In the publishing industry there’s one undeniable megatrend: it’s going digital and fast. Printed media content creators are vigorously trying to cling onto their physical products or trying to come up with creative web solutions to stay relevant. Two prominent change drivers of this digital transformation are Nopea.media and Foleon (previously Instant Magazine) so let’s do a comparison of these two new philosophies. Foleon offers a visually impressive, responsive and customizable answer to this change. What if you want these attributes while going digital but also want to stay relevant in print? Then your best suitable alternative is Nopea.media.
As stated on Foleon’s (previously Instant Magazine) website; ”Quickly create jaw-dropping internal and external communications assets your audience won’t easily forget.” Foleon offers the customer immersive and media-rich content while Nopea.media’s angle is ”A beautiful web magazine that you can print.” One might think that the two services are automatic competitors but that’s only scratching the surface. These two services are essentially answering totally different demands.
Foleon (previously Instant Magazine) and Nopea.media provide all the benefits of modern digital publishing in a magazine form; a global reader base, social media virality through sharing, instant feedback, article-by-article analytics, targetable ads, interactive content and so on. This sounds very promising but Foleon is missing a key factor that many old school publishers want: the ability to create print-ready material along with the interactive digital content. This is where Nopea.media steps in.
It’s clear that printed media is on a decline but is it going to die anytime soon? Not by a long shot. In many cases Foleon fails to change the underlying philosophical principle; Your web magazine content is an extension of your physical magazine. Why not the other way around? Imagine if you had only your web content to update and you would get the same amazing printed content automatically as well. That’s the difference in the fundamental philosophy behind Nopea.media and Foleon.
Nopea.media also provides a new method of publishing; creating magazines gradually and compiling a print-ready magazine from the gradually created web content. If you’re the editor-in-chief of a magazine and you have the deadline of your next magazine coming up you know this feeling: You have plenty of written content and pictures which need to be gathered and compiled in time for the pagination. Then the iteration on which graphics to use, the layout of the text and multiple drafts before the final product is ready. Imagine creating articles on the fly and choosing only the best ones for your printed magazine. In Nopea.media you can easily designate which content is exclusive to the web version and which get printed onto your physical magazine.
All in all the two services, Foleon and Nopea.media offer different approaches to the accelerating digitalization of the publishing industry by fulfilling the same-looking but ultimately different demands. Here’s a short list of the differences:
| Nopea.media | Foleon (previously Instant Magazine) | |
| Visually impressive | x | x |
| Standardized page layouts | x | x |
| Standardized menus | x | x |
| Drag & drop customization | x | |
| Very quick to generate new pages | x | |
| Possibility to create custom charts & tables | x | |
| Works well on mobile devices (responsive) | x | x |
| Print your magazine | x |
Read our article on how to create articles for web and print with the nopea.media plugin.