Magazines to Watch Introduction Part II

Oct 13, 2008

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As Link points out, a dedicated readership is one of the strongest assets a niche title has. "All of our magazines have highly engaged audiences," says Bryan Welch, president and editorial director of Topeka, Kansas-based Ogden Publishing and head of the MPA's Independent Magazine group.

    Welch says the selling point for his magazines, which include Mother Earth News, Farm Collector Magazine, Motorcycle Classics and Utne Reader, is that connection. "These are people who spend an enormous amount of time reading and re-reading the magazine. Everything that is done is designed to strengthen the engagement, which works well for advertisers."

    Media buyer McHale says it makes his job easier. "I'd rather have 40,000 people who are really excited to get the magazine each month than 400,000 who buy a magazine for various reasons; the bigger the book, the more it has to cater to many masters." But, cautions McHale, as magazines evolve and more content is migrating to the Web and other digital media, "it's a matter of the little publishers owning their genre."


    Indeed, independent magazines and startups find that the digital space is where they can compete with bigger magazines, where advertising pages are decreasing. "There will be an evening of the playing field. The bigger publications will shrink their circulations, and small books will have an opportunity to increase market share," says Don Hellinger, publisher of New York-based urban lifestyle titles Inked and Nylon. He notes that print pages have decreased 7.4 percent from January to June 2008 over the same period in 2007, per PIB, and that big titles such as Time and Newsweek have lowered their rate bases.

    In fact, any startup is going to begin life with an integrated plan. Case in point: Good, which focuses on how people can do good while doing well. Max Schorr, a cofounder of the magazine and the title's community director, says: "The founders of Good grew up with Internet. We always saw this as a multimedia play."



    For at least one new magazine, a built-in partnership helped a startup come to life quickly. Soon after Rupert Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal in January, a long-talked-about project, a magazine called WSJ, got the green light.

    Publisher Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio came to the project in May and oversaw the sale of 54 ad pages for the Sept. 6 launch. The magazine- glossy, oversized and oozing luxury-has a circulation of 800,000 in 17 top markets in the United States, with an additional 160,000 copies distributed in Europe and Asia. "We went out with a 104-page magazine with 19 advertisers new to the Journal franchise," says Asmodeo-Giglio. "In this market what we were able to accomplish-it's a tribute to the power of the Journal franchise."

    And, of course, the magazine has a Web component. WSJ.com is one of the only newspaper Web sites that charges for subscriptions; it has more than 1 million subscribers. "You can't be a magazine without an online component," says Asmodeo-Giglio.


    Stories about declining ad pages and ad revenue are nothing new these days. But if recent months are any indication, says Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi who writes a blog about magazine startups as "Mr.Magazine," says good things are happening in the area of niche magazines. "People are starting to think outside the box," he says. "The good Web sites are complementing the magazines."

    The MPA's Link points out that shopping has become a part of many magazine Web sites. "It's transactional, because advertisers' products are so aligned with the content of enthusiast magazines. The magazines have the security of that."

    Licciardi, whose Audubon magazine will sponsor the first ever New York City birding festival in Bryant Park next year, agrees. "You've got to sell the whole experience: multiple touch points and continuity of the brand," he says. "You can't just be a CPM on a spreadsheet anymore. If you're just a CPM, you'll have a fast death. The magazines that innovate, do new things, that focus on what their unique selling point and attribute is, and build on, with extensions, multimedia, will do well. They will survive by innovation."


For more AdweekMedia/SRDS Magazines to Watch coverage:
Magazines to Watch Introduction Part I
Magazines to Watch Introduction Part II