10-28-2010, 05:05 AM | #1 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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The Magazine is Dead. Long Live the Magazine!
(To paraphrase the old saw.... "The King is dead....")
The Future of the Magazine Industry Doesn't Include Magazines - Posted by ptucker on Fri, 10/22/2010 - 8:12pm I just returned from the annual American Magazine Conference, or AMC, this year in Chicago, where I got a front row view of the future of my industry. In one presentation after the next, the heads of such giants as Hearst, Condé Nast, and Time (along with Oprah Winfrey) reassured one another that the future was increasingly bright. “This year, magazines saw media share increase second only to TV,” said Nina Link, president of MPA: the Association of Magazine Media. “Advertising sales are increasing again,” reported John Griffin president of National Geographic’s publishing division. “Total magazine readers increased four percent in the last four years, second only to the Internet,” said Jack Griffin, (no relation) CEO of Time. Numbers from other sources bear out the grand recovery story. Last year, some 60% of magazine titles analyzed by the group Magazine Radar were flat or up in terms of revenue, and a third of them were up by at least 10%. This resurgence of confidence among the publishers in attendance wasn’t just a product of positive sales numbers. A shift is taking place in the way people consume media. The days of being bullied by Huffington Post, Google, and other content aggregators are drawing to a close. The Web, you see, is dead, as noted by Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson in the magazine’s September cover feature. Consumers are turning away from searchable sites and moving toward what Anderson calls “semiclosed platforms,” devices that deliver a certain type of content over the Internet through specially designed software packages—read that as the iPad and all that apps that come with it. Rest here: http://beta.wfs.org/content/future-m...lude-magazines |
10-28-2010, 11:12 AM | #2 |
Sci-Fi Author
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Bah, they're lying to make everyone stop panicking even though the ship is sinking.
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10-28-2010, 11:51 AM | #3 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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You could be right Steven.....
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10-28-2010, 02:07 PM | #4 |
Guru
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Probably not lying, just overly optimistic reading of the data. I don't think people are flocking to closed systems. It is probably people who haven't yet jumped in on the digital wave, switching from paper to the electronic versions.
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10-28-2010, 02:40 PM | #5 |
Mystery writer
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Interesting reading. Thanks for sharing it.
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10-28-2010, 03:21 PM | #6 |
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10-28-2010, 03:34 PM | #7 | |
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Quote:
If I were them, I wouldn't be too confident: The "final solution," the system that everyone will use for years and that won't belly-up at the first sign of an economic downturn, really hasn't been decided yet. Anyone putting all their eggs in one basket (iPad, for example) could find themselves with a sticky mess on their hands in short order. But no one wants to admit that they're just guessing at the format of the future. So, they gush about it, and hope no one else puts two and two together. |
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10-28-2010, 04:49 PM | #8 |
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I like a few pictures and a lot of print in most magazines. Time used to be like that and so did Popular Mechanics. Now it's pictures, ads that look like articles, massive whit space and far less information.
I would not be surprised if circulation was up because they are giving out free subscriptions. A friend gets several, only one of which he ever subscribed to and he stopped that a few years ago. I've had similar experience with a newspaper being delivered for months. One of the local papers just went to a smaller format then it was a few months ago and compared with papers from the 30's it was already small. (Watch an old movie on Hulu to see what they used to look like. |
10-28-2010, 04:53 PM | #9 | |
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Quote:
When they do, they won't be handing off their old zines to their former roommate, won't be selling them at a yard sale, won't be offering them to the local doctor's office for the waiting room. Most of those people will continue to buy magazine apps related to their new interests--but some won't, either because they aren't available, or because they just shifted away from the media. And when, in three or four years, they're ready to reconsider magazine subscriptions, they won't know where to look for the titles that match their interests. My daughter's 15. She doesn't buy magazines. And if they shift almost entirely to digital platforms, she won't know they exist to buy in 5 years. Lack of paper = lack of advertising to new readers. Lock-in content = lack of advertising to new readers. They're transitioning fine because currently, readers know how magazines work and which ones they like, and are willing to shift to digital. What they need to figure out is how today's junior high students are going to know which titles they like in ten years. |
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10-28-2010, 09:01 PM | #10 |
My True Self
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With so much available on the internet I've dropped all but one magazine subscription, and that one is an association paid magazine . Or to put it more succinctly, I've dropped four magazine subscriptions.
I had free access to one of the ones that I dropped. They wanted me to try it and possibly re-subscribe. The internet version of the magazine was as Kenny said (for) - "“semiclosed platforms,” devices that deliver a certain type of content over the Internet through specially designed software packages" The problem was I don't read magazines the way that the "specially designed software" expects me too. I ended up tagging company’s email address as junk and had it automatically deleted. Strangely enough, the one thing that I enjoyed was the advertising. Companies had to actually pay a significant amount of money for me to see it, so it wasn't as bad as internet ads. |
10-28-2010, 09:23 PM | #11 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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To be clear that wasn't ME that said that, what I posted above was from the ptucker blog posting at the link...
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10-28-2010, 09:26 PM | #12 |
My True Self
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I understand. It was just bad attribution on my part.
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10-28-2010, 09:53 PM | #13 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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NP
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10-29-2010, 08:49 AM | #14 | |
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Many of today's special interest magazines will likely evolve into news sources for those aggregate sites and SW to pull from and deliver to others... specialty versions of Reuters and Associated Press, essentially. |
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10-29-2010, 06:39 PM | #15 |
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I no longer buy any paper based magazines. Whilst Zinio still leaves a lot to be desired it provides me with most of the magazines I am interested in in a format that is easy to read and does not take up meters of bookshelf space to store.
In terms of concerns that people will not know where to look to obtain magazines that interest them, well, publishers need to get creative about marketing and making it easy to locate their product. I would love to see Itunes (I use the Ipad) provide a category of magazines to enable easier location. I would also like to see a decent tablet device that is lightweight and the physical size of an A4 sheet of paper which the Ipad falls a litle shy of. |
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