Apparently, magazine executives - who are seeing their industry stagnant and their revenues migrate to Web publications - are excited about the potential of leveraging video.
Hmm… maybe I’m crazy, but should they not have been excited about the prospects of the Web for their business 10 or even 5 years ago… or for that matter, even, today?
Magazines have some of the best content, period. Most of what you find online is at best a diluted version of what you can find in magazines. The reason is simple: magazines have historically been able to pay for good writers and good content. But when the Web popped up on their radar, instead of realizing that that was where the action will be, they remained defensive, so a bunch of online players stole their lunch. Of course, the revenues of the print guys is larger mainly due to the industries being more mature, but incorporate growth rates and trends, and you know that the outlook is bleak for magazines. It could be argued that women will be the predominant consumers / readers of magazines while men will largely turn to the Web for infotainment.
Think of the adult industry: 10, 20 years ago, if a teen wanted adult material, he had to buy a magazine. Today, he has the Web. The carnage that tech magazine publications faced was essentially duplicated to lesser degrees in other categories (tech being the most obvious one, followed by video games). Hence the success of an IGN at the expense of a Ziff Davis, for example.
But the bottom line is that in content and search, magazines acted slowly and too defensively.
Notice I also mention search. Why? Search results today favor online publications, not offline ones. Even though offline ones are usually more likely to have great content on a topic. That content may not be digitized, and if it is, the page might not be optimized for online search indexes and crawlers. This was one of the underlying rationale for developing - pardon the shameless plug - the MetaMojo.com domain specific, vertical search engine.
Back to the topic, will online video be the magazine industry’s salvation?
Find out what Mediapost has to say here.
Tags: Internet & Web, Video|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Apr 27th
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