Media Vent
By Bob Sacks
About Bob
Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.
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The Publishing Canary Theory Revisited
Today, the alarms are ringing loud and clear in every magazine publishing house around the world. We are in trouble. Advertising results from last year are bad and getting even worse. No, not all of us, but yes, many of us, are in extreme peril.
There is common folklore among magazine publishers that magazines are perceived differently than newspapers, which to me is a very thin line of logic. You know the old concept that a paper is read for an hour, while a magazine is a cherished friend that is read and reread for days, weeks or even months. That may have been true once for the majority of magazine readers, but now only beloved niche titles can claim that honor. Both the times and the reading public have changed. It is a tenuous thread told to advertisers who now want more than "pass-along-readership" numbers. Today's advertisers want real-time data, identity, history and buying patterns. In short, they want numeric accountability. Got any?
It has taken just a few years for newspapers to come face to face with their imminent demise. Some have moved to the Web, while others have just closed up shop. The reading public has gone to the Web for their news, and who can blame them? You get news on the Web and "old" information in the newspapers.
It seems the thing to do now is redesign the core elements of our logic and our business models.
The newsstand circulation models are old and getting older. The cost of doing business is high and getting higher. Many magazines will survive in print, but the success rate is low and getting lower.
My hope is that through this moment of great attrition emerges a healthy process for the industry, and that when we reach the next stable economic plateau we are stronger, more vibrant and focused intelligently on the getting the job done with greater efficiency and restraint than we do today.
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Changing the value proposition from mass production to mass customization or personalization seems to make lots of sense, yet they seem to elicit no action or reaction.
Give the customer what they want. This is not rocket science. All the technology is here.
What are we missing here? Face it, change or die.
What a cool idea. Sort of Neflix for Print.
Michael: You nailed it. CPMs are an antique thought process that Guttenberg understood. This is the 21st century. We need a new business model. I have been proposing for years the cable TV model of tiered pricing. The basic monthly price at $4.99 gets you the daily paper and two magazines. The silver package gets you the local paper, a national paper, and five magazines. The gold package and on up to the platinum package which for $79.99 a month gets you everything ever printed.
All this also needs to be delivered as paginated media and not endless web pages. If we lose the paginated media formula we have doomed our whole industry. See media-ideas http://www.mediaideas.net/mediaIDEAS-TH(ink)NOTE1.html for the definition of a magazine.
Bob,
From where I sit, I can't see how newspapers are going to make money on the web. CPMs for web advertising is just going to get less and less.
It works if you have a billion hits, but I can't see a newspaper site getting close.
Meanwhile, what I see is "read for free, pay for print."
Any thoughts?