Audience Development

279 Magazines Shuttered in the First Half

The first half numbers are in, and according to MediaFinder.com─an online database of U.S. and Canadian magazines—187 new titles have launched thus far in '09. But unfortunately, the frequency of these launches wasn't enough to counteract the number of titles shuttered.

Of the 279 that folded, main category culprits include regional interest magazines, which took a dive and saw 27 titles fold, like Denver Living and Florida InsideOut. However, regional interest publications were also the top category for new launches at 12. Other categories on the decline include construction, lifestyle and business with 18, 14 and 10 folded titles, respectively.

Since the end of March, 77 magazines have launched and 184 have folded, compared
with 110 launches and 95 closings in the first quarter of 2009.

A bright spot, if there is one, is that after the print editions folded, 43 titles continued to live on the Web.

Marie Claire Taps Twitter for More Than Just Traffic Bump

The legion of people—and magazines—using Twitter multiplies daily. For example, Marie Claire’s account has more than 13,000 followers who, in May, drove more than 32,000 additional page views to MarieClaire.com.

But we use Twitter for more than just linking to our stories and other news; it’s a powerful social networking tool. From seeking feedback to answering questions to arranging blind dates, tweeting, for us, has evolved into a fun way to communicate with some of our most engaged readers/followers.

Here are five ways we’re using Twitter:

Looking for Fresh Content
Marie Claire regularly connects with Twitter followers for new, reader-generated content. Recently, Marie Claire followers have submitted their worst date stories, participated in a poll about dating in their cities, and emailed us about their favorite bloggers on Twitter for our Blog Crush feature. We've also used Twitter to mine for career and money experts to answer question for our Career & Money Coach blog.

Live Tweeting
We tweeted during each new episode of Marie Claire's reality show, Running in Heels, and will be doing the same during the new season of Project Runway. We also live-tweeted a blind date in April, in which I went on a blind date with another Twitter user, both tweeting the whole evening for a real-time he said/she said. Our followers had a lot of fun reading along and commenting, and many stuck around through the whole five-hour date.

Answering Reader Questions
Getting on Twitter has allowed us to provide almost immediate answers to reader questions and concerns. We check our replies daily, along with any mentions of the magazine and site by Twitter users that don't necessarily know we're on Twitter yet, and we answer their questions, from queries about specific issues ("who designed the jacket Christina Aguilera wore on your cover last year?") to readers' problems that our content can answer ("so stressed—anyone have stress busting or work/life balance tips?") We also make sure that we follow back and talk to those Tweeters that reply to us and retweet us often so that the conversation isn't one-sided.

Developing Relationships with Other Sites & Bloggers
In addition to developing relationships with our readers and Twitter followers, we also keep up with the tweets of sites and bloggers whose readers overlap with ours (like @TheFrisky, @LemondropTweets, and @YourTango). Replying to and retweeting each other opens up the conversation to a larger group of Tweeters and helps all of us to further establish our presence and value on Twitter.

Offering Discounts, Coupons and Freebies
We love being able to share deals with our followers—we tweet all of our shopping discounts on our Diary of Fashionista blog, update followers on our daily giveaways, and retweet other great deals and sales that we hear about. We also recently tweeted about a one-day subscription sale on all Hearst magazines. It was retweeted 42 times and we got great feedback from our followers—many not only subscribed to Marie Claire, but to a handful of the other magazines as well!

A Mexican Standoff at the Newsstand

The moment I heard of the flare-up between newsstand distributors, wholesalers and publishers, whereby one party demanded higher fees or else, another stumped for status quo or else, and the other just made a lot of noise, I was reminded of Reservoir Dogs, the gory Tarantino crime caper famous for, among other scenes, its “Mexican standoff” ending.

That’s the classic spaghetti western situation in which each character has a gun pointed at another character’s head, forming a literal deadlock and ensuring that, should anyone pull the trigger, all die.

One characteristic of a Mexican standoff is that it can only emerge if all players are focused exclusively on each other with no thought spared for exogenous items such as law enforcement, the clock, passer-bys or, in the case of magazine sellers, customers.

To those in the standoff, such concerns are potentially lethal distractions.
And that’s why the Mexican standoff is such a potent allegory for self-centered oblivion, especially if you take into account that a major precondition to such a standoff is the participants’ inclination to ignore all but their own gun’s aim.

Washing Hands

Which leads me to wonder: How many industries have such a hold on their customers that they can ignore them and continue to thrive? We know how that went for the music industry, stand aghast at how it’s turning out for American banks and car makers, and have an inkling of how it might end for cable.

So with everyone in the single-copy supply chain focused on his or her own immediate interests, all are willing to gamble with the customers’ happiness, washing their hands of their role in the ultimate outcome. “Not my fault if people can’t get their hands on their favorite magazine. The other guy is showing tremendous bad faith.” This will be cold comfort should retailers choose to replace magazines with frozen yogurt or, worse yet, if readers begin to feel they can live with the alternatives to what they would have liked to purchase, but couldn’t find on the shelves.

The industry that can’t find a way to start serving new customers before “four to eight weeks” has thus outdone itself: Whether you’ll be served has devolved to “maybe, maybe not.”

Now that the conflagration is smoldering out, having claimed a major wholesaler in the process, it may be tempting to take a deep breath and pronounce the damage minimal, the whole episode an anomaly. Thanks to heroic efforts by some people in the field, a degree of normalcy was restored relatively quickly, and only a small fraction of customers were frustrated for only a short time.

But this won’t wash away the fact that key industry players were willing to take bets that impacted customers. Although minimum long-term damage may have been done this time (unless of course you are one of the 2,500 laid off Anderson News employees), the parties’ willingness to even take this kind of bet is distressing. If you know what’s good for you, you never bet on your lifeblood.

Admittedly, from the perspective of a publishing company with subscription-heavy titles, it’s easy to claim the high moral ground and advocate that customers must always come first. However, it’s also clear to me that it takes neither courage, nor creativity to reach for one’s gun whenever conflict arises.

With all that’s threatening the magazine publishing industry, couldn’t the players who hold the most influence show that they deserve it and display stewardship as opposed to machismo? Serious negotiating is never easy, but it can’t be done productively if the parties are only concerned with preserving their own piece of the pie and give no consideration to tactics that make everyone a winner—or at least prevent system-wide losses.

Now is Our Chance

In the past few years, several level-headed solutions have been proposed, including reevaluating how many titles should be offered at newsstands, rethinking how payment flows ought to be structured and investing in 21st century information technology. With the latest conflict having resolved nothing, wouldn’t now be the time to launch a pilot program or two?

Everybody knows that the channel’s current equilibrium is unsustainable and that reverting to status quo can only lead to a recurrence of flare-ups like the one we just experienced; this is tantamount to saying we are comfortable continuing on a course that’s detrimental to our customers.

In most movies, likely out of distaste for unhappy endings, directors typically find creative ways to resolve Mexican standoffs. In Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino chose to let events run their course. Let’s just say that there will never be a “Reservoir Dogs II”—at least not with the same cast.

Google CEO on Paid Content: 'The Reality is the Vast Majority of People Will Only Want the Free Model'

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, keynoted the Newspaper Association of America event in San Diego this week, just as newspaper executives were dragging out and dusting off the old aggregator backlash, whining about "stolen" content.

But Schmidt, during a Q+A session after his address, made some insightful remarks about online audience behavior with paid content, search and news.

His address was obviously targeted at newspapers and news-oriented content, but his takeaways can easily be applied to any online content publisher. We're all struggling with online business models and how visitors want to consume content.

Some key excerpts via Poynter, which has the full Q&A session transcript.

On online content models:

"I think from your perspective you should assume that there's a category of information you all produce that you'll want to distribute freely. There's a category you'll want to have on a per click basis. And there's some that you'll want subscription for. The reality in this model is the vast majority of people will only want the free model, so you'll be forced, whether we like it or not, to have a significant advertising component as well as a micropayment and a traditional payment system."

On how newspapers were good at repurposing content, but missed the engagement boat:

"The act after [repurposing content online] is a much harder question. It's how do you keep engagement? How do you avoid being just mediated with a set of stories that are aggregated with your brand on them, which is what's happened to some newspapers? So in the case you were describing, if I were involved in the digital part of a newspaper, trying to understand what to do, I would first and foremost try to understand what my reader wants."

On intellectual property rights:

"I disagree with your premise that they will continue to erode. What I do believe is that all these partially-thought-through legal systems are being challenged by the ubiquity of the Internet. Just as free speech is being affected by the fact that people are free to speak whatever they think even if we really don't want to hear them. It's the same problem."

On online measurement:

"We look at clicks and we also look at how long people stay on a page. And we can then infer interest. Your question is so good because it shows you how early we are in the industry. We don't have combined, accurate, audited ways of measuring audiences, counting advertisers, all of which has to be developed as a technology behind the businesses that all of us are going to build.

It took many, many years for the same business structures to be designed for the audit circulation bureaus for magazines. The same thing is going to occur and it will occur because it needs to. For our purposes, we use our internal information which is accurate, but as I agree, there is not a uniform standard."

Page Views for Print Magazines?

DeSilva + Phillips, the New York-based media banking firm, published a report yesterday on the state of celebrity media. If you’re in the business of celebrity media—particularly the print side—it’s a must read. Spoiler alert: The outlook is, uh, not so good.

You can read FOLIO:’s full synopsis of D+P’s report here.

But here's one interesting point I didn’t include in the write-up. On page 12, Ken Sonenclar, the author of the report, makes an interesting argument—and possibly invents a new metric–for celebrity magazine publishers wrestling over the ad dollars fleeing print for the Web:

"Celebrity magazines offer a degree of reach that even the dominant websites should envy. The best way to view this is via the language of the Web, where many celebrity magazine “page views” dwarf web page views. Consider US Weekly. In a four-issue month, the magazine will publish 384 pages (96 pages/issue). Taking the magazine’s recent average circulation of 1.9 million, and assuming a conservative pass-along multiplier of three, yields in excess of 2 billion page views for US Weekly per month. That is seven times the page views of TMZ, the Web site with the most page views."

Calculating page views for print magazines. Did we just invent a new, viable metric here? Or is it merely the last (faint) gasps of desperation for a dying medium?