Saturday, April 6, 2013

Flipping pages blog reporting:
...Print revenues still matter
Just for fun, I ran a poll in the Magazine group on LinkedIn. It’s totally unscientific and represents a very small sample of the group’s 40,000 members, but when I asked “How much of your company’s revenues still come from print publications?” 50 percent of the respondents said that more than 90 percent of their company’s revenues still came from print. A big majority of respondents said the largest share of their revenues were still from print.
I make no claims for those numbers other than they confirm my instinct that a lot of publishers still rely on print for a lot of their revenues. Does that mean that the magazine industry isn’t really shifting to digital. No, the shift is real. But we’re at a point in the transition when most publishers still make significant money from print and don’t make enough money from digital to ignore that fact.
My advice to any publisher trying to reverse this situation, and that’ a very smart objective, is to start where they’re at. Stop, take a breath and be very honest about what you’re doing today. If your boss or your board needs to talk up your digital numbers to impress shareholders or potential investors, let them. But you need to be honest about where you are starting from. If you have 25% digital revenues, fine, you know what you have to do.

The magazine business perches on three legs: Content, Audience and Revenue. If your print business is profitable, you’re either an incredible salesman, insanely lucky or you have these three elements in some sort of balance.
You need to achieve the same balance in digital. Too many digital projects are massively reactionary, almost panicked. “OMG! Everyone’s talking social, we need to do social!” or “Mobile is everywhere. We have no mobile. We need mobile”.
Yes, social and mobile are hugely important to magazines, but you have to do them right and right means taking a hard look at your own circumstances. What content do you generate?
  • What digital platforms will your content work on?
  • Is your digital audience there?
  • Do you have the resources go there?
  • If you go there, can you make any money?

Break down internal agendas...

http://flippingpagesblog.com/how-to-build-a-crossmedia-content-strategy-1/

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