look at an ad. But creating special formats for different online sites costs money," he says. "Again, it all comes down to size of audience."
According to F magazine's figures it is attracting some 2,000 unique users each day, and covering its running costs. Bosurgi is confident this figure will grow thanks to recent promotional partnerships struck with BT Broadband and Lycos. Moreover, he adds, F magazine's target market is "streamies" - people who can't wait and won't wait for slow download from traditional websites.
According to figures published by the national office of statistics last month, of the 47% of British households with internet access, 17% use the net via a high-speed broadband connection. Although a little-known consumer group in the UK, research recently published in the US by media monitoring company Arbitron shows this particular type of web user is better educated and more upmarket than the norm, and willing to spend more than average shopping online.
In spite of all this, making money out of online-magazine publishing is notoriously hard. Established publishers have relied heavily on their print heritage to support online developments. And even long-standing online magazine Slate, which enjoys the unusual luxury of being backed by Microsoft, only recently began turning a profit - seven years after launch.
"F magazine's audience is still quite niche," observes Justin Taylor, senior media planner at OMD Digital, who is currently using it to promote Siemens' Xelibri mobile phones. "But you don't have to be as big as Yahoo to be an attractive medium. While they need to grow to make this commercially viable, it is still a creative, entertainment-rich experience."
Danny Meadows-Klue, chief executive of the internet advertising bureau, has other reservations. "While there's a growing openness among advertisers to explore different types of communication, the reality is that for an advertiser to reach a large audience online they need standard formats able to work across all websites," he says.
That's why the banner ad was once so successful. To grow beyond being a 1.4% medium online must become more accessible for marketers, Meadows-Klue adds: "If this sort of exercise helps, great. But we're probably seeing the growth of standard advertising formats rather than bespoke formats now."
