Digital didn’t kill print; print killed print
Digital is often blamed for the demise of print, but Net Percent's Scott Lewis sees things a little differently.
It’s no secret that the print magazine industry is in decline. IBISWorld predicts the Australian industry contracting at a rate of 4.3% a year. With a GDP growth rate of 2.7%, that’s a 7.0% fall. Compounded over four years to 2022, the industry will have shrunk relatively by over 25%.
Ask people in the industry why, and most will give you a one-word answer: “digital”.
But is that really fair, or accurate?
If we look at an industry such as taxis, while it’s true that Uber and Lyft brought some digital know-how to the market, anyone who took a cab in Sydney, Melbourne or (God help you) Canberra around 2010, knew there were big problems in terms of service.
Discontented customers gave Uber and others initial traction. Has something similar happened with print publishing? Is it just that a new, convenient channel displaced the market? Or did print fail in some way first — fail the primary market of its readers, but also fail its secondary market, the advertisers?
Photo by Vincent Delegge on Unsplash
As a digital publisher, from my perspective the answer is a clear “yes” to the last question. If I look at the field where I’ve worked as a writer and editor in the past – freely distributed print trade magazines – there is one aspect of their business models that stands out as indicating the point of failure: the distribution number.
That number, which has pride of place in any sales-driven media kit, represents how many magazines are distributed for each edition of a title. The Audited Media Association of Australia (AMAA) makes clear what that number represents under its CAB branded audits:
“The audit process is quite straightforward, commencing with proof of printing and then followed by proof of distribution, and distribution method, to establish the average net distribution per issue.”
The distribution number only indicates that x number of magazines were printed, and y number of magazines were distributed.
Audits eliminate basic fraud — inflating the number of magazines distributed — but do not address two concerns of advertisers: how many people really read the magazine, and who are they?
Some free trade magazines do attempt to build a “real” audience, but many others do not. Instead, they have a prime list of, say, 1,000 recipients that they know are important to an industry. Typically, they then “pad” that list with 40,00 or 5,000 addresses obtained from rented mailing lists.
Australian company Thomas Marsden Advertising suggested in 2016 that the average open rate for catalogues sent to mailing lists was around 60%. Being generous for magazines, we might consider a 70% open rate. That’s quite a discount on distribution.
As print magazines don’t have an “unsubscribe” button, trade publishers cannot judge the quality of any rented list (they don’t have, typically, access to the list data), which means open rates can plunge far below that.
So one magazine’s 5,000 distribution is not the same as another magazine’s 5,000. How can advertisers, then, really judge the value of a publication?
It comes down to a publication’s focus on its readers, how it attracts engagement. Using the front cover of a magazine as advertising space and featuring multiple unlabelled advertorials in the magazine pages are clear indications a magazine cares little for its readers, and only for its “distribution”.
Judged by those standards, something like 70% of all print trade magazines fail.
To go back to our analogy, the distribution number became for print what the taxi medallion developed into for the point-to-point transportation business. Medallions ended up certifying not competence, but only the ability to raise the capital to buy medallions. Similarly, distribution now just means printing magazines and distributing them. It is not, in any way, an acknowledgement of a successful publication answering market demand.
Contrast that with digital’s download numbers. These directly indicate both demand and reader engagement. That’s because in digital this relationship is direct. We can’t “push” (because spam), so we need to “pull”. The result is a direct feedback loop to the market. If we don’t engage our readers, we go out of business.
Print killed itself. The industry thought it had a kind of monopoly, and could do what it wanted, ignoring the real market. If digital does destroy anything, it’s the kind of complacency — and even narcissism — which puts profit over performance.
And I, for one, am very happy to see that aspect of publishing fail.
Scott Lewis is editor-at-large and director at Net Percent Pty Ltd.
If there was no such thing as the internet people still wouldn’t buy the rubbish in papers today. It reads like notes from a boozy yacht club luncheon.
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One of the big failures of magazine distribution in Australia is the reliance on newsagencies. Print magazine distributors using their sales statistics supply news agencies so that up to 50% of print magazines ended up as pulp. This adds to the cost of production significantly and bumps up the cost of advertising.
Compare this to the US where the geography inhibits the use of news agencies and where 12 month subscriptions have driven sales. These tend to automatically renew, the reader gets them delivered to the door and there is not the inclination to change their information source to a digital format. Print media in the US is still relatively strong and the change to digital is slower. However it will happen especially if the print media industry continues to inflate their ‘readership’ numbers, usually a random number between three and twenty for each copy sold, depending on how bold the publisher is. With digital platforms offering stats that are much more measurable, inevitably the print media will continue to decline in Australia and eventually in the US when more evidence of actual stats are demanded.
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The extent of fiction in print circulations is not news. The problem was that too many in the industry bought their own spin. Even now they don’t understand that the product is consumer driven. Which is why we see so much poor product in the market.
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I think you’ve got the cart before the horse there. If there’s a noticeable lack of quality in newspapers, it’s because their revenue continues to fall and they had to layoff their subeditors, investigative journalists etc.
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I won’t dispute many of the points made here but I don’t know that freely distributed print trade magazines is the best judge of the performance commercial magazine industry as a whole.
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Agreed but the tradition of subscriptions has never taken hold here, unlike the US in particular. It takes a long time to build up a behaviour change like that. Australian publishers have always tried to push subscriptions but for whatever reason, people in this country would prefer to buy things month to month at their discretion.
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There is some truth to what you said about sub-editors. The boozy yacht club comment above isn’t just about spelling errors, but also about how right wing and of touch with mainstream culture Australian papers are, which is a problem that preceded the Internet.
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Fairly important to consider that postage of printed matter like magazines has been subsidised for many years in the USA. That makes subscription models a heck of a lot easier to sustain.
But as another reader commented, not sure that the vagaries of the distribution of free B2B titles can really be extrapolated as a benchmark for the entire print industry. In fact, all over the world, select print titles with unique content are flourishing, Private Eye, The Economist, New Yorker.
The print titles that are really suffering are the ones full of content you can get free nowadays on the World Wide Web. That’s not ever going to change…
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As one who has closed a print magazine to go digital, I believe I do have some insight into this subject.
1. I had NO say on how many copies a newsagency stocked, That was up to G & G and their “idea” of good stock management was nuts to say the least eg a central city location had 2 copies but a small country based one had 20?
2. The main reason I closed was cost. Printing of 12,000 copies, about the norm in Oz for a niche mag such as mine (videocamera and film industry) was exorbitant, amounting to about 30% of the cover price. Add freight, postage and packaging to subscribers, returns, cost of freelancers and overheads and it became untenable. I had NO shortage of advertisers.
3. Every year I do a survey of my (now online and via interactive PDF) subscribers, and each year the answer is the same – we would prefer a paper based copy.
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The problem with Australian news is that it is far to hyperlocal.
As someone who has come to your shores, I couldn’t believe how out of touch all coverage (online, TV and print) is with the rest of the world.
Is Australia that isolated that we need to amplify a public street fight in Brunswick or a home invasion in St Kilda? Who really cares?
More international content please!
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As the guy who wrote this piece, I completely agree with you. It’s just bizarre. You can talk to publishers who you know for a fact are exaggerating their distribution by a factor of eight, and they will go on and on about “standards in the industry”. It’s amazing.
My favourite, however, are those publishers who have one title which is audited, and features ads from the AMAA declaring their moral rectitude — and then have another two or three titles which aren’t audited, and where one suspects imagination and childhood wonder play a lead role in determining their promoted circulation numbers.
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I think it even goes beyond political bias — though I agree that that we seem to live in a world where writers are mildly biased towards the Left (for the most part), and editors/publishers tilt towards the Right.
The real problem for me is a lack of thorough research, study, curiosity and application to the writing of articles. As a writer today, you do need to have at least a basic grasp of economic theory, for example. You also need to know how to gather facts from the wide range of sources that are available: online stats, personal interviews, academic journals and papers, and so forth.
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I found that a really interesting comment, David.
I’m a very tech person, moving most of my life between software development and publishing. Five years ago, when I started my publication, I saw it primarily as a website, but it did not do well until I turned it into a PDF magazine.
It is only this year, both after having established a reputation in my industry sector, and a growing sense that the audience has shifted to being more comfortable with digital, that I am now rolling out a revised website (based on serverless architecture, Node, Vue/Nuxt and Google’s Firebase/Firestore). That will be followed up by a range of mobile apps over the next six months.
I don’t really know what less-tech people can do in terms of effectively developing digital publications. I do wonder if what we might see in the future is the formation of a loose confederations of small publishers, sharing tech resources. If you had five or six together, the cost of developing and using better tech resources would be greatly reduced, and it could create a more exciting place for new developments.
It’s a complex situation.
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