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
Leave a Comment
Pages: 1 2 next page »
Article Sponsor
More Features
Latest News
- Reality Bites Google December 3rd 2008
- 2009 Revenue For Twitter December 3rd 2008
- Funding Round-Up: Evernote, Angie’s List, UTest December 3rd 2008
- Ads Not Working? Change The Font December 3rd 2008
- MySpace Breaks Into Mobile Ad Market December 3rd 2008
- Cyber Monday, Profitless Boon? December 3rd 2008
- Yahoo, Rumors and Stupidity December 3rd 2008
- FCC To Mull Free Internet Plan December 2nd 2008
Features
- Down Year Will Bring Opportunities December 3rd 2008
- Mobile to the Rescue December 2nd 2008
- Ideas On Effective Management December 2nd 2008
- Quality Video: DIY (Cheap) or Else December 1st 2008
- Will Widget Channel Be Tuned In? November 26th 2008
Spotlight
Mobile to the RescueADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — The industry is still wary about mobile advertising — does it work, how significant is the ROI [...] more...
Reader Favorites
Classifieds
Most Commented
- Targeting Is the Ad Network "Killer App" (7)
- Vengence is Mine Saith Ballmer (6)
- When Boomers, Gen Y Collide (5)
- Study: Blogs Beat Social Networks on Purchase Influence (5)
- Federal Bailout Proposed for Online Ad Industry (4)
- Ad Networks That Buck the Downward Trend (4)
- Self-Serve Ad Exchange: This Century's Strowger Switch? (3)
- Bust-Outs and Layoffs: Apple, NBCU, Nokia, Spot Runner, WildTangent (3)
