Magazine Business Model
Will print magazines still be around in the future?
These questions typically spike whenever there is news involving closures or layoffs at once-powerful magazines like Time or Newsweek, or when a famous person like a Facebook co-founder sparks a lot of media coverage for buying a magazine like The New Republic.
The magazine business model is like Wile E. Coyote in mid-air
When there are events like the layoffs at Time, the coverage of them typically refer to something that readers are presumed to understand as being “the problems in the magazine industry.” However, what the reporter is actually referring to is a specific subset of the magazine industry called consumer magazines. Furthermore, the “magazine industry” to which the reporters are referring is even a more narrow subset of consumer magazines that are distributed nationally and published by a handful of very large media companies located in New York City and Des Moines, Iowa. The fact is there are magazines that are a business model, and there are magazines that support a business model.
The print magazine business model— the one that has a magazine as the foundation of a brand and the business generates a profit exclusively from advertising, newsstand and subscription revenue — is dead, kaput, over. Even the executives who run companies that have the magazine business model know it. That’s why they have all dropped the word “magazine” from their company’s names, laid off lots of reporters and are trying desperately to replace them with software developers. They have declared themselves digital media companies and like to use phrases like “multichannel” and “integrated.” Rather than being media and editorial experts, today they describe themselves as if they were marketing agencies, internet startups or designer labels. Perhaps that’s what they should be doing. But that’s not the magazine business model. It bears repeating: That model is dead.
Print magazines supporting a business model other than a magazine business model have a more promising future
Most magazines in America never had a magazine business model or strategy. Most magazines are created and published to support another kind of business model.(https://www.daowen.com)
Think about the magazines you receive in your mail box or that are delivered to your desk. You probably get a magazine from organizations that have a wide variety of business models: the university business model, the professional association business model or the nonprofit service organization business model. More and more, your magazines may come from companies that have an automobile business model or a supermarket business model. Some of the largest circulation magazines in America have lobbying group business models or religious organization business models.
Each of these organizations has different reasons for publishing print magazines that are known to provide a significant return on investment, even when they do not carry advertising or require readers to pay a subscription. Again, these are magazines that support a business model other than the magazine business model.
Print magazines supporting other business models are still quite powerful if the content is aligned with the objectives of the business model and serves the needs of the audience. I do not mean that the magazine should be a “house organ” or some form of propaganda — I believe such magazines fail. I mean the magazine must align with the reason the reader has a relationship with the organization, and must serve a unique role in starting or extending a relationship that is beneficial to both the reader and the organization.
Print magazines will be around for the long run. And by that, it’s referred to the time-horizon made popular by the economist John Maynard Keynes when he observed, “In the long-run, we are all dead.”
Words & Expressions
layoff：遣散
magazine format：杂志版式
subscription：订阅
Wile E. Coyote：怀尔狼，华纳兄弟动画片“兔八哥”(Looney Tunes)系列里的一个经典形象，故事的反角，是一个不幸的角色。
time-horizon：时间范畴