I am increasingly confused about KeepMedia mission, and I’m changing my views. What is it: a digital magazines superstore where you can browse and indulge in some leisure reading, a research site, or vendor trying to sell content at its barebones level? It fulfills none of those roles with any amount of thoroughness, even though I’ll give it points for trying…

The go-slow approach may be a little too slow, if you ask me…

Why am I writing about this now? Well, I mentioned KeepMedia’s ad campaign a month ago...I happened to chance on some more creative and media executions recently. Ads on Forbes.com, CollegeClub, Jazz Times and Juno’s e-mail campaign...if the company’s idea is to become hip enough to attract college students for a magazine reading break, then I’m afraid the Primedia stable of magazines will not cut it…

Keeping Newsweek, Atlantic, BusinessWeek and PC Magazine as the promos on the homepage is also not going to help: all of these are available for gratis on their own websites...(well, Atlantic after a month, BusinessWeek, some of it).

Point is, I fail to see KeepMedia’s utility at this point. The best bet for KeepMedia, despite what I said when the company launched: go backend. A tech and business consulting provider to magazines on how they should develop and monetize their websites…

For more on KeepMedia, read our dedicated section…