Publishers, Link.me Wants to Link Your Content to Profits

What do you get when you cross traditional publishers with digital technologies? In most cases a lot of very angry executives who aren’t sure how to monetize the business they have with the technology that is finally available. Meet Link.me, an Australian startup now based in San Francisco that is legitimately trying to content publishers such as HarperCollins with new profits in the form of exclusive content available via QR codes and mobile phones.

Say what? Lets keep it simple. Link.me is letting publishers link additional content, like DVDs would have extra scenes, with the books and magazines they publish. In practise, you use your phone to read a QR code on a page to reveal videos or some other extra content available only to the reader of said printed material.

If you’re a publisher, you’re probably asking yourself why you shouldn’t create your own QR code and add the content yourself. Well, Link.me wants to make the process easier and provide you with some additional value as well. With Link.me’s platform, the content and codes you generate will have real-time reports of how many people really use them and which content is most popular. Say you published a programming manual, you could use Link.me’s QR codes to have up-to-date code examples available to all readers as well as a call to action informing them to buy the new edition.

I’m QR-Reading

Users can actually check-in with Link.me to register for even more content which lets you track what they bought and when, ensuring even more data on the content that’s really worth your time, effort and capital.

…and Link.me doesn’t end with a few QR codes. When users register Link.me knows their interest and can show them better targeted content from the publishers they are working with. Link.me’s founder Anthony McGregor Dey told Techcrunch that the response rate was as high as 20 percent of total books sold and that even their lowest campaigns were about 4 percent. Not too bad.

Publishers seem to be willing to give Link.me a chance, so they’re currently working with Penguin, McGraw-Hill, Random House and HarperCollins among others. Their latest showcase is McGraw-Hills “The Zappos Experience” by Joseph Michelliwhere there are QR codes in each of the 15 individual chapters, giving you access to additional content or context. So print might not be dead at all, it might actually get more interesting with a .me attached to it. Don’t forget you can get your own .me domain name for your project with the .Me development program.