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Douglas MacMillan is one of the Ninja Hamsters at ADOTAS aka an intern. He previously spent several months working as a dutiful intern under the dictatorship of Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, only to be set free by our own Kiran. He does not get Jaime skim lattes in the morning.

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Welcoming The Fashionably Late Guests To The Online Party

Written on
Apr 5, 2006 
Author
Douglas MacMillan  |
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Welcoming The Fashionably Late Guests To The Online Party

Internet, ho! The great migration of traditional media to the online space is well underway. As evidenced by countless consumer studies over the past few years, TV and newspaper audiences are spending more and more time on the web, and content providers are in a mad scramble to keep pace with technological developments and advertising potential in their new medium of choice. Children gathering around the computer screen for the latest episode of their favorite cartoon while dad sips coffee and reads the morning paper from his laptop in the next room—a strange and unimaginable scene only a couple years ago—has become placid convention.

While broadband TV providers continue to upgrade their speed, content, and relevance, and newspaper publishers work to aggregate local and national sources and construct user-friendly archives, advertisers have their eye on the next big media gold rush in the online frontier: magazines. They have poked their head into the web to a minimal extent, but trade publications have yet to achieve a stable footing in the online market. A majority of magazine websites contain a fraction of their print counterpart’s content and advertising resources, and offer few extras to someone who has read the magazine. Most of them act as portals to the print copy—judging their success by the number of subscribers they can garner.

What’s wrong with this picture? The consumers are online. The advertisers are online. So what’s stopping magazine publishers from packing a meaty helping of content into their sites?

In her April 3rd article for the New York Times entitled “As Magazine Readers Increasingly Turn to the Web, So Does Condé Nast”, Katharine Q. Seelye proposes a few of the roadblocks to magazine integration online, and highlights publishing giant Condé Nast’s recent attempts to solve this dilemma and up their ante in the online market. Seelye sees less immediate incentive for magazines to take an online turn than their newspaper counterparts. For one, their readership numbers are stagnant, but haven’t yet taken the headfirst dive newspaper readership has. She also believes that magazines have “a more relaxed, if not intimate, relationship with their readers, who tend to set aside precious leisure time to read them.”

It may be true that logging into the Internet doesn’t quite have the same warm feel as curling up on the sofa with a Reader’s Digest, or sitting on the front porch in the summertime with some lemonade and the new Sports Illustrated. But, as studies indicate, the thing we call “precious leisure time”—which used to evoke such quaint images—is being eaten up, minute by minute, by encroaching internet usage. What may be stagnant readership numbers right now will become extremely detrimental numbers as people find more activities that support their lifestyle on the web. If consumers can learn to replace a newspaper with a computer screen in their everyday life, there’s no reason they can’t abandon five dollars of glossy pages in favor of a free website. If publishers fail to understand this, they will collapse.

Condé Nast, the country’s second-leading magazine publisher, has taken notice of the severe danger this trend poses to their business, and made the first baby steps in its online migration. In her article, Seelye takes inventory of the publisher’s few recent successes online, and divulges some of its plans for renovating less trafficked sites. Interestingly, Condé Nast’s sites generate more users when they combine content from several magazines and abandon the explicit brand name of their print counterpart. Epicurious.com, a cooking site combining Gourmet and Bon Appetite, and Style.com, a fashion site combining Vogue and W, have used this formula to moderate success.





Reader Comments.

Advertising blog site Adrants has an extensive and interesting forum discussion on this topic here…
http://adrants.soflow.com/NewForumTopic/25446a101b30

Posted by Author | 11:53 am on April 6, 2006.

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