Print-to-online: Real business model or face-saving ruse?
It’s become something of a standard operating procedure for magazines to fold their print editions while keeping the online versions going. Premiere did it. Child did too. And so did Teen People. In all cases, editors or publishers boasted about how the magazines would thrive online. “To effectively reach these girls, we must invest in the media where they spend most of their time and where we see our greatest growth potential,” Hachette CEO Jack Kliger said when ElleGirl folded its print edition. From the start, however, skeptics pointed out that the print-to-online transition sounded more like a ploy than an actual business model. As PaidContent’s Staci Kramer said of Premiere, “dropping print for online only is the new brown. In the past, magazines just disappeared; now they hang around as bits and bytes.” And now that TeenPeople.com has followed its print edition into nonexistence, it looks like the naysayers were right, at least in this particular case (and a quick glance at the Alexa charts shows that TeenPeople has been suffering from low usage levels for years). Of course, that doesn’t mean every magazine that drops print will tank online. But, as Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni points out, “the problem is not with the technology or the method of delivery, the problem is in having a product that is relevant to the reader whether it is in print or on the Web.” Having worked for a number of Web sites affiliated with print magazines, I’d have to agree. Publishers need to focus on creating content that people will want to read, view, listen to, interact with or whatever. The delivery method will, of course, play a big role in the way the content is structured, but in the end, the content itself has to be compelling enough for people to want to access it, and if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter what format it’s in.
