Business Management - Industry Trends

Dow Jones & Co. said it would stop publishing SmartMoney in print this summer while expanding its digital operation. The 815,154-circulation monthly’s September print issue, on stands Aug. 14, will be its last. The year started off tough for magazine advertising in general, but personal finance titles have been particularly hard hit.

SmartMoney’s ad pages fell 23.4 percent to 67 in the first quarter of this year versus the year-ago period, per the Publishers Information Bureau. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance’s pages fell 34 percent to 53, and Money’s by 14 percent to 92.

“What consumer wants financial advice in 30-day increments?”

For whatever reason, a U.S. arm of Toshiba pulled the plug today on its National No-Print Day campaign. But let’s not celebrate too much before absorbing some lessons from this saga: 1) We print lovers are still doing a crappy job getting the word out about how printing and paper usage are not necessarily bad for the environment.

When I set out to create this list of the “10 Biggest Digital Magazine Mistakes,” I decided the content would have a lot more clout and depth if it were created by a broad mix of industry experts. So I reached out to my pals and here’s what they had to say

You may have heard that the print cookbook is indomitable. Don’t believe it. Cookbooks may indeed outlast other print books, but they will eventually go extinct. That’s because print cookbooks offer nothing that apps, eBooks and websites can’t, despite print enthusiasts’ efforts to recast them as objets d’art.

The members of the Association of American University Presses have a lot to think about as they gather in Chicago next week for their annual meeting. The meeting, whose theme is “Igniting the Future!,” also marks the group’s 75th anniversary.

Kindles...already haveworked their way into most presses’ planning, according to an AAUP survey on digital-publishing strategies released just ahead of the meeting.

The Amazon Kindle format led the list of platforms, vendors and aggregators that presses said they use to deliver digital access to what they publish. Eighty-one percent of presses said they’ve gone the Kindle route.

Against the advice of my agent, I began perusing the self-publishing companies’ Websites and evaluating what they had to offer. Then I started poking around blogs and message boards to get customer testimonials. What I found was a veritable minefield with roads that forked in every direction and very few clear answers.

Consumer magazines in the United States will put an end to four years of overall revenue declines in 2012, a new report projected. Total revenue will edge up 0.1 percent, as advertising increases 2 percent and consumer spending on circulation slips 2.5 percent, according to the annual “Global Entertainment and Media Outlook” from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Print advertising, which suffered in the first half of the year, will ultimately grow 0.2 percent in 2012.  Print advertising in U.S. consumer magazines will grow at an estimated 0.7 precent annual rate through 2016 to $10.6 billion, the report said.

The good news: Canadians love their print magazines. The bad news: It costs magazine publishers a heck of a lot of money for recycling programs, especially in Quebec where it has boiled to a point where a lawsuit has been launched.

Before 2009, TVA Publications paid $7/tonne for recycling, but since a bill was passed earlier this year retroactive to 2010, that number has shot up to $262/tonne, (Jocelyn Poirier, president of TVA Publications) said. For 2011 its share increases to $297/tonne and $351/tonne for 2012, added Poirier. That results in a bill of over $5 million, he said.

Consumers are spending 10 percent of their media attention on their mobile devices while the medium only commands a mere 1 percent of total ad-spend. Comparatively, the quickly “dying” print medium attracts only about 7 percent of media-time, but still captures an astonishing 25 percent of the total U.S. ad-spend, with print receiving 25-times more ad money than mobile.

The “4th Annual eBook Survey of Publishers” found 36 percent of eBook publishers surveyed making greater than 10 percent of their annual revenues from eBooks, as compared to 18 percent in 2011. “The ‘more than 10 percent of revenue’ barometer has been used by analysts to indicate when eBooks will be considered big business for publishers,” said Dev Ganesan, president and CEO of Aptara.