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Emap announce the suspension of FHM US in print. This despite a 1.3 million copy rate base. Times are tough..
I had the pleasure of being on a panel at an industry event last week, debating the role that print media will play in the future. The discussion became most passionate when it turned to the thorny question of circulation and ABC’s, and I was struck by two things.
Firstly that the “who has the biggest ABC” is one of those “who is tallest dwarf” type arguments, and much more importantly, when is the world of print magazines really going to acknowledge that there are seismic shifts in media consumption that simply will not be addressed by padding your ABC with bulk sales ?
It is obvious that whatever magazine sector you choose, it is in some sort of decline, whether it be computing, travel or automotive. Gone are the days when the bigger publishers would release their latest circulation results with a fanfare – now unless it’s a womens weekly it hardly rates a sentence in the annual results. So a number of titles now appear to have a growing base of free copies, expensive to distribute and only used to prop up a flagging ratebase.
Part of this of course is the increasing wastage at retail ; in travel and property for instance, average efficiencies for October were around 40%. Publishers face ever more stringent penalties at the likes of WHS who want to drive out waste, while driving up margin.
Given that, it seems all the more remarkable that many smaller publishers are still clinging to the idea that a reliance on a static or declining ABC is a tactic with a future. They seem to be caught in the headlights, and uncertain of whether to keep pumping out copy (costly) or invest in developing an online presence.
To me, it isn’t even a debating point. A print only strategy is a death sentence, whether slow and painful or quick and dramatic. Invest or die. Of course, if you are struggling with making sense of the internet and developing a web strategy, I'll be glad to help. Drop me a line here.
Much has been made of the recent launch of Monkey, the emagazine from Dennis Publishing. Claimed to be the first of its kind (give or take a few failed experiments) it gives users a true multimedia magazine, with embedded video clips, audio files and lots of photos. Of naked girls mainly, but increasingly there are a host of user supplied comic clips, pictures and stories padding out the 50 odd pages.
 Advertising is of course the key to making any free product commercially viable, and its interesting that the three pages in this weeks edition were a film company, a games publisher and a mobile phone manufacturer. You’d expect these companies to be in the vanguard of advertising interactively, but if Monkey is to cover the salaries of the staff, and Uncle Felix’s latest hobby, it is going to need to crack the mainstream fashion, automotive and technology clients. That might prove a tough nut to crack.
 Launching at the same time is Gamerzines ; a digital only publishing house aimed squarely at gamers. It has launched two magazines, 360zine and PCGzine, which both have the normal fare of news, reviews and embedded videos which seem the staple diet of the gaming fraternity. They face a tough task to compete with publishing behemoths like Future, and again, advertising support is vital. Encouragingly, the launch issue has over 20 pages of advertising, indicating support from the games publishers for the project – whether that support remains beyond issue 3 is critical. My only (slight) gripe would be that in order to accommodate the embedded video, the actual magazine is over 20mB to download, which on UK broadband connections is still a time consuming process.
The model that most impresses me is JPG - a digital camera magazine out in the US. The magazine is a unique proposition as it allows a more democratic approach, with users choosing which photos and stories appear in future editions, and the editors very much facilitating the conversation. More on that shortly.
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