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Looking to the future

Posted in Media, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs March 7th, 2008 by Melinda Varley

MediaTel’s Future of Magazine’s seminar brought up some interesting topics in regards to where the magazine market is going, but is it possible to predict such a fragile market?

Publishers can make all the right arguments as to why their particular strategy, whether it be e-zines or the freesheet model, will work in the future, but who has the answer?

In my opinion, the answer is in the consumer. While the latest ABC report may have shown that volume of actively purchased magazines are down by 1.1 per cent, there have never been quite so many magazines, 3,445 – or readers for that matter.

Last year there were 97 magazine closures and 18 launches, a far cry from the 88 launches just a decade ago, but is this a sign that the market is heavily saturated and readers are simply loyal to their brands?

In order to be successful, a new launch has to offer something that no one else does.

The success of Dennis Publishing’s Monkey magazine can be attributed to the fact that, as an online only brand, it brings something different to the market by combining the best of print, online and broadcast.

And if any magazine should take their brand online, as many have including Nuts, Glamour and FHM, they should do something that can only be done in that medium, not just reiterate the printed magazine.

So are e-zines the future of magazines? Maybe, but not in the near future. The key to ensuring the magazine market doesn’t fall further, according to MediaTel, is engaging young audiences in magazines at an early stage.

The problem with this, according to Mike Soutar, CEO of ShortList, is that young people expect to be able to consume media for free and currently do so by accessing the web for content.

Could this mean that in order for magazines to be appealing to younger audiences and to have them continue to buy those brands later on in life, publishers should either drop their cover prices or adopt the free model?

The free model is risky to advertisers and currently has no true distribution figure. On the other hand, can publishers afford to drop cover prices? If the key is to engage younger readers, whether content is online or in a freesheet, shouldn’t magazine publishers be focusing on the teen market and launching new titles there?