inDepth continues its look at the impact of tablets on the magazine industry. Did you read Part 1 about how tablets entered the magazine world?
According to the Publisher’s Information Bureau, the magazine industry’s collective ad revenue fell by 21 percent in the first half of 2009 alone. While revenue has rebounded with incremental gains over the last four quarters, the numbers remain a far cry from their pre-recession totals.
Though oft-troubled news publications such as Newsweek and US News & World Report(which is now online-only) lost nearly fifty percent of their respective print audiences over the last decade, collectively the top fifty selling magazines still ship out over 175 million issues a month. Compare this to the 190 million from 2000, and the industry has lost a painful but survivable eight percent of its readership over the span of ten years and two major recessions.
The real problem here is that this data seems to mean little to the new breed of pragmatic advertisers. Circulation is no longer the benchmark it used to be. Take, for instance, the iconic food magazine Gourmet, which shut down print operations in 2009. In 2001, the magazine had a circulation of 952,049. In 2008, the number had actually increased to 980,552. Despite this, between 2008 and 2009 advertisers fled from the magazine, which lost fifty percent of its ad pages in a single year. According to Beth-Ann Eason—who oversees the Gourmet brand in its resurgent digital form, Gourmet Live—publisher Conde Nast had no choice but to rethink how to build a new profit model for what had previously been such a popular fixture with advertisers.
“The brand was extremely strong and recognized by consumers,” she said. “But [the publisher] looked at the longtime prospects for growth and they recognized that digital represented a stronger opportunity.”
While it would be easy to compare a failing magazine with the familiar plight of a struggling television program—where a show’s advertising rate drops at an equal clip to its diminished viewership—the magazine industry’s problems with advertisers are unique in that the issue has much more to do with quantification than it does exposure.
“There is another set of metrics that work for the Web,” Moore said. “There is much more of a desire for agencies to pay publishers based on the actions of their audience instead of the access to their audience.”
In other words, the internet provides the sort of concrete computations that magazines simply cannot compete with. Even when selling an advertisement to a magazine with millions of monthly subscribers, there is no way for an agency to quantify how many people will actually digest the ad as opposed to those that will flip right by. The internet advertising model allows companies to keep count of clicks and page views, giving them access to a number of statistics that indicate exactly how much bang they’re getting for their buck.
The iPad offers some middle ground here. With web-ready devices, there’s nothing stopping magazine publishers from linking print-advertisements to their respective websites. And while the technology is too nascent at this point for publishers and advertisers to come up with any concrete rates, the upcoming feeling out period nevertheless remains crucial to the future of the business.
“As an industry, we need to work with the agencies to define what the currency is going to be in this particular space,” Moore said. “I hope that we continue to communicate and have the courage to charge for the premium that our audiences should command.”
In the end, the question of whether or not the iPad and tablet computers can save the magazine industry is at least partially shortsighted. While the devices could easily represent a first step in preserving certain elements of the old business models, it’s just as likely they’ll serve as a cog in the growing machination that will ultimately grind and cudgel the malleable business into something entirely new.
According to James Bennet, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, this revelation plays directly into one of the industry’s greatest insecurities.
“What has often been thought of as the paradox of journalists is that what we do is chronicle change,” he said. “If nothing ever changed, we’d be put out of business. But when it comes to change in our business itself, we tend to be extraordinarily conservative, almost by nature.”
To this end, the brands that are thriving in the post-millennial world are those that have evolved, either by necessity or foresight, into something fit for the times. Even Gourmet—perhaps the single greatest reference point for the doomsayers—remains a fecund commodity for Conde Nast nearly two years after the magazine’s closure. Seventy-years worth of recipes and journalism live on through the iPad/iPhone app Gourmet Live, while the magazine has also merged with Epicurious.com to create one of the most powerful food-based presences on the Web.
“There is clearly an appetite among consumers for this type of content in a digital format,” Eason said. “So we brought together and synthesized all of that information and looked at the characteristics that made Gourmet unique and we made sure that those existed in combination with new technology.”
Likewise, The Atlantic’s successful transformation has also been predicated on the ability to uphold more than a century’s worth of accolades and tradition. As they continue to increase their internet presence, the institution seeks to maintain its basic DNA as its business people take advantage of the variety of unique benefits that myriad mediums offer.
To The Atlantic, the iPad is only one part of a greater ecosystem. Bennet likes to think of the internet and all of its appendages as one giant pond. Web-posts, he says, cast the sort of small stones that can create the constant ripples necessary to keep a brand vibrant and visible. By comparison, a great long-form magazine piece can drop what amounts to a boulder directly into the heart of the ecosystem, in this case infiltrating the online gestalt through pertinent discussion and debate.
“Our experience has been, a really good Atlantic story works very well in print and on the Web because it has a really strong argument that gets people talking,” Bennet said. “That is something that our print readers have expected historically, and that the Web certainly awards as well.”
For what it’s worth, Bennet’s ripple theory seems to be working. The Atlantic turned its first profit in more than a decade in 2010. In May, its website and its real-time news service, The Atlantic Wire, combined to bring in over 10 million unique viewers. What’s more, preliminary numbers suggest that the company will draw 45 percent of its ad revenue from its digital products in 2011. In this sense, the magazine seems to be as close as any to finally clearing out some of the bewildering fugue that has engulfed the business since the dawn of the internet era.
This seems to suggest the art of long-form journalism itself is far more important than the health of any one institution. The successes of magazines such as the Atlantic and National Geographic seem to validate the timelessness of in-depth reporting. As it turns out, the threats facing the industry might not be to the predatory degree some have presumed.
According to Bennet, if we’re hung up on the magazine as a bunch of paper fastened together by staples or glue, then yes, it has become clear that the print form as we know it will eventually go away. But the ideas inside the magazine—the words that entice and inspire and entertain—these things aren’t nearly so vulnerable.
“I think it is very important to distinguish between the form in which the journalism is presented and the journalism itself,” he said. “And particularly the values of that journalism. I think that the values that have animated print journalism are durable: relentless curiosity, a desire to get at the truth, a degree of courage in seeking out new ideas. These are all things that translate well into whatever medium or platform.”