The beginnings of ezines date back to the mid 1980s. In the earliest versions of this marketing tool the ezine was basically a cyber form of an actual print magazine delivered through the use of email. Some ezines featured one article and contact information while some supplied a full compliment of articles on a single subject or thematic element.
There would come a time in the 1990s when ezine publishers began to see that email recipients were less interested in the use of email for the delivery of ezines. At that time many ezine publishers elected to make their work available in an online platform with interactive features that were unavailable in print form. This new direction brought about a resurgence in the popularity of ezines.
Polls could be taken and trivia questions could be answered with immediate results. Little by little ezines began to use email-marketing techniques to let others know of the online ezine instead of using email as the full distribution system. Today there are relatively few ezines that are available in an exclusive email distribution format. Many of the ezines distributed by email contain only a teaser format with links to the full...