How Magazines are Hanging On

I’m sure this is not true of all printed publications, but I had a thought.

I am a subscriber to Business Week, Fortune and Inc. They are all great publications with a different take on different pieces of our economy.

I am way behind on reading them. This backlog started when I became a dad, and I literally have a stack of unread issues piling up in my office. I do a lot of reading online, but I never seem to have the paper version when I have a moment to read it (other than takeoff and landing on airplanes, which I’ve planned ahead for).

There’s two things I’ve noticed, though.

• The subscription price is plummeting. Fortune just offered me three years for $18. I took them up on that offer. Similarly lower prices on BW and Inc.
• You’d think I’d cancel my subscription, but I look at it this way: if I get one great idea from reading these magazines, it pays for all three of them, even if I’m paying $20/year for each (and as you can see, I’m not). So I keep them around.

But the thought struck me: the dirty little secret of magazine publishing right now is that they have to have the circulation numbers up so they can justify the ad rates they charge to make their business model work.

So since I’m a “highly qualified” subscriber in their demographic, I’m getting these offers that compel me to keep paper issues coming. But I’m simply not reading them nearly as much as I was before, and therefore, not seeing the ads as much either.

If there was a way for the print advertisers to measure how many times people were actually opening the magazine, I have a feeling the magazine folks would be in as big of trouble as the newspaper folks are right now (not that they are far off in any case).

I don’t know exactly what the new media business model looks like, but the days of the Madison Avenue ad sales exec with the fat expense account are numbered.

I’m confident these people will find many new ways to be prosperous and successful — but the cycle of “destructive innovation” is not going to stop at the edge of media (if anybody still wondered).

Interested in Jeff Pelline’s take on this in particular…he’s launching a pretty cool new idea to reverse publish blog content in print and take advantage of the fact that advertisers are still spending on high quality print publications.