Sport Magazine Goes Under, Wired And Teen Vogue Losing Revenue
It looks like the forecasts about advertising revenue that were out recently were chillingly prescient – Sport magazine, the prosaically-titled free weekly, has bitten the dust. Not that we’ll really miss its vanilla-laddish tone thinly spread over press releases, but it’s worrying for the mag industry that a title with 317,000 weekly readers can’t sustain a profitable ad portfolio.
Managing director Greg Miall said that forecasts like the ones recently are underestimating the true dearth of ad spending. “The market has come down a lot more than the official WPP and Aegis-type estimates”, he said. “Faced with financial armageddon, we simply cannot sustain our current operations as an independent company”.
Magazines seem to be getting especially shafted amid the recession. The Publisher’s Information Bureau announced on Tuesday that the number of magazine advertising pages in the US fell by 26% in the first quarter of this year. Check out their list of publications and their rises or most likely falls in revenue – big titles that are getting hit hard include In Touch (revenue down nearly 50%), New York Magazine (ad pages down nearly 40%), Teen Vogue (ad pages down 41%), Wired (revenue down over 50%, ad pages down a massive 57%.) That said, in their report there were 28 titles that had an increase in the number of advertisements, but in a moment of painful bathos, the title that had the biggest revenue gain year-on-year, Hallmark, has folded recently.
One answer is, as the New York Times suggests, to increase subscription prices, which in America are at crazy prices – you can get Newsweek for 47 cents an issue, for example, or three years of Esquire for $16 (£10.75). Some magazines like The Economist and People are finding that their customers are prepared to pay more than this for a subscription.
You could also get your sorry ad-haemorrhageing ass to the World Magazine Congress next month, a conference featuring the likes of Dylan Jones, Jane Bruton, Conde’s chairman, and the UK MD of Google, all trying to work out what the hell to do when consumers and advertisers alike haven’t got any money to spend. If the printed programme is anything to go by, the best tactic is to sledgehammer the customer with a wave of deranged paper stock: “Some of the innovative methods used in the Congress programme include a triple gate fold cover, thermochromic and ‘Scratch and Sniff’ effects…the programme features a range of tactile and visual enhancements including UV protective coatings, Dayglo florescent inks, cold foil and soft touch effects, pearlescent coatings, hexachrome printing and the use of translucent paper”. My head hurts just imagining it.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | April 16, 2009 11:15AM |