Where magazines are finding revenue
This is exactly what I was looking for yesterday: an article from AdAge outlining how magazine brands are acknowledging that print advertising probably isn’t coming back — and what they’re doing to make up for it.
It’s fascinating to see how different the models are for the different brands; whereas Men’s Health for example focuses on print advertising, books and mobile apps rather than digital advertising (which brings only 4% of its revenue in), The Atlantic focuses heavily on events as well as print advertising and circulation, bringing in only 10% of its revenue through digital ads.
A few mag brands faring well in today’s economy
I’ve looked all over the place for decent information on which magazines and their web products are making a go of it these days and haven’t found much, so I’ve decided to start a list of my own. After putting out the call to my ‘tweeple’ and starting up a conversation on Folio, not to mention just plain searching and scouring, here’s what I’ve uncovered:
Great summary from minonline.com on which monthly mags boosted their ad revenue in the critical month of September 09; their list includes Family Circle, InStyle, Fitness, Traditional Home and National Geographic. The question I have is why — and how other mags can potentially follow their lead.
One possible insight comes from the publisher of InStyle, Connie Anne Phillips, who notes (again in minonline.com): “This is the result of inspiring and accessible edit, newsstand dominance and marketing programs that deliver ROI across multiple platforms.” It’s the reference to multiple platforms that catches my eye; she’s talking about InStyle as a brand — not just a magazine.
This is echoed by National Geographic as well, in their approach to “big idea” “integrated sales and marketing programs”, which I just took a bit of time to check out. Online they look like mini-sites (see their Nestea example) but in the mag they would, I imagine, have very spiffy coordinated campaigns. I’ll have to check out their September issue to verify. Overall this is very interesting: it’s an idea that obviously would have taken a significant amount of planning and investment to deliver on, coming from a team that obviously had the foresight to commit.
Another mag that keeps coming up again and again in terms of success stories in this economy is The Economist. Thanks to a link from Folio friend Oliver Pearce, I came across news of some dough being spent on an ad campaign trying to position the brand as a source of inspiration for business folk — a tack that says a lot about how they’ve been positioning themselves. It also says a lot in general about the brand’s attitude toward advertising — which can be substantiated by any online reader who has gotten several eyefuls of their (I think) annoying popups appearing on a variety of sites. In essence, they’re not afraid to advertise — and they’re absolutely unafraid of self-promotion to the point of exhaustion, even on their own site (subscription promotions pop up and appear everywhere).
In terms of this kind of unabashed self-promotion, I’m more than willing to take a note. In the past I’ve thought of the web as the mag as neighbours of a sort, helping one another out but living semi-independently. No more. The brand, I have learned, is the core while the web, the magazine, the community gathering, the Twitter feed, the RSS stream, the iPhone app, the mobile site and on and on and on — these are platforms for communicating aspects of the brand to various audiences using the distribution systems they prefer. The aim should be engagement with the brand.
But for companies rooted in platform-first thinking (think: magazine company, television station, newspaper), this is a tough concept to A) wrap individual minds around; and B) to wrap an organization around. I know this — I witness it every day. Still, I know it has to be done.
Home from Kelowna
My heart goes out to all the people having to evacuate their homes in the Kelowna fires. My husband and I just drove back yesterday — getting up at 5am to make sure we didn’t get stuck on the highways and having to go up to Kamloops and then come back down to Vancouver — listening to the reports all along the way. I didn’t see much of the fire yesterday morning, but did get a pic on Saturday when we were at the beach, watching it catch in the forest across the lake. See below.
I just received my “personalized magazine” from Time Inc. in my inbox. Curious and somewhat eager to take a look at what they billed as “custom publishing” — not customized, they said, for a specific company or group of users, but rather for me. On the Table of Contents page, they say it again: it’s “designed especially for you — by you.” Well, not really.
Basically, Mine is an experiment by Time that lets anyone choose five Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines — and then receive, a couple of weeks later for me, a digital edition featuring stories from each of those magazines. Magazines included among the choices included In Style, Golf, Real Simple, Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Money, and Travel + Leisure.
A novel concept, definitely — and I think the idea of a customized, personalized magazine is actually intriguing. But I wasn’t impressed with this one. First, I really dislike digital editions. It feels embarrassing to flip pages online and to hear the little “swish” of the computer-generated page flipping sound. I also find them annoying to read and navigate: you zoom in for a closeup and then have to zoom out to see anything else. When doing so I’m already longing for touch technology.
Second to that, well, the content is just dull. It’s not personalized. There are just some stories picked out from each of the mags and plunked together. The only thing that did feel personalized was the ad on the back page, which just felt creepy: a Lexus ad that reads “The all-new 2010 RX: now with more Shannon Emmerson.” Ew. And yes. I’m sure they considered me carefully when designing a car I can not in any way dream of affording.
All in all then, I kind of hate it. But it does represent, I think, an entry point into genuinely customized products of the same variety. Fast Company wonders if Mine could lead to future mash-ups of newspapers:
Instead of subscribing to five magazines, why not just subscribe to one that has everything you want inside? And instead of subscribing to The New York Times, The Star Ledger, and your hometown newspaper, why not subscribe to a mash-up of all three?
I think there’s a good point to be made here, namely that while Mine is not mine, it could be, someday, done by somebody else and please, not in a digital edition.
Speaking: a meditation
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
~Dionysius Of Halicarnassus
I’ve been asked to speak at MagsU this June in Toronto on the subject of optimizing web content for search (SEO Toolkit: Put Search to Work for Your Magazine), which is very exciting — but also vaguely terrifying.
First, we all know that most people fear death more than public speaking, and while I’m probably not quite one of them, I get it. My husband has just started attending Toastmasters recently, and I’m considering joining him for at least a few sessions before I do the June presentation.
But secondly, the whole speaking thing makes me wonder who I am to speak on such things. I’m admittedly one of those people who apologizes when someone bumps into me or says something rude and I always preface my opinions with some version of “This is just my opinion, but …” so “speaking” on a particular topic, which implies that I actually know something about it, is just weird. I do know a few things, thanks to experience building a digital team and a bunch of magazine sites and making sure they get some traffic, and am more than happy to share, but I’ll likely still preface the whole thing by offering people the option to leave the room at any time if things get dull.
Control Yourself
Just came across this post on Things You Can Control Right Now and in spite of my conflicting feelings for things bordering on new agey, it struck a chord.
Today: will focus on exercise (off to the gym now!) and creative/innovative thinking.
Is two enough for a day? Will report.
Here’s the commonplace quote:
“You can’t control the length of your life, but you can control its width and depth. You can’t control the contour of your face, but you can control its expression. You can’t control the weather, but you can control the atmosphere of your mind. Why worry about things you can’t control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?”
-Unknown
ok, so i tweet
my dear friend matt talked me into trying, really trying, out ‘the twitter’ recently and so, ok, i get it now. he described it as “ambient intimacy,” a description which i quite like, meaning that in general you can participate in your day with all of your friends (some real, some virtual, some becoming) sitting right there beside you chattering away in your twitbin. it’s kind of nice.
plus the links are fantastic. i’ve found myself following some smart-as-hell people who regularly post tidbits of what they’ve been reading and thinking and you know, i feel smarter for it.
they do say that people with more friends are more likely to live longer than those without, so i’m now going to believe that virtual friends count. is this pathetic?
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
~John Keats
follow me if you like – http://twitter.com/semmerson
granville top predators quiz
Looks like I’m an Orca on GranvilleOnline.ca’s ‘Which endangered top predator are you’ quiz. I should have known!
YOU’RE AN ORCA!
You’re intelligent, but with a jealous streak. One of your finer points is your capacity for sophisticated communication, and your favourite topics is the peril of global warming. It’s fair to say that no one can ignore you when you come into a room. You’re formidable. There are no two ways about it: You’re an orca.Orcas are not an officially endangered species, but they are considered threatened by pollution, depletion of prey species, conflicts with fishing activities and vessels, habitat loss, and whaling. The orca is the largest species of the oceanic dolphin family. It is found in all the world’s oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to warm, tropical seas.
how we spend our days
It’s Wednesday morning, after a pseudo holiday yesterday, on Remembrance Day, and in going through my 111 emails this morning (yikes) I came across this quote by Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What I love most about this quote is the “of course” because, truly, how can we not know this? And yet when I think about myself most of the time, it’s probably far more in the realm of who I want to be — or, unfortunately, who I’ve been – rather than who I am right this second.
Yesterday I took some time to go through my new office (which my lovely husband made for me, complete with a dreamed-about wall of books) and clean out boxes of miscellany. Among the things I stumbled across, which included cassette tapes of interviews with EA executives, old photographs of old lives, and a thousand non-functional pens, were old diaries and notebooks. In total, now that my husband has organized my things, I must have 35 or 40 of the things, with terrible poems, half-written song lyrics, and all the angst of 37 years. Going through them, I noticed two things: first, I annoyingly wrote for far too long about feelings, responses, reactions, omitting the actual meat of things — the facts of the matter, details about what the hell was actually going on. Infuriating. Second, I still for the most part sound like I sound in my head. Even at 21, when things were too dramatic for words, there’s a nugget there that I know. And not just because I remember it. Mostly I don’t. Mostly reading these old diaries is like reading those of a stranger. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull as stone. On the whole, though, I’ve spent a lot of days in interesting ways — and they do add up.
startegy
love it. it may look like a typo, but it’s a new word courtesy of diego rodriguez of metacool. “startegy” is, you guessed it, about just leaping in. doing something. thinking about it, sure, but not becoming mired in questions.
more from rodriguez:
In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent. Learn all the time. Do good. Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions. Help others. Do good work. Bring cool stuff to life. Above all, start.
