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Friday, February 8, 2013

Media / Books The Future Is Coming Very Slowly

Posted by Paul Constant on Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:01 PM

PaidContent has good news and bad news for the media world, all wrapped up in one sentence:

Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition...

That's great! Way to be forward-thinking, magazine industry! I bet this is going to pay off in big sales numbers! Let's see how the rest of the sentence goes:

...but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation.

Holy shit. Holy shit. That's disastrous. Remember when tablets became popular after the birth of the iPad and everyone was waiting to see if they would be the future of magazines? Looks like they're not. Or at least, they're not the future of old-media magazines. Lots of people use their tablets like magazines—they read news, features, gossip, and profiles—but they find the stuff that they read piecemeal, carved out of blogs and tweets and news apps. These figures are not at all heartening. Of course, I figure some of this is attributable to the fact that digital editions for the most part cost exactly as much as print editions, but I'm not convinced that a 99 cent digital issue of Esquire, say, is going to move that three percent into the double-digits.

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Why should I have to pay for something that is swimming in ads and has such a slow cycle? I can go into the local bookstore chain and read the ones I want for free on a lazy Sunday. This industry needs some serious change!

Posted by silvertears on February 8, 2013 at 12:09 PM

3% is an average for an industry that has relied on gimmicks to sell a sub-par (on average) print product.

Posted by anon1256 on February 8, 2013 at 12:25 PM

@1 I agree, digital magazines have way too many ads. I really hate those flashing ones.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on February 8, 2013 at 12:31 PM

Only the magazine industry thought tablets were going to save the magazine industry. And maybe Steve Jobs believed it.

Posted by unpaid reader on February 8, 2013 at 1:14 PM

#3

It's not just ads, it's the whole design. Most magazines design websites...that look like magazines! They put a gigantic image or Flash thingy on the front, and then big pictures in a side bar, all the while you're trying to figure out what the articles are about.

I point out: the most successful (as in well used) websites in the world...Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook .. are essentially text-based, not image-based, and cram lots and lots of little tiny clickable text all over the page. Why? Because people aren't stupid...they can read. They can scan. They know what they want to see.

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on February 8, 2013 at 1:36 PM

@1 - What local bookstore?

Posted by Dougsf on February 8, 2013 at 1:47 PM

@1: I'm sure the bookstore will be there for a long time with patrons like you.

Posted by Ziggity on February 8, 2013 at 2:29 PM

When anyone can turn their opinions into content, it makes it harder to justify spending $25 a year to get the latest effluvia from the New York literati echo-chamber.

Posted by chaseacross on February 8, 2013 at 3:50 PM

I am not going to pay for content geared toward a wide audience when I can get more narrowly tailored content for free.

I really don't understand how anyone things delivering week-old news and advertisements for hideous watches constitutes a legitimate business these days.

Posted by giffy on February 8, 2013 at 10:26 PM

why would i buy an online magazine when there are literally millions of websites and blogs (available for free) that update multiple times per day instead of once per month?

Posted by high and bi on February 9, 2013 at 2:37 PM