The Magazine Publishing Conundrum

For most of my life I’ve been an out of the box thinker. This is one of the reasons I wasn’t terrifically successful in the corporate world.

 

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I ventured into magazine publishing I would try to do it differently. I wanted to find ways to run this business and still serve the areas that are important to me. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally narrowed down what my three main challenges are with the current magazine publishing business model. But first, I’ll recap the typical business model.

 

Magazine publishing and distribution (for the large, well known magazines anyway) goes something like this (this is really rough and high level and may not specifically apply everywhere, but you get the idea). Content creators get together with magazine management and decide the direction of the magazine issue. Other sales staff start marketing and promoting it based on this content. The magazine is created and printed with ads, graphic design, and informative or entertaining content. Some of the issues of the magazine are mailed out to people that have specifically requested and paid for it and the rest end up in newsstands and magazine racks everywhere. It sounds simple but it is a little more complex than that and you’d think that as a magazine publisher I would have gotten my head around it much earlier in this entrepreneurship thing. But here’s why it never really worked for me.

1)      Environment

I’ve done my best most of my adult life to respect the environment. Gary and I recycle and reuse as much as possible and avoid creating waste where we can. A typical magazine prints thousands and thousands of copies of each issue (not me). They mail out the ones to those that have requested it and then a distributor picks up the remainder and sends them out to bookstores, grocery stores, and anywhere there is a magazine rack. The distributor also does this for many other magazines and thus can determine which magazines are selling best in a particular location.

 

Each retail location must pay for the entire delivery of magazines and any unsold issues are eventually credited back to the store. I spoke with one store owner and he estimated that they sell approximately 40% of the magazines that are delivered to their location. Another store owner also gets paperback books from the distributor and expressed a desire to scrap the magazines all together and just have the books. But they aren’t allowed to do that. She also confirmed that their percentage of magazines sold versus inventory was pretty low.

 

The website of the distribution company explains the reasons for having so many of each magazine was that they wouldn’t want to have the store run out which would put them in a detrimental situation. On the off chance that there’s something in a particular issue that’s suddenly appealing to a greater percentage of the market, they don’t want the store to be without.

So, the end result is that there are millions and millions of pieces of paper created and printed with the full knowledge that they won’t ever end up in the hands of a customer. This is wasteful and irresponsible. Aside from the obvious and glaring environmental hazards that this produces, it’s kind of a crazy business model for a store owner.

2)      Advertising Costs

A free magazine that boasts delivery to thousands and thousands of households, a free newspaper that boasts readership in the hundreds of thousands and a magazine that isn’t free has verified circulation in the tens of thousands with a reach in the hundreds of thousands. Advertising rates are based on these circulation and readership numbers so the cost is usually in the thousands of dollars for any ad size. Every magazine will have a media kit (that’s what I was trying to do when I started down this rabbit hole!) that shows circulation and readership numbers and all sorts of other information to help an advertiser decide whether this would be a good investment or not. So in order to attract advertisers and justify the costs the magazine needs to make this kit as pleasing as possible.

 

Without going into too much detail, many media kits displayed their readership numbers in large bold font and sometimes of a different colour. Why? To ensure that the attention of the advertiser can see this usually massive number. As far as I can tell, there is no way to accurately verify the readership number as it’s based on a multiple of the circulation number and can reach in the hundreds of thousands and even millions. The idea is that if one person buys the magazine, it’s subsequently read by 2 or 3 other people. Sometimes the definition of readership includes those people that flip through the magazine while in the store.

 

So what we ultimately end up with is a business that pays thousands and thousands of dollars for an ad that may or may not be seen by the market that it’s going after.

 

For me, my passion is promoting reading and creative thinking and using those imagination muscles so I make ad space extremely affordable so that more people can participate.

 

3)      Providing Value

Ultimately any magazine wants to provide value to their end reader. That value can either be entertainment or additional information and the magazine works hard to ensure they provide one or the other, and sometimes both.

 

When the content is perceived to have higher value, there appears to be a greater number of ads that accompany these pieces. I picked up a People magazine issue from August of this year. The cover has a picture of Angelina Jolie in her wedding dress which is clearly going to drive sales. In this issue there are 136 inside pages plus the inside front cover and inside back cover. Guess how many full page ads there are in that issue? Out of 138 total pages, at least 70 are full page ads. I wanted to confirm these numbers with a trade magazine of some kind so I picked up the most recent Success magazine. There are 88 pages plus a CD with interviews that the publisher does with his guests and the two inside covers for a total of 90 pages; 10 have ads in them.

 

The argument that People magazine would put forward is that they have pages and pages of pictures from the celebrity wedding as well as a fairly lengthy article. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are astute business people and know that their brand has significant value and would have charged the magazine a substantial amount of money for that kind of access. The argument would also be made that Success magazine has a motivated and dedicated market. People magazine publishes 53 times a year and Success publishes 12 times a year. It may seem that I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I’m not really.

 

People magazine has 66 pages of content and Success has 80. As I was flipping through the People magazine, the only reason I even noticed the ads was because I was counting them.

So, how do I wrap this up? If we assume that each page of content is a page of value to the reader, then there is less value in the general entertainment magazine ads than there is in a dedicated trade magazine. In a marketing course that my husband took recently, they cited a statistic that only 3% of the population is actually willing to buy something at any given time. That means 3% are looking for make-up, a different 3% are looking for a vehicle etc. So, all those ads are directed at the 3% and most readers will flip the page to go to the next piece of actual content. It seems to me that if publishers and advertisers know that 3% statistic, why are they wasting 97% of their reader’s time with an ad?

 

When I was studying the cost of ads, one magazine had the statement in their media kit that magazine ads drive more traffic to a website than any other media form. So, I did my own very unscientific and informal survey and asked the question if anyone has ever gone to a website based on an ad in a print magazine. From the responses I got, not one did.

 

There will always be far more content in any Pages Of Stories publication than there will be ads.  We appreciate and respect the time that our readers have and want to give them the best bang for their buck. The goal of our publications is to provide some entertainment in their day, and perhaps through a careful selection of limited ads, find other pieces of similar entertainment.

 

I believe these three challenges that I have are not uncommon.  There’s a great deal of waste which harms the environment ; businesses are paying for those magazines based on questionable data; and unless it’s a trade magazine, there is less value to the end reader.  I believe that like the book publishing industry, the magazine publishing industry needs to change. I don’t believe that the current business model of businesses really subsidizing a magazine can continue. It doesn’t seem like the ads provide the value to the business and the excessive number of ads per magazine takes away from the value to the end reader. Sadly, I don’t think that this industry is going to change in the short term. As long as there are businesses willing to believe the numbers and pay those fees, then magazines are not motivated to make any kind of a change.

 

There is good news! I also believe that when the magazine publishing industry does change, what we’ll be left with is a far more robust and relevant industry. We’ve got a ways to go, but it’s totally doable.

 

For my part, I’m willing to pay more for a magazine without ads. What’s your preference?