Print publishing continues to bemuse me…

October 15, 2010 By 3 Comments

The Association of Online Publishers 2010 summit opened today, with experimentation and innovation as key items mentioned by chairman Tim Faircliff. I wasn’t in attendance, but I completely agree – both were key when I started my career back in 2001, and both were key since the dawn of business. The worrying thing is that we’re still reiterating that need in 2010.

And when it comes to print? Even more bemusing. Ignoring paywalls and iPad apps for the moment (They still count as experimentation, but neither is innovative anymore), there’s news that Bauer Media (former employers of mine for a long time) is about to trial ‘Gazetta’ – a Grazia for men featuring a strong news and fashion agenda and will also feature food, travel and automotive content. It’s being bundled with Grazia and given away free to test it without spending millions on launching first.

At the same time, The Independent is rumoured to be launching a new 20p newspaper targeting 20-somethings.

Why I’m so bemused…

Firstly, if you want to test something cheaply, £50 will do it and about 30 minutes will do it – just go and buy a domain and some hosting from somewhere like www.GoDaddy.com (aff link), and put some content up. You’ll have insights by the end of the first week.

Secondly, targetting men and 20-somethings? Ignoring the 20%+ year-on-year decreases for Bauer men’s titles FHM and Zoo, here are some interesting stats from research published back in February:

  • 99% of young males go online every day or nearly every day, with 80% saying they’d be lost without it.
  • 57% of young men have their closest technology attachment to the internet, followed by 49% for their mobile phone.
  • 25% of young men admitted to checking their email and 18% to looking at social networking sites on their mobile phone before they get out of bed in the morning. Some 94% use email at least once per day, compared with 60% that use a social network such as Facebook.
  • More than 25% of young males living with their partners watch TV on a computer in the living room while their other half uses the main TV set.

Now, this research was carried out on behalf of Microsoft Advertising, so feel free to draw your own conclusion from that, but if you’re targeting young men, would you be using print as your priority? Bauer have lined up some big name advertisers for the trial, as you’d expect, but do you think they’ll be retained long term?

And already in a similar market you’ve got the free to consumer Shortlist, radio companies such as my former employers at Absolute Radio, and numerous television offerings – the big difference between the male-targeted strategy for radio and print is that one compliments multi-tasking, the other fights against it.

And why ‘Gazetta’? A hangover from Italian football on UK TV and the rise of Starbucks a few years ago?

I’m interested to know what other people might think? Any guesses whether either new title will be successful or otherwise? Is digital too crowded?

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing, Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Thoughts on UK magazine ABC figures…

August 12, 2010 By 9 Comments

It still feels a bit weird not to be involved in the magazine industry when the ABC figures are released – although I’m getting used to examining the RAJAR figures for radio instead.

The thing is, the ABCs feel a bit odd this year, with the period-on-period and year-on-year increases feeling a bit hollow considering magazine sales grew 0.3% from last year – but that year was a historic low of 23.8 million. At the start of the decade, 30 million plus was the regular figure. And although the recession has played a part in sales, the decline started in 2005.

Looking in more detail at the top 100 titles, it’s dominated by Sky and supermarket titles. 51 of the titles posted declines year-on-year and the same number dropping period-on-period.

There are some positives for magazines in the homes, business, current affairs, and women’s sectors – although the ‘classic’ women’s magazines and several of the newer ones dropped. And it seems covermounts are more important than ever… the biggest drop was OK! magazine, which dropped 20.2%

But the men’s market trumps that with FHM down 18.1%, Nuts down 22%,Zoo down 27.9%, and Loaded down 26.3%. Free magazine Shortlist grew, as did Stuff, BBC Focus, Men’s Fitness, Esquire and Front. But two of those only grew by 1% or under (and Bauer Media is planning a new glossy men’s mag?)… That market fall is only matched by the decline in TV mags. Only two magazines didn’t drop in that area.

And out of all the publishers, BBC, Dennis, Conde Nast and Shortlist were up on last year.

It’s still a situation where slightly down or flat figures are still ‘the new up’

So where are the readers going? A lot of people have commented on the changes in the media over the years…

  • The recession – not just disposable income, but the perception of value in times of economic hardship.
  • The internet – free, accessible content which matches many of the print markets –including digital editions of the same titles. And all kinds of alternatives for entertainment from social networks to video sharing.
  • Mobile – see above, although the potential of paid apps means free content might be harder to find…
  • TV on demand – allowing you to fill up your leisure time more effectively if that’s your choice.
  • Gaming – whether social, console, mobile, or PC, gaming is a huge market and a big source of entertainment time.
  • Wifi – suddenly the internet is more accessible when you’re travelling – by train for example. Add in laptops and tablets.

Presumably by coincidence, Steve Rubel suggests one route that media companies should take for the future, regardless of the format their content is delivered in.

It would be interesting to compare with book sales to see if the desire for more in-depth information is holding strong, but the last figures I can find are from January 2010, with a drop of almost 7% for print books in 2009. Meanwhile ebooks have overtaken hardbacks on Amazon US.

I think it’s a sign that mass-market print titles, and profit margins, will never return to the pre-2005 levels, whatever anyone tries. The future for a sustainable print business in the long term is most likely to be much, much smaller runs of higher quality issues which are special in some way by commemorating events or providing in-depth information and experiences. But even most of those are going to face a massive challenge, particularly from tablets. I’m not a huge fan of Apple’s iPad, but I’ve found it’s great for content consumption, as is the Kindle, and as, no doubt, at least some of the Android tablets will be.

Then look at the likes of Flipboard and Pulse – two recent iPad-friendly apps which do a great job of presenting user filtered, or user’s social graph-filtered news and information. Or the semantic technology used by the likes of the idio platform for a while now.

I firmly believe the media companies who are performing best in the market, and show the signs of continuing that trend are the ones that most closely resemble tech organisations, and which are diversifying in everything to find out what works now whilst there is still some money left on the table.

Something that really made me chuckle in this context is an article on Giga Om, in which Paul Graham, the founder of tech incubator Y Combinator, convincingly explains the reason that Yahoo has struggled is that it turned into a media company at the end of the 90s. That’s not to say Yahoo can’t be successful, but the fact that one of the largest websites and digital advertising networks moved too close to becoming a media company must worry anyone who isn’t trying to innovate their media company at the moment.

Speaking to someone earlier today about their ambition to become a journalist, I could only advise them to put digital first, spend time learning at least the solid foundations of coding, SEO and social media marketing, and consider starting up something themselves rather than pursuing a print job – I’m just not sure there will be many around soon, and probably a lot of them will be extremely small start-up operations with a 20k circulation for an extremely niche product.

Filed Under: Magazine Publishing, Media, traditional media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Newspapers, Magazines, and the Apple iPad

June 10, 2010 By 5 Comments

While newspaper and magazine publishers have seen some good opportunities and success with the iPhone, the larger form factor of the iPad has definitely seen a huge leap in interest and the number of dedicated newspaper and magazine applications being produced, with figures already being shared by various publications about their success.

The Time sold 5,000 iPad apps in 3 days at £9.99, the Wall Street Journal has 10,000 customers paying $17.29 a month (free to print/web subscribers), The Financial Times has had 130,000 downloads of it’s free application. The Australian has had 4,500 downloads at $4.99 a month, the Guardian Eyewitness free app has had 90,000 downloads. And Wired is apparently selling more copies on the iPad than in print (print sales were quoted at 79,000).

(Figures from conferences I’ve attended, Paidcontent, New York Observer, Venturebeat)

All very impressive…but…

1) Friend and former magazine colleague Dave Cushman makes a point which quite a few other people have also discussed – is this an illusion of a long term future for publishers? He picks up on the open/closed, silo/network challenge, and that many publishers seem to see print sales dropping just because we can’t buy a lovely digital version of a print product. (Ignoring the fact that I carry 2-3 digital devices past at least 2 news stands every morning, with print products which already look good, are eminently portable and mobile already, and don’t require any net connection/investment in a new device).

2) The first month of figures are pretty much meaningless. Talk to me in six months about the number of app downloads, subscriber figures, and revenue. Then it’ll be clear whether the approach you’ve taken to the iPad is actually a solution, or just a very temporary bump.

Most applications will see good figures for the first month or two. They’re new in iTunes and get a little bit of promotion purely for that. And in this case, they’re also getting the bonus of a huge amount of hype around the iPad, and large amount of cross-promotion from the existing print and digital products. Here’s a question – How much revenue was given up in house ads to get the revenue the iPad app has generated?

The iPad is still hugely important:

I’m not denying the impact and value of the Apple iPad. It’s been extremely successful so far ( 2 million already sold), and is definitely driving a new way of accessing digital content (the web as well as apps).

But it’s far to early to say with certainty that the future of digital publishing lies in applications, and particularly in products which haven’t adapted to any benefits of digital distribution other than an easy paywall via iTunes. The larger iPad screen and speedy browser means a great way to surf the web for content without cost in many, many cases. And allows me to see all the peer-created and recommended content that is filtered for value to me in a more effective way than news organisations currently manage.

It’s only when excited new iPad owners have overcome their initial app-downloading frenzy and we can analyse repeat usage we’ll see whether this new distribution channel works for magazines – and whether anyone gets away with packaging the same product.

Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Not sure how to monetise your eyeballs?

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

While newspaper and magazine owners are still trying to decide whether or not they should aim for eyeballs or paywalls, there are several other companies who are happy to take up the challenge.

For instance, online social media publisher Mashable has signed a deal to syndicate content to Thursday editions of Metro in the U.S. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is already a regular on CNN in the U.S, and Mashable and CNN. Plus Mashable has partnered with CNN for the Mashable Media Summit 2010.

It’s interesting to see that mainstream publications and online publications are increasingly merging, but the ‘digital natives’ seem less worried and more sure that they’ve already got the monetisation aspect under control.

One reason is that by the time the likes of Mashable and Techcrunch have reached their current scale, they have already had to answer the questions of how to fund an online business. But as they grew from relatively humble beginnings, they’ve tackled it as they’ve grown without having to worry about legacy systems and overheads.

And by the same token, if you look at the staffing levels – Mashable lists 20 staff, and Techcrunch lists 21.

Compare that to the epic lists of staff at most magazines, for example, and you can see a big contrast.  There are print magazines run by smaller teams, but none that have the scale of the leading blogs (Or at least what started out as blogs).

So how do you produce so much content with a small team across all our properties? Simple, count the guest posts and the open offers to submit work to the likes of Mashable and Techcrunch.

Then consider a quote from the 2010 PPA Conference from the Chief Executive of Future Publishing, Stevie Spring:

“Advertisers are scared of the prospect of seeing their ads next to user-generated content. This won’t change. All it takes is one bad example to put brands off.”

That’s why sites which benefit from user-generated content are filtering and curating that content to get value out of it. There’s a reason why there are successful businesses based around user-generated content, but 4Chan isn’t one of them.

Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing, newspapers Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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