redrover
Well-Known Member
partviking said:Unfortunately the diminishing buying public are contributing to the demise of all magazines and the knock on effect of reduced income is the resulting perceived (or real) lack of quality depending on your point of view.
Sadly most magazines and newspapers will probably go the way of the Dodo in time.
Sad but true... although not quite in the way you'd think. I work for a large multi-regional newspaper corporation, and we are in the third year of what has been dubbed the 'Digital Transition'. For a time this meant the development of new digital products, but in a marketplace which has grown organically from the dot.com boom to the present, the established household brands are unbreakable. The strength and penetration of their brands can never be successfully challenged by a newcomer: Autotrader, Rightmove, Yellow Pages, etc, will never be broken by likes of Motors.co.uk, Fish4Homes or Local Mole, regardless of how good they may be in comparison. A financially unsustainable product won't last if there isn't immediate profitability.
But thank the lord for the tablet computer. The recent rise in e-editions of magazines and newspapers has meant that traditional printed media firms are able to retain their existing advertising models and customers, offering them exactly the same market penetration and exposure as before, and in the same format, but with significantly lower overheads. Printing costs are eliminated, making e-editions cheaper to produce (infinite impressions at no extra cost, no distributor network, print costs, or lost revenue from unsold magazines.), and as such they are priced substantially cheaper for the consumer to buy (you can get the last 3 issues of PC on a tablet computer all for £3.99). Win-win. Long live the iPad....
We've probably got a good 10 years of that 'transition' model ahead of us. It will take a fundamental shift in the way the consumer wants to read magazines before the 'blog-roll' type format of websites like AROnline become the adopted format for ex-printed media. But the advertising model is already shifting to accommodate this. Targeted banners and page take-overs based on your cookies, Google Adwords, Mobile inventory and display ads targeting search criteria are all well established within journalistic/reference websites... I can see PC making the transition to the blog roll (or further still to a sort of interactive 'dolls house of articles' format) quite early on. It's progressive, and above all, the content of the magazine is not governed by its running order (unlike a newspaper where it's news at the front, sport at the back), but it is currently confined by pagination and layout. So that would be quite a creatively liberating and interesting step forward...
Michael