Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	October 9, 2008

6 posts from the San Francisco conference and our thoughts on where the magazine industry is headed

We spent the last few days at The Westin in San Francisco for MPA’s American Magazine Conference, where over 400 publishers gathered to attend the event chaired by Michela O’Connor Abrams, President and Publisher of Dwell.

The vibe at times was gloomy and attendance was down slightly from last year, but the fact that half the publishers stayed on Tuesday afternoon to visit the Google campus in Mountain View, perhaps provides some hope.

There were bits and pieces of the sentiments we’ve been echoing for a while spread around the conference (Be true to your brand! Focus on your audience!), however it was clear to us that some in attendance still don’t get it. Even while at the brink of the worst economic times they’ve known, they still don’t understand that their magazines should no longer be central to their overall business strategy.

We’re seeing publishers shoring up their magazine profits with events and book sales, which is great, but in our view, their magazines should also be more expensive and their rate bases should be lower. Publishers that are charging $40 or $50 for an annual subscription to their monthly magazines, or $100 or $150 for their weekly magazines, will be fine. But the publishers who were willing to give up their circulation revenues for advertising revenues are the ones who’ll feel it the most. Naturally, this will ride itself out, but it will be painful.

The reality is that digital products will become primary, while print products will be secondary. It’s the economics of production and delivery. You can push electrons a lot cheaper than you can push paper and ink.

For publishers who have their own TV shows - America’s Test Kitchen, Martha Stewart, Oprah - they already have their primes in place. Clearly not every magazine can have a TV show. But they’re getting a second chance! They can have a website that allows them to build a digital audience with the same kind of digital delivery costs that are associated with television. Any magazine publisher that has a chance to buy or build a digital franchise in the same market and turn their magazine into an ancillary to that franchise should be doing it.

Welcome to the world of special interest media, where your magazine brand is more valuable if you can use it to leverage a TV show or a website than it is as the center of your brand. It’s time to get over the idea that a magazine is the center of your universe. It’s not. Magazines will ultimately be a premium product that a website, or TV viewer’s best customer, will buy.

More coverage from AMC 2008:

• Google’s Eric Schmidt: The Internet is a Cesspool
• Reshaping the Model for Magazines
• Independent Magazines Talk Digital
• Facebook’s COO: “It’s an open web… this is important for the long run, but difficult for monetization in the short run.”
• 4 Tips (and 3 Results) for Setting your Content Free, from TVGuide.com’s Christy Tanner
• 4 Online Publishing Tips from CondeNet’s Editorial Director, Jamie Pallot