Monkey Media

So Dennis Publishing have launched a brand new product, Monkey magazine, in an attempt to stem the inevitable decline of their profits. With the print medium slowly shrivelling and dying, and their flagship product Maxim struggling to translate its brand online without getting lost in the sea of lad sites, I can understand their motivations.

But why they have gone ahead with Monkey is totally beyond me. They came into our offices a few weeks ago, and although I managed not to physically attack them it was a close run thing…

So here’s the thing. I love blokey magazines – all those pictures of scantily clad ladies, articles about blokes drinking their own body weight in Estonian lager or jumping the Thames on a tricycle… it’s all great stuff. Plus you’ve got reviews of CDs, books, cameras, digital hoojimeflips… And then, on the other hand, I love wasting time on the internet (especially whilst at work…). Again, loads of funny videos, little viral games, pictures of scantily clad ladies, reviews of CD and cameras and…

It’s at this point that Dennis Publishing stopped and had their eureka moment: “No one’s buying our magazines, and everyone’s talking about the internet. Unfortunately, we don’t know the first thing about the internet. But it sounds like people use it at work during their lunch hour for exactly the same thing as magazines. So let’s just email everyone a magazine! Wow! And then tell everyone we’ve done something revolutionary! Yeah! Job done, let’s go to lunch!!”.

But it’s nonsense. Every Wednesday, they send the Monkey ‘magazine’ to your in-box. You open it and can flip through the pages, read articles, watch funny videos and stare at naked ladies. Great. But you have to go through it page by page, in order. That’s to say, it’s a totally linear experience. And everyone knows the most exciting thing about the online experience is that it’s non-linear. Then there’s the videos, which are grainy and don’t load fast enough. Then there’s the fact that most people don’t have a full 25 minute block to devote to looking at tits in the office, and would rather do it by skimming the odd viral sent to them by a friend. Then there’s the fact that the ‘boss button’, supposedly to make it look like your working, takes a good couple of minutes to load and opens in a small corner of your screen, leaving Holly Valance still artfully draped in all her 15 inch glory across the centre.

I don’t want to be so negative about all this, but I really can’t understand what Dennis are thinking. The lack of attention to little details is unbelievable – on the review page, there’s a camera review, and then a phone number to call if you would like to purchase one. But you can’t by it online. Why not? What’s the point of an online magazine that doesn’t connect to the rest of the internet? Plus at the moment it doesn’t look as though you will be able to access previous issues of the magazine, so there’s no archive of ‘funniest animal injuries ever’ or whatever. Again, this would have been such a simple thing to do, but they missed it.

So there you go, that’s an update on what’s happening in the world of press – it’s floundering in a blind panic. And with the exception of FHM, who have delivered an amazingly integrated digital offering, complete with MMS, WAP, digital TV, the full works (and even managed to get users to pay for content…), every other player in the Men’s Monthly market seems to be struggling.

Which leaves Dennis Publishing’s latest offering looking like a total monkey.

Don’t just take my word for it: Monkey