A magazine cuts back on digital in favor of print. Wait - what?
The conventional wisdom is that print media is on its way out, to be replaced by digital. But as people who've read this LJ will know, things are not quite that simple. We've seen online-only publications release print magazines. We've seen alternative newspapers making profit in print and earning more profit by filling in the gaps left by daily newspapers printing fewer issues. And now, Capital New York is reporting that The American Reader, a bi-monthly literary magazine, is shifting resources away from its website and into its print issues.
The latest issue of The American Reader
By their own account, they are not leaving the Internet altogether. The website will still be there, and so will staff blog and news and events posts. But other online-only content isn't going to be posted.
What makes it even more interesting isn't some old magazine run by old people that hate change. The American Reader was founded in 2012 by people who are around my age or younger.
So what made them decided to do such a thing?
"We have big growth in our print edition that hasn't necessarily been reflected online," Uzoamaka "Max" Maduka, The American Reader's 26-year-old co-founder and editor-in-chief, told Capital.
Indeed, the magazine's website still does not meet the minimum traffic standards that are required to be measured by the analytics firm comScore. (Maduka said the site draws roughly 75,000 unique monthly visitors.) The publication has fewer than 7,000 Twitter followers and roughly 42,000 Facebook likes.
While the print circulation of 6,000 is even smaller, it represents a more engaged, lucrative and geographically dispersed audience, about 1,200 of whom pay $39.99 for a yearly subscription while the rest cough up $10 a pop to pick up single issues on the newsstand. (The circulation was a microscopic 400 at launch.) Single-issue sales, said Maduka, have begun to cover "a significant chunk of production costs" for The American Reader, which was initially bankrolled by an investor whom the magazine has declined to name. They're working on a second round of funding and will soon begin accepting print advertising with a publisher in tow.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. When you are a media outlet, making a profit online is hard - harder than it is in print. And in The American Reader's case, the print magazine is growing, and it's bringing in money, while the online side doesn't seem to be bring in anything. Looking at their website, they don't seem to have any ads - but with the online traffic they're getting, the economics of online advertising pretty much ensure that they wouldn't be generating much revenue even if they did.
Of course, as the Capital piece notes, literary magazines are a different animal from other magazines. And the general magazine industry is not in a good place right now. Print revenues for are declining while printing/distribution related costs keep going up. It's no wonder that, this week alone, we've seen not one, but two magazines shut down. In Vibe's case, they're keeping the website around, but it's clear that they're not putting in as many resources in it as they did in the physical magazine.
So I'm not trying to suggest that every magazine should follow The American Reader's lead. Far from it. But cases like this renew my belief that end of print is the future, or that digital is the solution to the media's financial problems. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's not going to be one single, definitive solution that works for everyone.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
The latest issue of The American Reader
By their own account, they are not leaving the Internet altogether. The website will still be there, and so will staff blog and news and events posts. But other online-only content isn't going to be posted.
What makes it even more interesting isn't some old magazine run by old people that hate change. The American Reader was founded in 2012 by people who are around my age or younger.
So what made them decided to do such a thing?
"We have big growth in our print edition that hasn't necessarily been reflected online," Uzoamaka "Max" Maduka, The American Reader's 26-year-old co-founder and editor-in-chief, told Capital.
Indeed, the magazine's website still does not meet the minimum traffic standards that are required to be measured by the analytics firm comScore. (Maduka said the site draws roughly 75,000 unique monthly visitors.) The publication has fewer than 7,000 Twitter followers and roughly 42,000 Facebook likes.
While the print circulation of 6,000 is even smaller, it represents a more engaged, lucrative and geographically dispersed audience, about 1,200 of whom pay $39.99 for a yearly subscription while the rest cough up $10 a pop to pick up single issues on the newsstand. (The circulation was a microscopic 400 at launch.) Single-issue sales, said Maduka, have begun to cover "a significant chunk of production costs" for The American Reader, which was initially bankrolled by an investor whom the magazine has declined to name. They're working on a second round of funding and will soon begin accepting print advertising with a publisher in tow.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. When you are a media outlet, making a profit online is hard - harder than it is in print. And in The American Reader's case, the print magazine is growing, and it's bringing in money, while the online side doesn't seem to be bring in anything. Looking at their website, they don't seem to have any ads - but with the online traffic they're getting, the economics of online advertising pretty much ensure that they wouldn't be generating much revenue even if they did.
Of course, as the Capital piece notes, literary magazines are a different animal from other magazines. And the general magazine industry is not in a good place right now. Print revenues for are declining while printing/distribution related costs keep going up. It's no wonder that, this week alone, we've seen not one, but two magazines shut down. In Vibe's case, they're keeping the website around, but it's clear that they're not putting in as many resources in it as they did in the physical magazine.
So I'm not trying to suggest that every magazine should follow The American Reader's lead. Far from it. But cases like this renew my belief that end of print is the future, or that digital is the solution to the media's financial problems. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's not going to be one single, definitive solution that works for everyone.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.