The Web Site As Toolbox

Backpacker.com achieves a level of utility among its visitors rarely seen in a consumer magazine Web site.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, July 6, 2009

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After several near misses, Backpacker.com, the online home of Active Interest Media’s backpacking enthusiast magazine, this year won an Ellie for General Excellence Online (under 1 million uniques). It’s not hard to see why. The site’s buzzing forum, its 5,000-product deep gear finder database, a highly interactive destination tool, and a wealth of instructional video all contribute to a deeply utilitarian experience. And with all the talk of paid online content, especially for content as useful as Backpacker’s, editor-in-chief Jonathon Dorn maintains there’s currently only a casual, experimental interest in charging readers.

In the meantime, a March 2008 redesign resulted in double-digit increases in unique visitors, currently averaging 250,000 per month. Dorn and site editor Anthony Cerretani spoke with AD about their philosophy and strategy for the site.

Talk about the changes in the site’s redesign last year.
Dorn: The rebuild of the site include a lot of SEO work, which has improved our organic ranking. I also like to cite the appropriateness of the content. We preceded the redesign with a pretty in-depth survey that touched existing users, magazine readers and other prospective users, and found a recipe for a different set of content buckets and tools than the old site had been built around. We significantly increased the profile of maps and gear content, which were far and away the two premiere buckets the users were interested in. The gear finder tool, for instance, allows users to do custom searches to find a piece of gear that meets their needs from a database of 5,000 products. It spits out a selection of products to choose from.

We have similar types of tools on the map and destination side that allow you to customize and drill down to what you’re looking for. The variety of things you can do once you select a trip is pretty phenomenal.

Cerretani: There is a level of service that comes from Backpacker that’s pretty consistent. What we tried to do from an online standpoint is build off of that. If we’re talking about gear and destinations we try to extend that into the multimedia realm.

How is the site impacting the roles of the various teams?
Dorn: As a staff we have all become trained and active in contributing. The line of demarcation between print and Web editors is disappearing here. I shoot videos, we blog, Anthony is writing features for the magazine. There’s an enormous amount of crossover. It’s a 360-degree planning process that’s not just print or Web planning, it’s a little bit of everything. That results in stories that have a print component, a Web component, a video component, or even text messaging—where users can go to the Web site and send a map to their phones.

The video stuff has been incremental gain to us. We’re now seeing a lot of traffic off of that.

A lot of it is generated from a weekly newsletter that we started with the redesign last year. We see immediate spikes after we send out the newsletter—a 25-50 percent increase in traffic. We started with a 50,000 mailing list which is now 160,000.

Cerretani: The philosophy of the gear content is the same: Read the story, watch a video, and then link over to the gear finder to see the specs. Then use Digg, Twitter or Reddit to syndicate it to your friends. We use those tools to give as many dimensions as we can.

Most publishers will tell you that magazine readers and Web site visitors tend not to overlap. I’m guessing that’s not the case with your site.

Dorn: We do see a lot of overlap. Greater than 65 to 70 percent of magazine readers are using the site. A smaller number of Web site visitors subscribe to the magazine. [The overlap] is a really significant number for us. This fact played an important part in the redesign of the magazine two months ago. The Basecamp section, which was retooled this spring, was one of the areas to more thoroughly integrate Web service into the magazine. There’s a little bit of Web design in there on almost every front-of-book spread. There’s a Web-like ‘popup’ embedded in the content that directs readers to additional content online. There’s a text code to send an SMS of a map to your phone; a popup for a link to one of our Google flyover videos; you’ll see excerpts from blog posts. We have about six categories for the popup design elements that were built with a consciousness of the additional utility that readers can find online.

Our mistake in the past was ‘ghetto-izing’ Web content into a Web TOC, or throwing all the crap that we couldn’t fit into the magazine on the Web site. We’re so much farther down the path now of making decisions on content delivery based on what format it’s best to deliver on. There’s too much here to ghetto-ize into one page on a TOC that someone might or might not see. That integration is either already driving or going to drive more traffic to the site—and more loyalty from users from both platforms who see we’re paying equal amounts of attention to both sides of the fence.

You’ve got some fairly gigantic real estate for sub offers on the home page.
Dorn: Our online subscriptions have tripled since we’ve redesigned the site. It’s a combination of that real estate and a subscription popup offer that hits every third or fourth refresh. It’s a model that our circulation department has worked to great success with Yoga Journal and Vegetarian Times before us. We followed that best practice within the company.

You’ve got a robust community area, are there any other social media tie-ins that you guys are following?
Cerretani: We update Twitter and Facebook daily, primarily as a tool to let our readers know what’s going on, and also to interact with them. We try to keep it timely. If it’s happening today, we try to do it immediately on Twitter. The great thing about social media is it’s instantaneous. We’re able to gauge interest in a topic that we might not have though of, and then we can fast-track it.

Dorn: Another way to look at it is for research. It supplements Google Analytics and other tracking tools we use.

Publishers often cite content that helps a reader with a specific function as one ripe for a pay model. Your site is free. Any plans to partition a pay area?
Dorn: We’re certainly listening to that, and we have experiments in the works, but we’re not convinced yet. The ad-supported model continues to be working for us. We’ve got a good thing going and don’t want to put a wall up at this point. We have something in the works that will be a small test, but nowhere close to doing it on a large scale.