<i>You've got male
General interest magazines for teenage boys have always failed to catch on, but can a new online version called Monkeyslum get them excited? Sean Hargrave reports
Monday September 6, 2004
The Guardian
They are renowned for not talking or showering as much as their parents would like, but now teenage boys are in the vanguard of an internet publishing revolution.
While their sisters have always had an abundance of print, and now web, magazines, teenage boys have never had a title or portal to call their own. That is until the middle of this month when the creators of the teenage girl portal Mykindaplace.com are due to launch Monkeyslum.com.
Claiming it will be funny and irreverent, the team insist the site will achieve at least 125,000 unique users in its first month and will provide the best solution for any advertiser wishing to reach school age boys.
"Teenage boys are notoriously difficult to reach," admits Charlie Redmayne, managing director of Mykindaplace and Monkeyslum. "They get into a particular hobby and devour magazines on the subject but don't find a commonality of interests like girls do. A girl might be into horses, say, but will still be into fashion, music, gossip, makeup and boys.
"There has been a change, though, which we think makes it the right time for a general site for boys. They're now far more interested in lifestyle than they used to be because they get involved in the lives of their football or film heroes and want to know what clothes they're wearing, who they're dating, which clubs they use and what they drink, and so on."
Hence the Mykindaplace team, mainly comprised of former advertising executives, decided they could do for boys what they have already done for girls and give them all the football, cars, computer games and general interest content they could ever want under one roof. At the same time, they will be creating a captive audience for advertisers that, in Redmayne's opinion, are fed up with advertising through hobby magazines that are read by a wide age group.
"We know that the only way you can reach teenage boys is through the men's magazines like FHM, because they aspire to be older, or special interest titles," Redmayne says. "The obvious problem with that is you reach a lot of men from all age groups at the same time so you're not getting value for money from your budget."
As the first launch of a portal specifically aimed at teenage boys, Monkeyslum is attracting a lot of attention from the publishing and advertising industry.
Whether they believe the launch will be successful or not, all are agreed that while the team behind it are obviously keen to win over advertisers, making sure the content on the site is "engaging" will be key, as William Makower, founder of digital marketing agency Panlogic, explains.
"We've done a lot of work on how the brands we represent can reach teenage boys because it's such a huge untapped market. The problem is that, because they're so focused, a site like Monkeyslum will have to provide great depth to the content it puts on the site, while at the same time it will have to provide a lot of breadth to cover the relevant areas. So, that's going to be a difficult one - breadth and depth at the same time."
As Monkeyslum is part-owned by Sky, the team are hinting that they have a useful resource for sports information and news, and have signed a deal with publisher Highbury House for gaming content.
Central to the Monkeyslum team's argument that they can bridge a demographic divide nobody has spanned before is the idea that they will buy in top content and then complement it with stories from a dedicated editorial team based at their offices. It has been tried, competitors say, and the closure this year of Sorted magazine is testimony to how difficult a market Monkeyslum is aiming at.
James Carter, publishing director of FHM (print and online), warns that teenage boys will be very difficult to win over with "repurposed content". FHM has not considered tapping in to the market with a junior version of its magazine, he insists, because its average 25-year-old male reader is far more of an attractive option for advertisers to reach.
"Until you can pay for goods online through your mobile, Monkeyslum won't be able to offer any e-commerce, like we do, because teenagers don't have credit cards," he says.
"Their main problem is going to be that the web doesn't really operate like they're trying to make it work. People would love there to be a single site people get their information from - but what will always happen is if somebody wants to read a match report they'll go to a football site, if they want to read about a computer game, they'll go to the relevant service.
"People come to FHM.com to be entertained because they know our brand and the voice we write stories in. If you take content that's already available in other places I can't see how you can then present it as quirky and zany when it's already appeared in a place where it was presented as mainstream. I can't see how they're going to build a brand."
It is a concern shared by Jon Holt, director of PR firm Golin Harris. While any publicist would welcome a new site that makes it easier to target teenage boys, Holt believes that monkeyslum will face big problems.
"The main thing is they need to remember that a brand is a promise and if you fail to deliver that promise, you're in trouble. I can't see how they're going to build that brand of zany irreverence if it's based on content boys can get elsewhere. It sounds like they could end up putting a brand at the top and then have content underneath it that doesn't fit."
The other area where Holt believes the site will have to tread carefully is sex. As kids are well known for buying magazines that are meant for older readers, he predicts the site will face a difficult question soon after launch.
"All the girls' magazines know they have to be salacious to get readers," he says. "They're clever enough to partner a story about blow jobs with some other article that's serious and educational. As there hasn't been a magazine for teenage boys, I wonder how soon Monkeyslum is going to find out their readers are into the smutty stuff. Then they're going to have to decide if that's what they want to provide. It will be tempting for them as they're obviously working on getting as many teenage boys as possible, so they appeal to advertisers."
Monkeyslum's Redmayne promises that the site will never feature soft porn and has been in active discussions with the government to double check that its content is responsible rather than salacious. He also believes that the chat side of the site will allow teenage boys to ask questions anonymously that they would never dare raise with peers.
It is this side of the launch that Damian Burns, head of digital at advertising agency Zed Media, believes will ensure it is a success: "We find when we're researching teenage boys for our clients that they love to use chatrooms and bulletin boards. So, I would say Monkeyslum is a very welcome move for advertisers because I can assure you we all know that at the moment whenever we want to target teenage boys as much of 80% of the budget can be wasted reaching older men.
"It's good timing because teenage boys have come on a long way in the last couple of decades. They are becoming far more savvy about brands, just like girls have always been, and want to make sure they've got the right gear. The days of being happy with a bottle of Old Spice at Christmas are long gone."</i>
old spice : a mass-market after-shave - now diversified into other personal hygeine products.
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