Life isn’t getting any better for magazine companies:
According to figures released by the Publishers Information Bureau and TNS Media Intelligence, in Q1 2008:
- ad pages fell 6.3% compared to the same period in 2007, from 54,126 in 2007 to 50,696 in 2008.
- total revenues remained basically flat with a slight 0.4% decline.
- the decline in ad pages was led by the top six consumer magazine publishers, with:
* Conde Nast down 2.6%,
* Time Inc. down 5.3%,
* Hearst down 3.2%,
* Bonnier down 11.5%,
* Hachette Filipacchi down 7% and
* Meredith down 12.2%.
The greater problem frankly is that even when the economy picks up, I can’t see how any advertising will rush back to print. Ad dollars are stampeding online… and the online spike in revenues for these companies’ websites isn’t big enough to offset the erosion in print.
Of course, one untapped, totally incremental area would be video content and advertising. While web video is cannibalistic for TV media firms, for print media it is all new. However, as some executives in these companies confide to me, print media does not have the pedigree or DNA to tackle video projects… so while this hypothesis remains intact in theory, I am not sure it holds water in practice.
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