Consumer magazines have seen their fair share of carnage in the publishing recession, with a steady stream of redundancies and some high-profile closures including Dennis Publishing’s Maxim and Bauer Media’s Arena.
So what to do? Give more content away online and grow advertising, or use websites to increase brand profile and boost sales? There wasn’t one answer to that question at consumer-magazine focused session at the FIPP World Magazine Congress on Wednesday but several theories, as publishers visibly grapple with the structural and cyclical declines of their industry…
— BBCWW: Newspaper and magazine publishers often cite the huge amount of free content published by the BBC and others as a key barrier to charging for content — but the BBC’s own commercial publishing division has exactly the same problem. Gillian Carter, editorial director of BBCWW’s Good Food magazine, said the mag had considered erecting a paywall for its archive of 6,000 recipes but said it would be hard to sustain given the amount of free content available. The site receives 1.2 million unique monthly users and the mag has gained 7,000 paid subscriptions from online users and Carter said free online content hadn’t impinged on mag sales at all.
— Lagardère Active: Publishers had better find a new subscription-based business model soon because the revenue lost to the current downturn is not coming back. That’s the sobering advice from Didier Quillot, CEO of Lagardère Active, the French Hachette-owned publisher’s digital division, who said that online will only ever account for between five and, at most, 20 percent of the company’s revenue. “It will at best compensate from the decline in subscription revenue… the internet is nice but it will stay small.” Quillot, a former CEO of Orange in France who joined Lagadere in 2006, says his team are busy “working on how to implement subscription models in order to exit this fatality of internet being free”. More after the jump…
— Grazia: Bauer Consumer Media’s women’s weekly Grazia claims to be doing well in the downturn, but like many of its peers, its online activities are very much in addition to the centrepiece magazine both editorially and commercially. Editor Jane Bruton told the session that her magazine’s strength was it’s speed in reacting to news events, in print: “We go to press on a Friday and we’re out on Tuesday, so we can react to the news very quickly. Why wait a whole month?” Some would ask, why wait a whole week or even a day for news, but Grazia’s circulation was stable at 227,156 in the last six months of 2008. For Bruton the web is more about connecting with readers through Facebook, Twitter and all the rest.
— GQ: Dylan Jones, longstanding editor of Conde Nast’s men’s mag GQ, said that the title’s mission was in essence to “sell trousers to young men” and echoing what Gucci’s worldwide media director told the conference yesterday, he said that ” the challenge for us is replicate the luxury online. (Advertisers) have found it hard to get that luxury online, the red carpet, the velvet rope. Dylan’s take on the online structural changes in publishing is that while many in newspapers “thought it would never affect them”, the same thing may be true of the magazine industry now.
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