Scottish Rugby Mag Scrum Goes Online-Only Amid Ad Downturn

A free, monthly rugby magazine has decided it has suffered the downturn in print advertising for long enough and is transferring the entire operation online. Allmediascotland reports that Edinburgh-based Scrum magazine, which covers grassroots club rugby in Scotland and has a print run of 11,000, is planning to make the switch after 18 months of print publishing.

The magazine’s website is now offering to email the magazine in its entirety to readers’ inboxes each month. The magazine’s editor Gary Heatly told paidContent:UK: “At the start of the summer advertising was our main source of revenue. But the print costs and postage costs to send it 210 clubs and 190 schools was quite considerable. With the last couple of issues the advertising revenue has not been as good we would have hoped.” Heatly says he hopes the magazine can go back to printed publishing at some point next year.

This media guide for prospective advertisers put together last summer by the magazine’s publisher Bell Johnstone shows that online played only a minor role in the magazine’s original business plan. Describing Scrum as a “must-have glossy” magazine for rugby fans, it has the usual features list and ad sizes for ad agencies. But at the time the guide was published the website hadn’t even been built and instead of offering ad space online, the magazine promises to link to advertisers’ websites if they buy print space. For smaller magazines suffering in the downturn, there is going have to be some creative thinking to transfer an old media mindset into a successful digital business.

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