Two Trends For Magazines, -- Show Any Weakness And The Publication Is Consigned To The Internet Only Or Worse, And The New Buzz Word is Video

Philip M. Stone March 19, 2007

With all the bad news about magazines closing, or being consigned just to the Internet, the surprising news from the Magazine Publishers of America is that in 2006 some 262 magazines were actually launched – that’s a 2% increase over the year before. But what the figures don’t say is how really tough it is out there these days.
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No need to dwell on all the happenings at Time, Inc, that has had a couple of years of downsizing staff and also sold 18 magazines to Bonnier; no need to dwell on the fact that according to some reports General Motors spent $600 million less on traditional media advertising last year and magazines would have felt a whole lot of that pain including Time Magazine itself; no need to dwell on magazines either being shuttered or put up for sale – the Dennis Publishing stable that includes Maxim and  Stuff – or magazine consigned just to the Internet – Elle Girl ,Shock and Premiere.

The question these days is what is it that magazines need to do to survive? There’s the new-look Time Magazine that now publishes. on Fridays rather than Mondays so Mr. and Mrs. Public will have the opportunity to read its redesigned pages over the weekend and if you look closely enough you’ll see the news emphasis has shifted – the breaking news and all that is now on Time’s web site and the magazine is now mostly analytical and featurish in nature.

There’s no question that the Internet now plays a very large part in a magazine’s life. Magazine publishers, perhaps even more so than newspaper publishers, have come to the realization that for those magazines kept in print there has to be a true convergence on the multiplatform of print and the Internet. Others have already given up the ghost of print, and even though their circulation numbers sound fine,  to the “suits” it’s not good enough and magazines are being dropped from print and left with just an Internet presence, if they show almost any sign of weakness.

Foremost among those ditching the print side is Hachette Filipacchi Media US, part of France’s Lagardere. Just last week it announced that the US version of Premiere, with a circulation of 492,498 would be consigned to just the Internet starting with the April issue. Premiere has shown some weakness of late and that is just not on these days – ad pages are down 3.2% year-to-date with total paid circulation down 2%. There are a lot of magazines out there that actually would be happy with those kinds of numbers but that doesn’t do it at Hachette Filipacchi any more.

It has already consigned Elle Girl and the US version of Shock to the Internet, and it must like the result for that is where the real investment seems to be made these days and not in print itself.

A further sign of the importance of video are the separate deals made by Hachette Filipacchi, Hearst and Rodale, Inc., for video services from privately-owned Brightcove Inc.

Rodale, for instance, plans to bring Brightcove’s video to its flagship Men’s Health and its other health and fitness titles. The Men’s Health online video channel will contain instructional videos for the magazine’s recommended health workouts, there will be celebrity interviews, relationship advice, and the like.

And why do this? Ken Citron, Rodale’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, explained in a company statement, “We are focused on inspiring our users to leverage all media formats in their quest to achieve their health and fitness goals. Video gives our editors a way to connect more directly with consumers.” Rodale’s various titles now reaches some 40 million people every month, the company says, which in turns gives it a very good audience for new revenue opportunities via video advertising.

Brightcove seems to be the name these days in providing such services, having already contracted with the likes of Dow Jones, Reuters, SonyBMG, Time Life, MTV Networks and British Sky Broadcasting.

Hachette Filipacchi has its own dedicated video studio for which it is already providing material for such magazine web sites as Elle, Car & Driver, and Woman’s Day. The next step with the Brightcove deal is to expand upon that and also take advantage of the video advertising revolution.

But for all of the Internet activity, reality was brought o earth last week in Hanover, Germany, at the Magazine Media 2.0 conference that included executives from more than 25 countries.  Just a very few of the 350 companies represented said they made more than 3% of their sales online.  Only Meredith of the US (Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal) said it was actually making a profit online.

The real question facing magazine publishers, as it does newspapers, is how do you sell a product online that most people will expect for free? Perhaps the future is what Hachette is trying in Europe – selling digital facsimiles that also contain embedded audio and video, for €9.90 a month, but will people pay that kind of money on the web? The first results are so-so.

More important perhaps is that advertisers are spending more and more of their money online, so a magazine that does have a web presence to go with its print presence is probably in the best position to make use of that, and video features heavily in that.. For instance some of that General Motors $600 million found its way to the Internet – would not magazine sites have been a logical convergement placement?

Yet more proof, in a different way, that the advertising model is probably the one that works best, even for magazines.

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TeenPeople Dies On The Web - April 17, 2007

Even consigning a print magazine to just the Internet is no guarantee of survival, as Time Inc. has just shown by closing down the TeenPeople web site with People.com absorbing its material.

Time Inc. consigned Teen People to the Internet last year in a cost-cutting move, but a 50% drop in traffic from March 2006 to March this year convinced management this wasn’t working as planned. So now we have a benchmark – 218,000 viewers a month is not enough to sustain an online magazine, especially if the numbers continue to slump.

So far this year Premiere and Child have stopped print publication to become Internet-only magazines.