Online magazines: Are they making money?

Are magazines making money online?  According to an article by Tom Foremski in the "Silicon Valley Watcher" dated March 22, 2007, that answer would be "no."

In the same article Helen Leggatt states, "despite investments totaling millions in marketing dollars, only a handful of the industry players present could claim more than 3 percent of their sales came from online."

I am speechless.

I spent $4.99 on a magazine filled with ads for a great number of products.  I imagine that "someone" buys some of the items featured.  But the "free" online version, which has similar content plus videos and links to numerous other sites and products I can enjoy, makes little to no money on the venture.  In fact, according to this article, advertisers aren't making much money from the ads submitted, either.

Additionally, Foremski says, "The economics of publishing online can't support the people and processes that are needed to produce it.

It's because publishers have to compete against online publishers such as Google whose costs of publishing a page of content and ads is minuscule. The reason GOOG or YHOO or Craig's List can sell advertising cheaper is because they don't have to pay for their content.


It costs tens of thousands of dollars for newspapers and magazines to produce, market and distribute a "page" of content.

There is no way that they can compete against competitors whose comparable costs are pennies per page."

Unbelievable!

There was an interesting comment posted on March 23, 2007 from "Anonymous": For all the problems in traditional print publishing, I'd still be more likely to cite an article in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal than I would a blog posting about the same topic..... Credibility is still an issue with blogs.  So is transparency.  So is personal bias....but at least we tend to know where MSM is coming from, i.e., I may know the biases that they have, may even prefer a certain slant on content for that very reason."

Hmmm.  More things to think about.  Are the articles in the print and online versions of magazines the same?

I've been looking at leisure magazines.  What about news magazines?  Are online newspapers more blog than news content?

I guess that's another subject, but it is one I will be checking in the days ahead.

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