Advertising for US Vogue has dropped significantly this year. Many teen magazines have shut down. Wish, Canada’s five-year-old lifestyle magazine for young, professional women recently announced that they would end their print run with their Winter 2008/2009 edition. Is this signalling that print is on life support, at least for lifestyle and fashion publications?
Money is often cited as the reason why print publications are folding. It costs a great deal to print the thousands of publications, and not all of them are going to sell. In addition to printing costs, one has to pay for delivery, whether it is to stores or postage to subscribers. Online costs are much lower. Big publications all have websites and often already have their articles posted online. It is a simple change to move from print to online publication. Most won’t require a complete redesign, and even if they do and spend several thousand dollars on a new site, the long term costs are still much lower. In addition, readers won’t have to wait for months to see articles on current topics (e.g. a writer can “live blog” a show at Fashion Week) nor are letters to the editor going to be limited. Most online publications allow comments, so readers not only can submit their points of view, but also interact with other readers. More localized publications can have a wider presence, especially if article linking/sharing buttons are implemented. Finally, the lack of paper usage makes an online publication much greener.
Of course, there are still those who prefer a more traditional format. They don’t want to scroll through a computer screen and prefer the glossy look of magazines. In addition, print publications give its readers something that online publications do not have- reading while commuting to work. Even with improved cell phone technology, accessing Internet sites via a phone is still much slower than high-speed access from a computer. Of course, there are also people who don’t quite understand/accept new technology, and in fact, some believe that online publications shouldn’t be considered “real journalism.”
There will be a day when print fashion and lifestyle publications will be dead, or at least limited to glossy look books printed twice a year. The day hasn’t arrived yet, at least not for a more mature crowd. However, people who do not understand or embrace technology must be prepared. This day will come.
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i think you are correct. our pub, Millionaire Blueprints Teen, had one real printing and our issues after the fact have been online only….
This is an oversimplified view of the situation. There are many factors that are coming in to play, which are not mentioned.
Print publications are not paid for by the cover price; they are paid for by advertisers. That’s why, when opening Vogue, or something similar, you have to wade through 100 pages of ads before finding the list of contents. But advertising budgets for print media are declining as advertisers fail to establish a measurable return on their advertising investment. As a result, publishers need to cut costs which has been leading to layoffs – often laying off the very people who are best placed to attract new advertising revenue. But companies are increasingly run by bean-counters, not creatives.
So yes, there is a shift to on-line publications. And yes, costs are somewhat lower. However, there are new costs such as website developers, web content producers, hosting, bandwidth etc. And on the web, there is even less revenue from subscriptions (pretty much zero). So are advertisers going to make up the difference? Apparently not. On-line advertising is declining as a result of advertisers failing to establish a measurable return on their investment again. This may be because the web has allowed anybody to advertise almost anywhere. The internet is saturated with advertising to such a degree that software companies and web service providers are making money from producing products that turn off advertising. Perhaps that is an opportunity – “this advertising has NOT been brought to you courtesy of XYZ software Inc.”
That is a little more detail on the issues and challenges currently being faced.
There will always be a place for printed publications, it’s just that the nature of those tiltes and their place is changing.
For the last ten years I’ve heard publishers panicking as they’ve thought their titles have been athreatened by on-line magazines.
The internet and on-line magazines will not replace magazines, they will be there to support a core magazine. We’re coming to a place where one without the other will be difficult, but hitting the right balance will allow both to survive and thrive.
After a day at work on a screen, the joys of being constantly interrupted by pinging e mails, phone calls, texts and pagers – how many people would rather grab a magazine and read it at their own pace to relax and unwind or switch on again at home.
Power to print!
Jo Armstrong
Independent Publishing Consultant
Print | Paper | Process
jo@joarmstrong.com