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Online, magazines aren’t just a place where buyers read ads, they’re a place where deals get transacted. They’re not just a place for reading, they’re a place for reading–and then action.

Thirty-five different interactive tools are embedded in the Money.com Web site.

Readers can delve into their own finances in any number of ways. “How Deep is Your Debt?” whispers one tool. “Are you Saving Enough?” nudges another. Other tools offer wide-ranging advice, from stock screening to insurance picking to home relocation recommendations.

Much of the print magazine’s content is online, but the tools are the heart of this site. More evergreen than a feature about understanding Alan Greenspan’s remarks, more engaging than check boxes on glossy paper, tools define the site. As well they should, says Money. com editor Craig Matter.

“People don’t come to the Internet to read–they come to work,” he says.

That sums up the Internet’s deep and far-reaching impact on the magazine industry. After decades of serving as an impartial chorus that chronicled pastimes and industries, providing news and insights, magazines suddenly find themselves not just informers, but enablers. Online, they respond to reader demands for interactivity by establishing new relationships with readers via tools like those at Money.com. They bring together buyers and sellers in Internet marketplaces. And they even drive their own business growth through on-site customer service and subscription capabilities.

“The Web allows us to serve the consumer more directly, in ways we haven’t in the past,” says Mark Holmes, vice president for programming and product development at National Geographic’s Web arm.

Such new capabilities aren’t easy to conceive and launch. For decades, magazines applied their knowledge of customers down a one-way street–producing, printing and distributing expert views to their interested communities. Now, they are learning how to be managers of two-way communication, extending past the letters page to being moderators, merchandisers and toolmakers.

Swept into the swirl of Internet marketing and business models, magazines are seeking to establish partnerships with rising software companies and media operators without being hoodwinked. Associated issues range from being forced to understand new ways of presenting text, to signing contracts with software developers that are in the midst of hyper-growth.

“Obviously, we’re not up to speed in terms of technology,” acknowledges Kevin Brown, president of MediaEdge Communications in Toronto, which is nonetheless proud of its nascent marketplace venture with technology developer eMarketplaces. Daunted by the colossal capital and skills development required to establish a successful online marketplace–a business model that was largely a conceptual notion until a few years ago–MediaEdge, publisher of Canadian Property Management and Condominium Magazine, among others, turned to eMarketplaces. The resulting strategic relationship, PMmarketplace.com, is intended to provide a place for property and building managers to request services and reach contractors. It’s radically different from publishing stories and selling advertisements, but Brown says it’s a way to reduce the print medium’s inefficiency in trying to link suppliers, buyers and information about each.

Tools as Marketing Devices

Perhaps the simplest way magazines go to tools-based publishing online is with a clickable quiz, which is among the most pervasive features of magazine Web sites. Magazines use them to experiment inexpensively with the content that they are already using in print. The assignment is in, the art is budgeted–all it takes is a redesign and the site has a tool that will last for a year or more. Further, the opportunity for targeted advertising is obvious any time the quiz results in advice.

Inexpensive tools with strong opportunities to lead to sales are also increasingly important for magazines, which don’t usually have access to the seemingly limitless capital with which Wall Street has rewarded the risk-taking dot.coms. At Red book, for example, the Web site has piggybacked its featured tools on existing magazine features. A workout adviser, a makeover tool, a bra selector–all were adapted from features the magazine contracted and paid for. “You could never create a tool like this without the images, and shooting this would be a huge amount of money by Web standards,” says Jennifer Woodhouse, Web site editor at the venerable women’s title. Redbookmag.com is also building a few of its own tools from scratch, she says, but doing so is much different from assigning a story for print publication. Woodhouse says she had to select a freelancer who could grasp the concept of developing content not for the linear narratives that are traditional in magazines, but for the decision-tree wizards that a re common in software and Internet applications.

In turn, that means new business arrangements with content providers. “We came up with a flat fee for what we thought would be fair,” she says, instead of the per-word price with which freelancers are familiar.

Some are striking partnerships with sky-rocketing Internet operators such as VerticalNet, providing content in exchange for a cut of the partners’ e-commerce success. Others are establishing their own operations, flinging themselves with abandon into the new world of e-commerce.

The Independent Publishing Co., for example, which operates a handful of packaging magazines, established a strategic relationship with marketplace developer TechTrader to launch a marketplace aimed at its readers and advertisers. The strategy stems from a learning process started in 1994, when the St. Charles, Illinois, publisher launched a controlled-access Web site. Over the years, it has experimented with developing advertisers’ Web sites, taking subscription orders online and offering an interactive bingo card. Relatively few readers take advantage of these services, says Pat Farrey, national sales manager for IPC–but the ones who do are active, involved and of high value to advertisers and the magazine alike.

IPC now is convinced that its historical strength in news about packaging will position it to take the central role in the packaging marketplace as well. Companies that simply erect marketplace frameworks and expect them to effortlessly fill with vendors and buyers overlook the essential skill of knowing who these vendors and buyers are, and what they want to know in order to make purchases, Farrey says. “You can’t build a mall without knowing the demographics of the people who will shop in it,” he says.