5 Comments

How Far They’ve Fallen

Oct 14, 2009
by

A few short years ago, who could have imagined how precarious business conditions would be for traditional newspapers and magazines. As 2009 comes to a close, it marks the end of another dismal year for print media. Symbolic of the plight of magazines was the October 5 announced shutdown of the 70-year old Gourmet by embattled publisher Condé Nast.

While a rebirth of print magazines is unlikely, these publications are still fighting for their collective lives. But now the battle is being waged largely on the Internet. Magazine publishing companies that compete with one another “are discussing the creation of an ad network that would sell targeted space across many of the industry’s websites,” says an October 6 Ad Age article. One magazine executive told Ad Age: “We’re getting killed by ad networks. …if we could just create some scale on our own and sell across it, we can get a lot better ad rates.”

Clearly, desperate times require desperate measures. While the industry has discussed such a possibility before, it seems to be a more compelling need today. “Now there are maybe 500 ad networks,” another magazine executive told Ad Age. “Last time the conversation started, there were maybe only 200 ad networks.”

Variations of a magazine ad network already exist. Time, for example, has a network for its own print and online properties. Other magazine publishers have created topic-specific networks, such as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s “Martha’s Circle,” according to Ad Age.

A home-grown magazine-controlled ad network is just one strategy for survival. Another may be publishing electronic versions of newspapers and magazines. True, some already exist, but not in any formalized paid form. So it’s interesting to hear the latest rumor, previously reported by Ad Age, that a group of magazine executives supposedly held talks with Apple about digital editions of magazines to be sold via iTunes. Apple is also said to be in talks with The New York Times about producing a digital edition, says Wired.The discussions center around Apple’s new “tablet,” a product yet to be officially announced, that could provide a platform for reading digital magazines.

The Apple tablet in itself is significant new – it could very well catapult Apple into a brand new arena, competing directly with Amazon’s e-book device, Kindle.

But the real message behind Apple’s tablet, Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s eReader, and similar devices is their ultimate purpose: to replace traditional print versions of newspapers, magazines, and books with electronic versions. And the message behind a potential online ad network created by magazines is pretty clear: We’re raising the white flag on print and surrendering to the digital world.

About Barry Silverstein

Barry Silverstein is a freelance writer/marketing consultant. In addition to writing for ReveNews, he is a contributing writer to Brandchannel.com, the world’s leading online branding forum. He is the author of three marketing books, The Breakaway Brand (co-author, McGraw-Hill, 2005), Business-to-Business Internet Marketing (Maximum Press, 2003) and Internet Marketing for Technology Companies (Maximum Press, 2003). Barry ran his own Internet and direct marketing agency for twenty years. You can find Barry on Twitter @bdsilv.

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing + Business Tools + Media + Online Publishing + Recession
  • http://www.bloggingwithchris.com Chris Peterson

    Hi Barry,

    I guess, it it indeed inevitable with the current speed of the internet growth. There is more than consumers can consume available anyways for people for ages. But with kinda internet freedom, Choices are crystallizing. But would you want print media to vanish as a reader?

  • Barry Silverstein

    Truthfully, Chris, I think there is a place for print. Unless digital reader technology improves to the point of providing the same tactile and visual experience of reading a magazine, I think e-magazines will be a poor second to "real" magazines. This is a dilemma facing us as the move to an electronic life phases out print. I'm not sure what the result will be. I think certain publications will survive in a combination print-electronic form of some kind.

  • Colin Nigel

    Lots of print magazines are doing just fine. Look at Cooks Illustrated and Fine Cooking to start with. Low profile magazines that rely on newsstand readers and subscribers to pay the bills are chugging right along, sometimes with zero ad support. The magazines that are struggling are the ones that are totally ad-driven. They have circulations of a million to support their $100k page rates; circulations comprised primarily of people who end up paying the publisher nothing for the magazine. There will always be a place for print magazines that readers are willing to pay for.

    The other thing to keep in mind is that digital readers blow. They're a horrible way to read content. You get to keep nice magazien art direction and the idea of a "paginated" ad, but you lose all of the good things that websites offer in the way of navigation.

  • http://www.mediatrust.com T Foster

    The print pubs that succeed tend to be those that involve leisure and hobbies. They represent content that people want to read "in front of the fire" meaning they want to have the tactile feel of a printed page to leisurely peruse. These are the exception, not the rule. Publications that people need to do their job have to change, as people want their information fast and anywhere they are. To support these new consumption paradigms, publishers need are adapting to new models.

    The great thing about this shift is that to increase eCPM, many of these publishers (that are typically CPM reliant) will be turning to performance marketing to better monetize their inventory.

  • Colin Nigel

    Leisure and hobby (or "special interest") magazines are the rule rather than the exception at every Barnes & Noble I've ever been to.