Do three dots make a trend line? Helsinki seems to be the home of adding overlaid “tags” on an image after Publishzer released its image tagging solution for fashion bloggers they call a “Mag Tag”. Now they join Kiosked and Thinglink’s solutions for driving more engagement in images.
In case you missed our past article, Publishzer offers The Fashion Mags, a platform for building embeddable magazine-inspired spreads. As their name implies, they’re targeting the demographic of fashion bloggers who want to lay out their images nicer than your standard blogger template.
The initial results of tagging items of clothing seem to be good. Publisher claims a 22% click through rate (chart below), and tells us that their collection was mostly sold out after the first day of being featured on one Finnish fashion blog. Kiosked has a reported 9% CTR, while ThingLink claims an average of 3.5% engagement.
They’re sharing these numbers after their tagged release, which might be a little premature as readers get used to the tags, but co-founder Teppo Hudson tells us that they believe the reasoning behind the high CTR is much deeper.
“Kiosked is a much better solution than banner ads, but we try to make it a bit something more. In this case is that the publisher isnt just adding a dot on the image, but there’s the context of a whole ‘spread’ built around the image, which gives the reader more engagement,” says Hudson.
Regardless of whether the embedded spreads actually drive more clicks, I imagine this could be seen purely as a value-added potential to bloggers, as he mags look nicer than the standard image/text/image solution offered by standard blogging CMS. If they offer an easy solution to monetize on top of that, then bloggers have little to lose.
And the general thesis of adding tagged links to stores will likely be a win. When readers are browsing a fashion blog, they’re interested in clothes to buy and previously there wasn’t a good solution to immediately find the clothing. The embedded The Fashion Mags are seeing good traction in the blogging community with an 80% retention rate for the content, and around 15,000 unique readers daily.
The next step is for Publishzer is to add another ring to their supply chain by bringing boutique designers on a home-built e-commerce solution. Doing so would give them a total advertising and sales solution for designers, while helping bloggers monetize through affiliate deals.
Below is the numbers Publishzer are sharing about their first release. And see the tagged mags in action here.
