Rethinking the Publishers’ Business Model Some B2B publishers in US and UK are better placed than others to ride out the storm following from the market change. Because they have stopped thinking in terms of publications and started thinking in terms of communities.
Mike Hewitt
A simple adjustment of revenue sources is not enough
This isn’t an easy time to be a magazine publisher. Caught between a global economic slowdown and the relentless shift of advertising revenues from print to digital, media companies have been selling, closing or reducing the frequency of print titles and investing in digital media. B2B media owners should be better placed than most to ride out the storm – but the evidence is that some have been better at doing so than others. The controlled-circulation model for print magazines, which served us well for over a century, is in terminal decline. That much is clear from the long series of advertiser-funded magazines which have either closed or converted to online-only editions.
B2B media companies are changing shape By 2010 there were 4.733 UK B2B titles being published, down from 5.108 five years earlier. The process is gathering pace, and the companies which once dominated UK business media are changing shape or vanishing altogether. This year has already seen the once-mighty media company EMAP split into distinct operating companies and rebrand as Top Right, and
Grenzen überwinden: Neue Wege im Fachmediengeschäft
dozens of smaller publishers in the United Kingdom have either exited print altogether or are working hard to do so. In the US, the situation is little better. The first quarter of 2012 saw trade press print advertising fall to $ 1.82 billion from $ 1.88 billion in the same period last year. Compare the full year 2011 to the last year before the Crash, 2007, and the picture is still starker: print now accounts for 44 percent of revenues compared to 75 percent five years earlier (see figure 1).
Mike Hewitt is managing director of Adaugeo Media (www.adaugeomedia. com), which helps both media owners and brands develop and monetise business-to-business communities. He is tutor for the digital publishing module of the FIPP Magazine Brand Management Certificate and moderates the annual Digital Innovators’ Summit (Berlin) hosted by FIPP, VDZ and emediaSF.
Bad news? Certainly, for those businesses that can’t move away from a complete dependence on print advertising. But the evidence suggests that even the largest and least nimble B2B publishers are moving towards
35
Kapitel 2