Created as a central video hub for the global signage, display and wide-format digital print industries, printmonthlytv.com has broken new ground and provided suppliers and printers alike with the opportunity to register in seconds and then upload their videos for free across 16 different channels, representing every sector of the industry.

A sister publishing platform to Print Monthly magazine and its website printmonthly.co.uk, the hub is open access and designed specifically to cater for the needs of the industry. It thus provides a conduit for its members to showcase their technology, services, products and colourful creations in video format, without being lost in super-sites such as YouTube.

Every week Print Monthly also broadcasts its pioneering bulletin Print7 News via printmonthlytv.com, which gives an easily digestible two minute run down of the top five stories from the last week in the industry.

We are among the very first to use broadcasting in the business-to-business industry, let alone the print industry. It is proving a very popular medium and gives busy business owners the chance to keep abreast of all the most important news when they do not have the time to stop and read editorial.
The common request from those calling for such a service was a quick an easily digestible news medium which would give them a mix of the most important information to keep their business competitive, combined with the courageous, creative and colourful work the industry is involved in throughout the year.

It may be from the horse’s mouth, but we have broken new ground with Print7 News. And while this simply would not have been possible just a few years ago, it is now an exiting new horizon of development.

Another major factor for setting up printmonthlytv.com was to create a central hub where the industry can easily register, upload and share videos for free. printers can now document their work and show prospective clients the details of what they can achieve, without giving away trade secrets of course, while suppliers can upload videos on subjects from how to maintain and troubleshoot their systems, to showcasing new technology.

For those who have yet to enter this brave new world, the most basic elements you need to get started are a good idea, a digital camera or smart phone with a video function, a steady surface and free editing software from the web. Once these are in place, the sky is the limit.

While I maybe banging the drum, I can also say hand on heart that our vision for printmonthlytv.com is that it is for the industry, by the industry, so get out there and do some shooting.

Rob Fletcher,
Print Monthly editor

Web jargon explained

A common problem in today’s ever changing media landscape is how you interpret figures and statistics in regards to site website traffic.

No doubt you will have heard phrases such as ‘hits’, ‘page impressions’, ‘click throughs’, ‘views’ and even ‘visitors’.

As the world wide web has expanded over the years it has undergone huge technological leaps, meaning today’s virtual landscape is unrecognisable from its birth. Consequently the terminology used to describe website traffic has changed, with all of these phrases coming to the fore and then becoming outdated.

In today’s world wide web there is only one phrase that really counts, and ultimately one way to measure it without any bias, tweaking, fudging or manipulation. This holy grail is ‘unique users’ and the best way to measure it is ‘Google Analytics’ figures. While there are other measuring sticks, Google now accounts for more than 90 percent of global website searches and is widely recognised as having the only truly trustworthy algorithms to monitor it.

Ultimately a unique user represents a single computer or IP address, with a person in front of it. It also does not replicate itself, so no matter how many times a unique user comes back to a website in a given period, they are only registered as a single ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’ of the website, no matter how many times they come back. This means if ten people visit the Print Monthly website in a single month, even they come back ten times a day, every day, our unique users for that month is still ten. This piece of information is of most value to advertisers as it can be cleanly and clearly compared via Google Analytics figures with other websites. And it tells you how many individual consumers are actually looking at a website and ultimately your products.

If you would like to start the ball rolling by seeing our Google Analytics figures then please call our sales department on 0117 960 3255 or email sales@linkpublishing.co.uk.

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Web jargon explained