Worked Skateboard Magazine

Is this a product? Sort of, even though you can touch or hold it. Well, whatever. Half of the posts on here are hard to categorize, but we do our best.

Now go check out www.workedmagazine.com. I had heard of this magazine, but I didn’t realize it was all online and free. And after finding out it was online only, I didn’t realize what a clever format they had come up with.

Now if someone had told me “There’s this new online magazine, and it’s got a bunch of cool Flash stuff, and you can actually turn the pages like a real magazine!” my first reaction would have been to think “Yeah, great, it’s like a real magazine, sounds like someone trying to be clever but it’s really stupid.”

But upon experiencing it firsthand, I realized what a good idea it is to make it like a real magazine, and here’s the reason–advertising.

When you flip through a real magazine, you’re sort of forced to see the advertising, right? Sure, you can skip it, but unless you’ve got every page memorized you might skip something you’re looking for. Chances are you’re going to see each ad that’s printed in a magazine several times.

The problem with most online magazines is that their ad response rates are low. So they try to force you to look at ads by creating popups, which are usually really annoying because they get in the way of what you’re trying to look at.

But with Worked, it’s different. It’s just like a printed magazine. You click in the lower right corner, and it turns the page. When you see an ad, it’s not covering up anything. It’s not in your way, or at least it doesn’t feel that way. I think it’s rather ingenius.

Now there are some downsides to it. The site is Flash, so it’s not going to be indexed by search engines, nor can you bookmark a certain article or page and return quickly to it later or copy the url and send it to a friend. You have to flip through all the pages again to find it. But when you consider that it’s well designer, has all sorts of video clips in it, even the ads are nice to look at, and it’s free, you really can’t complain much. I know I’ll be visiting it in the future.