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Cranberry Publishing have just launched the latest in their excellent series of free games magazines - PS3zine. Each issue will contain games reviews, previews and of course lots of interactive elements. They are fantastic products - being free - and in a demo less world, why pay £6 for a print version when everything you want is free ?
 A measure of their popularity is that they have over 50,000 subscribers signed up to their existing products, so they have obviously tapped a vein with gaming consumers. At the same time, Imagine Publishing (I worked with them last year) have announced a £1.5million investment in the online world.
All this comes when the launch of Sony's Playstation 3, an Elite version of Microsoft's XBox 360 console and Nintendo's Wii should mean a bumper year for games magazine publishing. The fact it won't is an indication of how much the print publishing cycle has changed and the reliance of the magazines on "exclusive" demo CD's. That world has gone.
And it won't be back.
Required reading for every magazine company, whether BtoB or consumer - Colin Crawford, head of online at IDG in the US, blogs that his company is now "more an online company than a print company." Easier for him to say, you cry, given that trade and niche products are easier to migrate online than mainstream. But only by degrees and timing.
His piece, entitled "The Transformation of IDG", makes the point that . . .
"Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues. This occurred in the US in 2006 and in Europe during the last quarter.
With this change in the revenue mix and the higher margins from our online businesses - the company is more profitabl[e] today than it has been previously. . . .
In the US, our online revenue now accounts for over 35% of our total US publishing revenues. Next year, for many brands online revenues will be greater than print revenues, if fact they already are at some of our key brands and by 2009 – approximately 50% of IDG’s US revenues will come from online."
50% from online ? Wow. I'll bet thats not a percentage adjacent to any being discussed at print publishers on this side of the pond.
Its not been a good week for the printed word. Hot on the heels of the closure of So London after three issues, comes the news that the weekly music launch Popworld Pulp has become er, pulp. Incredibly, this is after just two issues.
That's two weeks. Hmmmm.
Sales of just 9,000 off a print run of 130,000 didn't help obviously, but the decision to launch this magazine with no supporting website when its target audience are all there frankly beggars belief. I thought the "Spend £1 million on a launch in the music sector and overtake NME" business plan had come and gone with Future's ill - fated Bang!
Obviously not. NME has survived the internet maelstrom precisely because it has embraced it, building a million strong web audience when its print proposition was being eroded.
I've started running a course on Developing Digital Magazines for the PPA, which had its  first airing this week. Almost all of the publishers there were of the opinion that the number of vendors in the market was bewildering, and that no one vendor could claim to deliver the ideal solution.
Interestingly, of all the vendors we discussed on the day, Exact Editions were favoured by 80% of attendees, who liked the clean accessible way that their site and publications are presented. Thanks Adam BTW for the kind comments. Oh, and if anyone from Zinio is reading this, answer your emails - you're missing business.
Another hot topic of conversation was prolonging the shelf life of your magazine online. Titles like Top of the Pops, Elle Girl and others are finding new life - and new readers as digital rather than print products, and it seems this trend is likely to continue. Only this week, Premiere, the US movie magazine has announced that it is shutting its print product (they call it "shuttering" in the US for some unknown reason) but retaining the site and online products.
This is despite the magazine's highly impressive readership of nearly half a million, and as I discussed earlier, its a trend that will continue.
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