I got it totally wrong - magazines are not dying

Six months ago I wrote "Are newspapers and magazines dying?"  and concluded that technology and business magazines were dying and the rest of them were living on borrowed time. Well today I went to a Barnes & Noble to kill some time before my next meeting. Being a "Type A" personality I got bored in about 30 seconds so I started observing people looking at magazines. Wow! There are a lot of magazines. Hmm...how many are there? So I started counting.

There were 109 different magazine titles in the "Women's Interest" section. OK, so I moved over to the Sports section...94 different titles. Holy shit...there were 8 more sections of magazines to go...each with about 100 different titles. There were over 1,000 different magazines in this one Barnes & Noble...each published monthly. Magazines are definitely not dying...but are they making any money?

This stunning revelation...at least to me, made me go back and read my earlier post "Are newspapers and magazines dying?" Here is an excerpt from that earlier post;

Wait a minute. Are we living in a bubble? Does the majority of society follow the same information consumption patterns? It is natural to assume that most people think and act the same way we do...but it is rarely the case.

To test my assumptions I went to the Magazine Publishers Association website to check out magazine subscription trends. The results surprised me...but after thinking about it...they make sense. Over the past 9 years the top 10 magazines have lost only 10.6% of their readers. Much less than I expected.

But then I examined the list of top 10 magazines; AARP  Magazine, AARP Bulletin, Readers Digest, TV Guide, Better Homes & Gardens, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Lady's Home Journal, and Woman's Day. Ahh yes, I do live in a bubble. We do not reflect the demographics of the world at large. It makes perfect sense that these magazines would not lose their readership to the web.

Hmmm..then I decided to scan the top 100 magazines for the titles I used to read. Only one, Forbes was on the list...and just barely at number 100. There was not a single technology related magazine on the top 100. Again this makes perfect sense given the demographics of the target market for these magazines.

My observation is that these magazines and newspapers are living on borrowed time. As their readers die off, so will their circulation. The new generations are consuming news and information in a different way. They have time to adapt...but they better get started.

OK, my confidence is restored. I am not totally myopic. But, who is buying all these magazines and how can they possibly make any money? I don't know...and now I am off to my next meeting. I will research this when I have more time.

Does anyone out there know about the magazine business? I understand how the top 100 magazines make money but how does number 850 make money?

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column .

Comments

[Chris Harlan]

Long tail...

I don't know too much about the magazine business, but wouldn't the smaller magazines get a higher $/subscriber from advertisers since they have a niche audience that can be targeted? While larger, mass-market, magazines like those in the top 100 get more absolute advertising dollars, but less on a per-subscriber business.

If you manufacture high-end golf equipment, would you rather advertise in "Golf" magazine, or in "Time"?

Of course in today's world, you'd probably start a website / blog rather than the #850 magazine, given the relative startup costs and associated risks.

[Ben Saren]

I subscribe to several magazines. Off the top of my head:

Golf Magazine
Golf Digest
Newsweek
Business Week
Wired
Fast Company
Inc
Fortune
Business 2.0

Wow, that's pretty nuts actually.

I also subscribe to the Sunday NY Times.

[Juha]

I was talking a publisher here recently, who started off a few years ago with one HiFi and one Apple Mac title.

Now that company a car title, a travel one, plus a food and digital photography magazine too.

They're expanding to the point that guy said this year, they'll have to slow down and take a breather to make sure the growth doesn't kill them.

So much for the Dead Old Media then.

[Mark Zanzig]

Old media have certainly a hard time, despite more and more titles appearing on the market. The core question is indeed, how profitable is this? And how sustainable?

Subscriber revenues typically do not cover the cost for a magazine. The money comes in through advertisements. Problem: with more titles appearing the average circulation per title goes down, and with it the revenue from advertisements. Unless the better "targeting" (i.e. a golf magazine for trips to Elbonia) can compensate for this. In some cases it works out, in others it does not.

I think you have been right in your first post; maybe not next year, but in the long run the old media will not be able to compete with the Internet.

(A friend of mine runs a garden related title for a big publisher in Germany, and whenever I meet him, he says that the business side has become more difficult.)

[Joel]

Don,

I am older then most in the technology arena so I remember the doomsayers who often said IBM was dead. I remember in the 70's when all the startups like Digital, Wang, DataGeneral all announced that IBM was dead. I also remember working for DEC and even though we bragged that Digital was #2, DEC's revenues were still smaller than Big Blue's PROFITS! Yeah, even then there were those who always tried to kick IBM off the mountain top. Everywhere you turned someone was bad mouthing IBM. That was then. Now, or for the past 20 years, it seems there is always someone prognosticating that Microsoft is dead. It just makes for good fodder. Microsoft will be here much longer than those who "greatly exaggerate Microsoft's death."

[Danial Jameel]

Great Read! This is something i pointed out earlier in your blog regarding the death of newspaper industry. The decline of newspapers started with the advent of mainstream and niche market magazines. Internet and Blog have served as a catalyst for the newspapers but Magazine as I said are and will be doing fine in the near future.
News and information are essential platforms for society, citizenship and democracy. The mediums might change but the content will always exist as long as such fundamentals exist in our civilizations.

[Jesse]

Plain and simple, I'd still rather read paper than a computer screen.

I don't wonder how they can make money even in the digital age, I just wonder how they can make money given the sheer competition among magazines.

I'm assuming they operate on extremely low overhead that values fewer, niche-market sales rather than the weekly news mags that need millions of subscribers to sustain the high overhead.

I guessing they have a lot of cross-over writers that perhaps contribute to more than one of a publishers' magazines.

[Brian McKenzie]

"To test my assumptions I went to the Magazine Publishers Association website to check out magazine subscription trends."

You mean you wrote the original article WITHOUT CHECKING this basic resource?!

And people take notice of you, why?

[DonDodge]

Brian, Yes I did check the facts on the original post. What you just read in this post about going to the Magazine Publishers Association, was an excerpt from the original post. I said that in this post and even indented the text to show it was an excerpt.

What was new for me in this post was the realization that there were over 1,000 magazines in one Barnes & Noble store. I don't read print magazines or newspapers. I read everything on-line.

"And people take notice of you, why?" I don't know why Brian. I never asked anyone. Perhaps they enjoy reading...and understand what I am trying to say. Just a guess.

[Toti Stefansson]

It's pretty much all about targeting. Localization and targeting. Magazines also have the luxury of offering longer lifetime ads, as they tend to outlive the average webpage.
So from an ad-selling standpoint, they ain't doing half bad.
Plus, we keep buying them. If, for nothing else because you'd probably get arrested if they spotted you heading into the bathroom with your laptop.