Category Archives: The future of magazine publishing

Consumers “like” magazines best

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Is the magazine medium doomed to extinction as some media pundits predict? Not according to a brand audience report published in April by MPA-The Association of Magazine Media (MPA). ‘Magazine media brands continue to deliver meaningful growth across platforms, engaging consumers in all formats, including social media.,” the report declared.

American magazine brands were growing at a 7.6 percent increase each year, they reported. And, they were engaging their readers across a variety of social media platforms with remarkable results. According to data collected by MPA’s Social Flow platform, “likes” and “followers” of social media totaled 900 million at the end of the first quarter, a 4 percent increase over the previous quarter

In fact, both television and magazine data show that the top 10 magazines reach nearly twice as many people on social media as the top 10 television programs. According to data from Shareablee, magazines generate more social engagement than TV, radio, online media, and newspapers.

“Consumers of all ages have deep and passionate relationships with magazine media,” says MPA CEO Linda Thomas Brooks. Readers engage with magazines on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

While MPA collects data primarily from secular magazines, Christian magazines can find encouragement in the data. Certainly some magazines struggle and over the last five or six years a number of prominent American magazines have closed their print operations and switched to digital format. Many of these are engaging their readers through social media more than ever before

In fact, the global digital magazine market is projected to grow from 14 percent in 2015 to 35 percent in 2020, according to   Business Wire in London. The bold prediction is based on analysis by Technavio, a technology research company. The company explains that the growth of the global digital magazine publishing market is predicated on the increased penetration of the Internet and extensive use of mobile devices.

The lesson for Christian magazines? If you’re publishing the kind of content people want to read and if you’re engaging them across a variety of social media platforms, you have significant potential to grow your audience.

 

The silver lining in the bad news about magazine publishing

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“Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.” This startling statement was made earlier this month by David Carr in his Media Equation column in The New York Times. Reflecting the generally negative atmosphere surrounding any discussion of the future of magazines, he went on to say that “like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff.” As evidence he pointed to a recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report stating that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. Advertising is also down 8.8 percent year to date over “the same miserable period a year ago,” according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Magazine publishing in the United Kingdom has also suffered a series of setbacks, according to Mike King of Companiesandmarkets.com. Moreover, he states that the UK magazine publishing market has been forecast to continue to decline over the next five years. However, he is a little more optimistic than some market observers, predicting an eventual recovery, or at least stabilization, as the UK economy recovers.

In South Africa, some observers are even more optimistic about the future of magazine publishing–with one caveat. “There is a definite downward trend within the magazine publishing industry, both in terms of readership numbers and ad revenue, locally and internationally,” says Tanja Carruthers, editor at Fitness magazine and publisher at Maverick Publishing Corporation. “However, certain niche titles seem to be the exception as consumers become more discretionary with their tighter expendable income.” Her magazine is a case in point. South Africa’s only dedicated female health and fitness magazine has posted its fifth consecutive year of circulation growth.

Carruthers says that instead of consuming more general information, people now prefer to consume content on a specific subject through their preferred media platform. This phenomenon has been evident for decades, appearing as long ago as 1971 with the demise of Look magazine and the introduction of a plethora of new specialized magazines. However, Carruthers predicts this trend of “narrow-casting” to  increase and eventually overtake the older more-general once-venerable publications, which like dinosaurs, will eventually drift into obscurity.