Magazine Publishers Compare the Internet to 'Instant Coffee'

By Lois Beckett, Mon., Mar. 1 2010 @ 12:45PM

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Categories: Business, Media

I am going to get offline right now and buy a magazine.

Imagine that you are the head of a American magazine publishing company. You publish Vogue, or Sports Illustrated, or National Geographic. Your ad revenue has plummeted. You have recently shuttered several magazines. The Web sites of your publications are clunky and underdeveloped (most of them use a similar dull template). You know that you need to do something drastic, something that will turn around your business and inspire a new generation of readers.

And so, on a gray Monday morning in San Francisco, you and your fellow magazine-publishing cohorts join together to launch a collaborative effort to save the American magazine -- "Magazines, The Power of Print."

Yes -- you are not going to struggle alone. You are going to bring together the best minds in the business to create a $90 million print advertising campaign. You are going to advertise in your own magazines about how people should keep reading magazines!

To do this, you need a really killer slogan. Something that will galvanize your readers. That will show just how cutting-edge and relevant you are.

"Will the Internet Kill Magazines? Did Instant Coffee Kill Coffee?"

Bingo!

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Magazines, Media, The Power of Print

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Andrew Kaplan says:

It's interesting how the MRI can boast what essentially amounts to increased interest and engagement with magazines, while at the same time ignoring the crucial metric: huge drops in revenue. It's the problem plaguing all of the media biz right now: everyone consumes the media voraciously, but neither readers nor advertisers are paying for anything like they used to. That said, I also wonder whether the 17% drop in ad revenue year-over-year is a fair comparison, since 2008 was an abnormally GARBAGE period for most media companies in America due to the recession.

Posted On: Monday, Mar. 1 2010 @ 1:10PM

Lois Beckett says:

Once you start looking at ad revenue stats, the question really is, how much of this is due to the recession? Industry press releases play up the recession explanation, rather than the "good-bye to print advertising" explanation, and I don't know of a good magazine-specific study that breaks it down and estimates how much of the drop could be accounted for by the recession.

One thing that we do know is that ad revenue had already dropped 5% overall in the first three quarters of 2008--in other words, before the financial crisis hit. A 14 percent decline in the last months of the year pushed the total figures lower, and they posted an 8% decline overall.

(For stats, see http://www.magazine.org/advertising/revenue/by_ad_category/pib-4q-2008.aspx)

Your math may be better than mine, but if there was a 18% drop in ad revenue from 2008 to 2009, and 2008 was already a pretty bad year, we're looking at a pretty steep additional decline from an already rough spot--and we know there was decline starting in early 2008. Just by itself, that seems like a pretty fair basis for speculating that the problem isn't just the recession.

I'm sure there is a much more sophisticated analysis of these figures out there--please chime in if you can point us there.

Posted On: Monday, Mar. 1 2010 @ 5:22PM