On the surface, the media business is in trouble. But “behind the turnover figures, the industry is essentially still in profit“, according to new research. The Publishing Futures survey, conducted by Wessenden Marketing and Wide Area, reckons “underlying financials are robust” – but there are bumps in the road…
— Naive about online costs: Online return-on-investment is “growing quickly”, but that’s despite “low publisher resource, knowledge and sophistication” about the web, the report says: “The big question for many publishers, is do they know enough about online and are they spending enough on it to build a significant presence quickly enough? For a number of publishers, the answer is simply ‘no’.” There is “clearly still a great deal of naivete about the actual costs of building and maintaining a web presence”; most respondents admit it’s more difficult than they first thought. At least the researchers found “much less talk about online cannibalising or destroying print”.
— Job cuts could be over? As we have reported over the past nine months, the publishing industry has seen unprecedented job cuts in response to the recession — but the research suggest the worst could be over: 74 percent said they have already made the cuts needed; 23 percent say they expect to reduce slowly in the next year but only three percent expect to reduce rapidly.
— Online ad growth to return?: The report has yet more evidence of publishers’ revenue freefall: 44 percent of respondents said their overall current year-on-year revenue had dropped, some by as much as 21 percent. But 62 percent said they expected online display sales to grow in the next year — only 15 percent predicted a drop — and 65 percent predicted growth for paid content online. By contrast, 58 percent said they expected print classified ad sales to decline in the next year. As a whole, 15 percent of respondents’ revenue comes from online.
— Integration high on agenda: Respondents were asked to list what they saw as the biggest opportunities in online publishing: they gave high importance to “integrating print and online” possibly via a paid content model, and also building a sense of community among users. But they also added their biggest threats, the biggest of which is a “lack of publisher resource / focus / knowledge”, generated by the need to stay on top of fast-moving technological developments and too many staff being print-focused. Publishers are also worried about a “lack of differentiation in a crowded market”.
The research surveyed 187 mostly UK publishing companies — which between them publish 911 consumer magazines, 855 B2B magazines and newsletters, 413 newspapers and more than 1,000 websites.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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