This is a summary of all of the blog posts we have written about EE Times up to December 2018.
EE Times Europe Returns – In Print!
November 30th, 2018
Once you get over the surprise of an American publisher launching a print title, this move makes sense. Effectively we will have a publication with much broader reader appeal than Boards & Solutions, but the loyal readers of this popular title won’t be discouraged as B&S will still maintain its own identity within EE Times Europe.
The editor of the new title will be Bolaji Ojo, a well-respected journalist with a long history in the electronics media, and other European journalists such as Peter Clark and Nitin Dahad are also contributing to the content.
Interestingly one reason cited for the launch was an increased demand for print advertising in Europe. With banner advertising often failing to deliver compelling results, it’s interesting to see a move from some advertisers away from highly measurable digital channels to something they presumably believe is more effective, even though it’s much harder to find data to prove it.
At the show I also had a chance to catch up with Andre Rousselot, president at European Business Press (EBP). Previously EBP published EE Times Europe under licence, rebranding to eeNews Europe last year when Aspencore decided not to renew the licence. I was delighted that he welcomed the competition from the relaunched EE Times Europe: He is already seeing strong demand from pan-European advertisers and felt that the launch of another pan-European title that offers both digital and print channels would only add to the credibility of the eeNews Europe business model.
It’s great to see a well-known brand such as EE Times Europe return. With the success of eeNews Europe, perhaps this isn’t surprising, and I’m excited to see whether Andre’s view that this will grow the market for all pan-European titles by encouraging more advertisers to see the benefit of campaigns that use both print and digital.
Aspencore to Release an EE Times Special for electronica
February 20th, 2018
Aspencore (part of Arrow Electronics) will produce a print version of EE Times Europe (with an EDN Europe section) for electronica. Although the title was published in print until recently, this was through a licence agreement with EBP who rebranded their European titles in March 2017.
The special print edition will be mailed out before the show and distributed at the showground in the main entrance. Although this is an interesting turn of events, we don’t expect to see regular print versions of EE Times Europe in the near future: like other digital titles that have special print editions, we think the return to print is as much about engaging advertisers as it is about re-introducing a print title. Additionally having a print title is a good way to build the publication’s database at shows.
Despite this, it will be great to see a print version of these popular titles, so we’re looking forward to reading it in November.
EETimes Europe and EDN Europe Rebranding: Interview with Andre Rousselot
March 29th, 2017
Why do we need a rebranding?
The rebranding is required because of Aspencore’s decision not to renew the licence agreement between UBM and EBP originally signed in 2009. This licence agreement has been very successful for UBM as it has established the EE Times and EDN brands in Europe at no cost for UBM. However, the rebranding will give EBP total control on its publications once again.
What else is changing?
The acquisition of EETimes and EDN in the USA and Asia by Aspencore has also resulted in the cancellation of a long-term content sharing agreement and a long term sales agreement.
- Content sharing: this agreement was beneficial to both parties as it allowed our European Editors to repurpose US generated contents and both US and Asian Editors to repurpose content generated in Europe. In the past few years, after the folding of print editions in the USA, the content stream towards the USA was far greater than the reverse flow.
- Sales agreement: the independent team of sales people from EBP was selling advertising for USA and Asia and the Asian sales people were selling for the European products
How much did you own of EETimes Europe and EDN Europe?
We own the circulation database and website; the only thing we licenced was the brands. I’d already made the decision to not use eetimes.eu a few years ago: at that time UBM’s intentions weren’t clear and I wanted to control the URLs for the publications. [note – at the time I questioned the logic of using the new URLs for EETimes Europe, but now it’s clear that Andre was right and I was wrong!].
We have given Aspencore the European URLs so they can use them in the future, if they want (e.g. eetimes.eu, eetimes.co.uk).
Why did Aspencore buy EETimes and EDN?
According so senior sources at Aspencore, the official reason is to keep publications alive to inform engineers around the world. The reality may be far different as it appears that Aspencore guided by Arrow ( the owner of Aspencore) to create a monopoly of publications in key markets such as the USA and Asia. In the age of Big Data, correlating audience data of publications and websites with customer data of a large distributor is a big temptation especially when you own both!
Some have used the term “The dark side of electronics industry publishing and I like the analogy and people in the industry are now calling EE Times a “toxic brand” which makes me less sad to have to abandon it after so many years…
How are EBP’s products affected?
- Publications: except for the name change to eeNews Europe and eeDesign News Europe, nothing will change as EBP is and remains the unique owner of the reader data bases of these publications.
- Websites: the websites will use new URLs and the old URLs that remain the property of EBP will be forwarded to the new URLs, eenewseurope.com and www.eenewsdesigneurope.com respectively.
Has the rebranding driven changes to the editorial teams?
All editors will continue working for the new titles and websites
- Julien Happich is the Editor in chief for eeNews Europe and also runs LEDlighting
- Peter Clarke is in charge for Analog, MEMS and Sensors
- Christoph Hammersschmidt runs Automotive and Smat2zero
- Nick Flaherty runs Power Management and T&M
- Jean-Pierre Joosting is Editor in Chief of MWee and runs RF and Microwave
- Graham Prophet is Editor in Chief of eeDesign News Europe
- Rich Pell is the US based editor for Smart2zero.com
- Alain Dieul is Editor in Chief of Electronique C&I
Any plans to return to print: for example with eeDesign News Europe?
We have no plans to print either of the titles. The digital magzine generates revenue and is reletively low cost to produce – certainly lower than print. If we have opportunity in the future, then we will look at print, but I think it’s unlikely that returning to print would be possible.
When is the official date for the rebranding?
The first issues with the eeNews and eeDesign brands are the April issues
The websites will be rebranded in the last week of March
Where can I find the new media data ?
New media data can be downloaded from the new site:
EE Times Europe and EDN Europe to rebrand
March 13th, 2017
In what is probably going to be one of the least surprising moves in the electronics media this year, Aspencore has decided not to continue licencing the EE Times and EDN brands to European Business Press, and so the publisher is rebranding the two titles.
EE Times Europe will be rebranded eeNews Europe, while EDN Europe will become eeDesignNews. The editorial teams for the European titles will remain unchanged, and we’re not expecting any major changes to the titles.
The vertical sites published by EBP will also be renamed with the “ee” branding. So we will be seeing eeNews Analog, eeNews Automotive, eeNews Power Management, eeNews LED Lighting and eeNews T&M sites launched (with the same content as the previous websites).
The official switch of brand will be on 1st April 2017. We’re hoping to get an interview with EBP’s publisher, Andre Rousselot to find out more. We’ll also be talking to Aspencore at embedded world to find out whether they have any plans to use the EE Times and EDN brands in Europe.
Of course the driver behind the change is Arrow’s acquisition of the UBM titles. I think it’s hard to read too much into the move: frankly I would have been surprised if they didn’t stop licencing the brands. We can guess that the media acquisition fever that Arrow had isn’t going to be quite as virulent this side of the Atlantic (surely EBP would have been an obvious acquisition for them?) and of course Arrow clearly does want control of the titles they own.
Nick Flaherty Becomes A Permanent Addition To The EE Times Europe Editorial Team
May 16th, 2016
Nick takes over from Paul Buckley as the power editor at EE Times Europe as well as reporting test and measurement news. EE Times Europe is a favourite technology publication of the Napier Team and our clients who have received some excellent coverage.
For nearly 25 years, Nick Flaherty an avid technology writer, analyst and consultant has been keeping us all up to date with news from the semiconductor and electronics markets. His experience includes editing a wide range of magazines and newsletters all focussed on technology.
Nick is renowned for providing detailed expert technical comment and his skills have been utilised by some of technology’s biggest names including Philips and Texas instruments. In addition to writing for and editing technology publications, Nick also dedicates his time to The Embedded Blog covering hardware and software news and remains the technology editor at Unmanned System Technology Magazine.
We look forward to working with Nick in his new role and wish him all the best in his newest appointment as a permanent team member at EE Times Europe.
EE Times relaunches as a community site
July 3rd, 2013
On 1st July, EE Times relaunched as UBM Tech’s first community site. Later this year Light Reading and InformationWeek will follow suit. UBM’s goal for the community sites is to give tech decision-makers access to peer-based insights through moderated discussions, blogs and social media.
This is an interesting move, and may prove challenging to realise. Whilst it’s not true the engineers don’t participate in social media – there are many active discussions forums – few sites have been able to get engineers to engage in conversations around products and technologies. Whilst EE Times is one of the few sites that has the scale to be able to achieve this, it will be interesting to see whether there will be a huge change in the level of interaction on the site, or if most of the content continues to be generated by the professional journalists on the UBM Tech team.
Can EE Times Europe beat Google?
November 16th, 2012
OK, I admit it. I went into my meeting with EBP at electronica with a little smirk on my face. They were about to tell me about their new electronics industry search engine, which was clearly a stupid idea as the resources and expertise at Google are several orders of magnitude higher than those at EBP. Nice idea. But you’re not going to do better than Google.
Then I saw the results from eetsearch.com. This has to be wrong, I thought. But no! I put in more and more search terms, and consistently the results were better than Google. Wow!
EBP has taken a very simple approach to removing the rubbish and the spam from search results: don’t include those sites in the index. In fact they currently only index about 4000 sites. The approach they’ve taken is to only include component manufacturers’ websites in the index and SERPs. It definitely works as for most search terms, the results returned by eetsearch.com were actually better than Google. This was particularly true when you search for generic terms such as “microcontroller”.
The site plans to make money by selling advertising. You can buy adverts around a keyword on cost-per-month basis, and I’m sure that there will be no problems in selling the ad space on keywords such as “op amp” and “microcontroller”.
But the big question – will anyone use the site – is a major issue. There have been many attempts at search engines, some of which have produced great results. But to get someone to switch the results need to be much, much better. Will engineers remember to use the site for the searches they do that are component-related, or will it be less effort to trawl through the more spammy results on Google or Bing? It will be interesting to see the traffic figures in six months’ time!
EETimes Europe gets new embedded editor
November 9th, 2011
EETimes Europe has strengthened its editorial team with the appointment of Nick Flaherty as Embedded Editor. Nick is looking for technology and product news from embedded companies, and will also maintain an industry events calendar.
In addition to the position at EETimes Europe, Nick will remain an industry freelancer, and tells me he is excited about the prospect of continuing and expanding his role as editorial director of leading networking group SiliconSouthWest (www.siliconsouthest.co.uk) and founder and editor of SouthWest Innovation News (www.swinnovation.co.uk).
EE Times launches subscription-based newsletter
October 29th, 2010
UBM formed UBM Electronics and immediately announced the first new product from the division: EE Times Confidential, a subscription-based newsletter. In fact the newsletter isn’t entirely new – if you go to the site, you’ll see back issues listed from March, although clearly the company has decided that now is the time to push for subscriptions.
In general I’m very supportive of publishers asking readers to pay for publications. My logic is simple: if readers pay, then they will demand high-quality editorial content that provides in-depth analysis and new insight. If this happens, journalists will get the recognition they deserve.
But will the venture work? It’s going to be difficult to decide what is premium content and what should be published on the EETimes.com website. However EE Times has successfully charged for other products such as webinars, and I’m sure if the content is good enough, people will pay.
Of course for many Europeans the idea of paying for electronics publications isn’t new: for example Elektronik and ElectroniqueS are two high-profile publications with paying subscribers. I’d like to think more publications in Europe would be able to charge for content, although with many publications cutting editorial resources dramatically over recent years generating content of sufficient quality might prove too much of a challenge for some European publishers.
Thoughts on the “EE Times acquisition of EDN”
September 30th, 2010
There has been a lot of talk about the “EE Times acquisition of EDN”. Of course there has been no such thing – UBM (owners of EE Times) have purchased Canon Communications (owners of EDN as well as several medical titles).
For the electronics industry, the end result is that EE Times now controls EDN…except in Europe. Advertisers in the US must be worried about one publisher having such a dominant position, although hopefully this will mean that they can invest in the high quality editorial we all expect from both titles.
Now that the dust has settled, I though it was a good time to post a few thoughts on Napier’s YouTube Channel.
EE Times launches new website
July 12th, 2010
EE Times Group has launched their new EE Times (US) website, which now includes all the division’s different publications (Embedded.com, for example, previously wasn’t part of the EETimes.com site). Apart from some minor teething troubles – the heavily-promoted links to the tour of the new site didn’t work – the site is definitely a very impressive resource, and I think that the design will grow on me (I’m not a huge fan of the mix of rounded and right-angled corners on the home page).
In the long term, however, I’m sure EE Times Group will try to grab more and more traffic from Europe, as well as the globe’s other continents. EE Times has the benefit of scale: the 21 topics within “Design” and 17 product categories is more than any European editorial team has been able to pull together (elektroniknet.de, for example, has 11 categories that span both design and products). Only time will tell whether the ability to produce highly specific content will be sufficient to attract European engineers’ eyeballs away from local sites.
EE Times finds engineers don’t like Twitter
June 24th, 2010
The EE Times declaration that “Engineers don’t like Twitter” was interesting – the results mirror some of the conclusions from our own survey of social media habits of European engineers. We also found that superficial social networking simply wasn’t important to engineers, who preferred the more task-orientated social interaction offered by forums.
It’s interesting that, despite the amount of effort being put into developing new social media tools, engineers’ online habits haven’t changed much. As an FAE 15 years ago, one of my jobs was supporting customers through internet newsgroups. Although these newsgroups have generally been replaced by forums managed by vendors, the social media interaction that gets engineers the results they need has barely changed in the last one and a half decades.
New embedded editor for EE Times Europe
May 31st, 2010
It’s great to see that really good editors are in demand. Colin Holland, who has shared his coverage between the US and European EE Times titles, has been snapped up full time by EE Times Group (the American publisher). I understand that Phil Ling will be named as Colin’s replacement as Embedded Editor for EE Times Europe.
Both these editors have outstanding knowledge of the embedded industry, and it’s great to see demand for such high-quality talent from EE Times (on both sides of the Atlantic). I’d like to wish them both the best of luck in their new roles. If any more details are forthcoming in the official announcement, I’ll cover them here on Napier News.
The EE Times view of publishing in the future
March 9th, 2010
EE Times Group put on an interesting presentation during Embedded World to talk about their plans for the future, and clearly most of the future is online. They plan to launch a social networking community called EE Life (although to be honest it really seemed to be a revamp of their existing forums).
The focus for EE Times is clearly to reach people – particularly in Europe – through online activities. Of course the situation is confused by the fact that EBP, publisher of EE Times Europe, is effectively competing for the European online audience (and arguably the worldwide online audience). However, I was pleased to see that EE Times Group seems to be trying to identify new approaches that deliver value to both the audience and advertisers.
I was particularly interested to hear about some successes with webinars that require attendees to pay to attend. If EE Times can negotiate the path between ensuring that content delivers great value for money for the audience whilst still providing a platform for the company presenting (i.e. the “advertiser”), then this could be a great source of both revenue for EE Times Group as well as providing an engaged audience for the advertiser. The test will be whether EE Times has the strength to stop companies turning these events into puffy product pitches. I hope the approach works, and would expect to see other publishers follow suit.
It’s interesting that EE Times Group is openly saying that the time where all online information is free is about to end. Paid-for webinars are just the start of the content for which they will charge, and the group is following in the footsteps of some mainstream titles, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. Although this isn’t going to make me many friends amongst readers, I think that paywalls for high quality information are inevitable. Of course the question is where the bar will be set: I guess the line will be different from one industry to the next – and suspect that engineers might be very reluctant to part with money for anything but the highest value content. I can’t see sites that simply use press release information and derive most of their traffic from Google getting paying subscribers, but it’s not clear whether curation of good content will be enough or if people will only pay for unique content that is written in-house and that adds substantial intellectual or technical value.
I guess the good news for publishers is that publications in our industry have – and still do – get paying subscribers. Examples range from Microprocessor Report, a publication I subscribed to when I was an engineer and that now costs more than $1500 for an annual international subscription to local language titles such as ElectroniqueS and Elektronik.
EE Times Group also gave a “sneak preview” of their embedded research study. Of course it’s great information – it always is. Like most people at the event, however I was disappointed that the slides were rushed through so quickly that it was impossible to take in all the data – I didn’t know whether EE Times Group wanted us to know the results or not! However it was great to see that FreeRTOS was included in the study for the first time, and can now claim to be “the world’s most popular RTOS”. FreeRTOS isn’t currently a Napier client, but what Richard Barry has done amazes me, and I’m more than happy to give him a plug!
EE Times Europe revamps website and switches domain
March 8th, 2010
EE Times Europe has refreshed the layout of the website. The new design maintains the familiar EE Times look, so readers should not have any major problems with the new site.
At the same time EBP has quietly shifted from the EETimes.eu domain to surprisingly unwieldy electronics-eetimes.com. The old local domains such as eetuk.com route to individual landing pages, although the content on these pages is the same as the site’s home page. This presumably allows EE Times to easily reverse their decision to drop the local sites.
Quite why the European site has chosen to switch domains hasn’t been made public. A quick whois lookup shows that the ownership of all the “old” domains has not been transferred to EBP, suggesting that perhaps they didn’t gain control over these domains when acquiring the rights to publish EE Times Europe.
A quick search on Google for “EE Times Europe” brings up results from the old eetimes.eu in first place, eetuk.com is next, and then results from eetimes.com appear. The new domain electronics-eetimes.com makes its first appearance at seventh in the SERP. Searching for “EE Times” didn’t produce any results from the new domain until the third page.
Of course this is early days for the domain and the old eetimes.eu domain continues to redirect to the new domain, so I don’t expect any immediate problems other than perhaps email newsletters getting caught in spam filters until recipients whitelist the new domain. The long-term implications, however, are interesting. Presumably EBP is trying to increase the total traffic to the EE Times Europe site, rather than focusing specifically on growing a European audience. Whether this is what advertisers want remains to be seen. I’ll also be watching to see if EE Times Group decides to do anything different with the “old” domains.
Julien Happich named editor-in-chief of EE Times Europe
September 23rd, 2009
Julien Happich has joined EETimes Europe as Editor in Chief, replacing Peter Clarke who will remain with Techinsights in a new function after the recent reorganization. Julien is well known in the European electronics publishing scene, having worked at EPN for almost 10 years. Julien is an editor with real technical expertise, and has a masters degree to prove it!
We were amused to see some unattributed quotations about Julien in the news release we received, claiming fFirst reactions from the PR community and colleagues were enthusiastic: “Julien is an brilliant choice – he has excellent ideas” , “Good choice! He’s a top bloke and very well-respected”, “Great move!” Obviously EBP are not going to be shy in promoting their newly-acquired titles! In fact we’re also delighted that Julien has taken the role: he’s a great choice, one we would absolutely endorse.
When I wrote about the acquisition of EE Times Europe a couple of days ago, I was pretty upbeat about the prospects for the magazine. I’m confident that the new setup will prove to be a great opportunity to grow the title and am sure that Julian will be a key player in ensuring that success.
EE Times to drop French and German sites
December 22nd, 2009
Although there has been no official announcement, I understand that one result of the sales of EE Times Europe is that local sites will be dropped, meaning that EE Times will no longer provide news in French and German. Although the publication had a number of local sites, the dropping of the other sites (Israel, Eastern Europe, etc) is unlikely to disappoint as the differences between the local and European sites were minimal. Although the crowded German market is perhaps a good reason why EE Times might not gain a significant share, it’s disappointing to see yet another publisher pull out of France. It’s inconceivable that the French market can only sustain one publication, and I hope to be able to tell you of a new launch in France before the end of the year.
André Rousselot buys EE Times Europe and MWEE
September 18th, 2009
European Business Press SA (EBP), the Brussels-based publishing company that is owned by TechInsights has been sold to André Rousselot. The company will continue to publish EE Times Europe as well as Microwave Engineering Europe and their associated web sites, EET.eu, mwee.com and some European DesignLines.
André has been driving these publications in the intervening years, so does this change actually matter? I think it does. And I think it is good news for EE Times Europe and MWEE. By moving to the franchise model in Europe, TechInsights can focus on developing the US title, which in turn will benefit the European titles by enhancing the content they can access. André is able to focus on tweaking the formula to meet the specific needs of the European market.
This has to be a great deal for André, who sold his publication business to CMP about nine years ago. He has definitely been successful in selling at the top of the market, and buying at the bottom!
Unsurprisingly the ESC shows were not included in the sale, although I was surprised to hear that Embedded Systems Europe also was not included – particularly as the publication recently was distributed as a supplement in EE Times. I hope that this move means that TechInsights will focus on building and developing the magazine in its own right, rather than simply seeing it as a vehicle to promote the embedded shows in Europe.
I’ll be watching closely to see the impact of this move: will André, who has always run a low-overhead cost-effective , be able to continue to focus his investments in high-quality editorial? How will this move affect Reed, the other big pan-European publisher?
Perhaps the best news about the deal is that we know that the key editorial figures will remain in their roles, and I also understand that a significant announcement about additional editorial resources is expected soon. Keep checking Napier News to find out more!
EE Times grows circulation, cuts frequency and shrinks pages
November 21st, 2008
TechInsights has announced that it will increase the circulation of EE Times Europe to 70,000 in 2009, making it the largest circulation electronics title in Europe. To increase the circulation so much (even if the increase is digital rather than print circulation) is an aggressive move in potentially very tough times, but represents a very positive vote of confidence in the European electronics market.
At the same time the frequency will drop to monthly, although with four special issues planned for 2009 (Test & Measurement; Avionics and Defense Electronics; Automotive; and Smart Sensors, Sensor Networks & Medical Electronics) in practice the number of issues planned is only a couple fewer than 2008.
TechInsights has also decided to change the format of the title to A4, and presumably the reduction in size will help with printing and postage costs.
To me this is a very positive move. Although I’m not completely convinced that engineers want magazines sent less frequently because they get the news from websites, as TechInsights argues, moving to a monthly frequency must make good business sense. The increased circulation is a very positive move, and is clearly designed to take business away from EPN. I’m actually quite happy to see the focus on electronic distribution – in the long term this must be the way forward, and as the displays that engineers use get better and better, I’m sure that reading magazines onscreen will become the norm. Perhaps the only question is the promise that the increase in circulation will be focused on the Central and Eastern European countries – in the past Eastern European circulation has been seen as “less valuable” by advertisers, and I look forward to being able to analyse the new circulation figures in detail.
EE Times (US) cuts editorial staff, starts debate
July 2nd, 2007
There has been quite a stir about the cutbacks at CMP, particularly the decision to lay off Richard Goering, effectively ending their dedicated editorial staff for EDA products. The transition of US print titles to online, appears to be happening rapidly (but is has not [yet?] hit Europe with the same impact) and this has driven CMP to make a fairly ruthless decision about EDA coverage.
Basically the problem with EDA companies is that they don’t advertise (which ultimately means someone else has to pay the wages of the EDA editor). Lou Covey, a respected owner of a PR agency on the west coast was told by a CMP manager that, “Lou, we can no longer support industry segments that fail to produce a discernible revenue stream.” A fair enough comment, but clearly there is no pretence that advertising and editorial are completely independent. This lead Chris Edwards to post a story on his blog that explains EDA’s media problem or why I have come to dislike start-ups.
Rather worryingly the trend now is towards sites that regurgitate press releases and offer little or no editorial input – something that was discussed by John Cooley at his Deepchip site. Possibly more worrying for publishers is that if everything should move online, the ability to drive revenue is determined by inventory of ads, and few sites – if any – could sustain the cost of quality editorial inputs with the level of page impressions available. Print simply delivers more pages per engineer per month.
What’s the answer? We’re actually fairly optimistic at Napier. We don’t think print is dead (or dying) in Europe, and the fact that many publications have been open about the presence of some link between advertising and editorial coverage means that potential advertisers know the rules of the game. In Europe we still have some publications making a substantial income from subscriptions, and indication that people really do read print titles!
EE Times adds PDF option
November 28th, 2006
Starting with the November 27th edition, EE Times is offering a one click PDF download option, as well as the online reader. Although this might seem like a step back to the days when the electronic version was distributed by QMags, we think this is a really good move, allowing an archive of old issues to be kept, and accessed in the industry-standard PDF format.
EE Times Europe finally launches
September 12th, 2006
EE Times drops PDF version
July 4th, 2006
EE Times has switched from PDF format to NXTbook Media’s browser-based reader. Although the title still has a small proportion of subscribers taking the online version (when compared with some European titles), it is clear that the move means we’re all likely to be reading magazines in some fancy online browser format, rather than the more straigntforward PDF version. Although the magazines will inevitably claim the browser formats they have chosen are based on the best technology for the magazine’s readers, clearly “The Selling Opportunities” (as NXTbook Media puts it) with toolbar ads, audio and video available is a key driver to these formats.
EE Times European websites go live
June 6th, 2006
The launch of the new EE Times websites has been completed succesfully, with EE Times sites for Europe, Germany, France, UK, Scandinavia, Israel, Eastern Europe and Russia. As planned, the Scandinavian site keeps the Elektronik i Norden branding, with all the other sites using EE Times branding. We understand CMP is close to securing the EETimes.eu domain name, but this wasn’t completed at the time of writing.
CMP announce launch of EE Times Europe
April 4th, 2006
Yesterday CMP presented their plans for the launch of EE Times as a print brand in Europe. Although the publisher has used the brand for the English, German and French online properties, these sites have been small players in the European electronics media.
Although the announcement was one of the worst-kept secrets in the European media, we still discovered some interesting information. Most importantly, no announcement was made about who will be editor-in-chief. Richard Wallace promised an announcement before the first issue, although we think that it may be tough to find a suitable candidate who is prepared to live in Brussels, where he said the editor would be based. There will be a re-design of the local EE Times websites, with the UK site replaced by an EE Times Europe site, and a daily English-langauge newsletter. Also local sites for Russia, Israel and Eastern Europe will be added to the website portfolio, although the content of all local sites will include English-language content as well as local language. The plans for the new sites don’t appear to be particularly well developed, as there was no commitment for the Israeli site to be in Hebrew, and complete confusion over the challenge of finding a local language for Eastern Europe. There was a promise of having local correspondants for all local sites, although there is clearly a lot for CMP to learn about Eastern Europe before they can launch.
Editorial content for the print publication will be primarily global, with local news taking a back seat. This makes sense, as it minimises the costs of writing the publication, and differentiates it from local publications, although the demand for locally-biased electronics news has been clearly demonstrated across Europe; the demand for a global newspaper in what will be a foreign language for most subscribers has not been tested in Europe. Bizzarely the promise for the websites is for local news to be the main focus. We believe that – if there is to be a large volume of content – the EE Times Europe site is not going to be hugely different from that on the main (US) site, giving limited incentive for European engineers to choose the European site. The non-English language sites are a different matter, and will probably be seen as a single site that gives access to local-language news and the vast library of EE Times content (in English).
The magazine will publish twice a month (actually only 20 issues per year), starting September 06. Finally the circulation will be re-qualified, with the goal of achieving 45K print subscribers and 10K digital edition subscribers. A BPA audit will be held in November, although it’s likely that the re-qualification will only be partially completed.
So, will it be successful? At Napier we believe that the introduction of the EE Times brand, and the creation of a strong editorial team will make the magazine successful. Inevitably advertising will increase from the USA, where marketing managers will like the idea of a familiar name. The real question is whether all this effort will be financially worth it – EXE had a reletively-low cost model. During the presentation, CMP claimed that they are only aiming for an average issue size of 48 pages – roughly the same as EXE. With the increased costs of an improved circulation, and the promise of a real strengthening of the editorial team, we’d be very surprised if standing still (in terms of advertising per issue) would be seen as success.
2006 EE Times ACE Awards Call for Entries
September 30th, 2005
We don’t generally cover the US media, but thought it would be worth pointing out that the deadline for the 2006 EE Times ACE Awards is 31st October. The judges will then have a full five months to toss coins, throw darts, and do whatever else they do to choose the winners in the seven categories, as the awards will not be presented until 4th April 2006.
EE Times redesigns and highlights European news
March 16th, 2005
EE Times has launched a new look and structure to the website. Amongst the enhancements are links on the EE Times homepage to news stories posted on the UK, German and French EE Times sites as well as the Swedish site run by those wonderfully nice people at Elektronik i Norden. The European sites have yet to benefit from the new design, so you get a nice retro feel as you click through to the European stories.
Posting news in different languages isn’t really a move that will benefit the majority of the American users of the EE Times site. We suspect that this move is a recognition that – with far fewer stories posted each day than the main .com site, and with European stories also featured on the .com site – the local EE Times sites are not getting as much traffic as CMP would like. This move will direct some of the European engineers that are going direct to EETimes.com to the additional useful local content that is available in their own language, boosting traffic to the European websites.
EETimes launches wireless design website
January 25th, 2005
Although this is really a US publication, with much of the leading edge wireless design happening in Europe, www.WirelessNetDesignLine.com will be an important medium to address European engineers. Interestingly, though, there is not yet a European editor working on the site – unlike commsdesign.com.
Edited by Robert Keenan – the respected CMP editor, the site will “contain targeted coverage of various exciting
new areas of wireless communication design technologies”. It’s good to know that they keep covage to exciting areas – I guess they’ll skip the any areas of technology that are dull!
