Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Deal With It Direct had a full house for this year's list roundtable. Considering all the additional responsibilities on brokers' plates, that's impressive... See Full July Issue

This summer the United Kingdom's National Magazine Co. — NatMag — killed online-only teen magazine Jellyfish after a 20-week trial, saying the e-zine's business model was not “sustainable.”

Roughly translated, “unsustainable” in publishing usually means “couldn't draw a crowd if the editors set their hair on fire and ran down the street naked.”

So what happened with Jellyfish? It apparently had e-mail deliverability troubles.

According to an article on PrintWeek.com, NatMag admitted that Hotmail had blocked delivery of Jellyfish. The company also said some corporate servers were blocking the magazine due to its use of Flash animation.

Corporate servers? Why would a teen girls' title hit corporate firewalls? Does the U.K. have some “take-your-daughters-to-work” philosophy — as in every day, all year — that we don't know about?

In the same PrintWeek piece, Fresh Media Group marketing director Dominic Duffy blamed an unnamed e-mail service provider for Jellyfish's deliverability issues.

Fresh Media is the company behind page-turning software Ceros, which was used to create Jellyfish.

“An error made by the publisher's chosen e-mail distribution company led to the magazine being blacklisted by Hotmail — probably the most widely used [e-mail address provider] of the target demographic,” Duffy said, according to PrintWeek. “The lesson to learn is that the quality of data used as the source of the initial marketing drive is absolutely paramount.”

That Jellyfish was smashing up against corporate firewalls and getting blocked from potential recipients at Hotmail tells us one thing: NatMag had a list problem. Because of this, Jellyfish was being sent to people who either hadn't agreed to receive it or didn't know they agreed to receive it.

E-mail service providers live and die on deliverability. If they can't deliver e-mail, they have no business. Moreover, reputable ESPs have strict rules about what they'll send to whom. It's in their best interest to make sure clients' lists are clean and deliverable.

If NatMag chose a data source that resulted in a bunch of bad addresses, the solution would've been simple: Trim the bad addresses and change subscriber-acquisition tactics.

There isn't a single “distribution” problem Jellyfish had that it couldn't have overcome with the help of a reasonably knowledgeable ESP deliverability specialist — that is, unless there simply was no market for the magazine.

Heeeey. Wait a minute. Could it be that teen girls simply didn't want to read Jellyfish? Naaaah. It had to be the ESP. Yep, that's it. It was the ESP.

Boy, life sure is simple when we can slap the vendor around for our own marketing stupidity, isn't it?