Few bright spots in online-only figures
Fri, Jul 3, 2009
Silicon Alley Insider has pulled together some figures on how well newspapers that have gone online-only are doing in the US.
Their verdict: Most Dead Newspapers Not Doing Well Online
There’s not enough data as far as I can see to draw conclusions but the slide show they’ve created is interesting to flick through and it’s something keep an eye on.
If anything things are much worse for print magazines transferring to online. I’ve seen data showing online-only magazines attract about 10 percent of the revenue of print titles.
Of course there are huge savings, but there’s a typical death spiral when a magazine goes online only:
a) optimism over the new format, fresh start etc.
b) realisation that print might be 50 percent or more of total costs, but advertising revenues tend to fall by a greater amount and there’s no way to make up for lost cover sales revenue.
c) the staff cuts begin – usually starting with editorial and quickly leading to even fewer readers and hence less advertising revenue.
There are answers to the problem but not within most existing publishing business models.