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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1830
Mac Magazines May Face Trouble: What of the Web Publications?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
March 17th 2003
Mac print publishers face lean times.
How is the hard-copy Macintosh magazine market travelling in these hard economic
times? If it's the second or third-tier US Mac mags we're talking about, "a lot", says
Think Secret.
We'll assume we're talking about MacHome and MacAddict. Nick de Plume reports that
subscriptions are down by between 10 and 15% on this time last year. The mags have
been reduced to "begging" status, says Think Secret, noting a mass email from one
publication to its readership.
It can't be all roses at the 'first-tier' end of the market either. MacWorld, the
publishers of MacCentral, closed the illustrious MacWeek some time ago, preferring to
put its resources into MacCentral.
Does this reflect the overall decline of the Mac market? Clearly, yes. The base is
smaller. MUGs are declining.
Electronic magazines still exists, some with fairly large circulation. These include
MyMac and About This Particular Macintosh. We can't locate AppleWizard any longer. Of
course, TidBits, the grand-daddy of all electronic Mac newsletters, in existence even
prior to the world-wide web, has survived, publishing weekly, as ever. One of the
older sites, LowEndMac, founded in 1997, has had its share of financial difficulties,
which demonstrates the problems even high-traffic sites face: bandwidth/web hosting,
staff salaries, ancilliary costs and so on. The pinch comes because costs have risen -
some substantially - while ad revenues have fallen.
The smaller Mac market, and the consequential downsizing of the scale of advertising
mean that electronic publishers, as well as hard-copy magazines, have to watch their
budgets very carefully, particularly as advertisers are certainly not spending they
way they did in the dot-com boom. In the magazine industry, the generally-accepted
ratio of editorial to advertising is 60:40, but then there's 'advertorial', so the
lines become blurred. It would be possible for magazines to accept more than 50%
advertising, but, obviously, the editorial integrity of the publication would suffer
considerably.
Subjectively, it's certainly become noticeable - to me at least - that publications
like MacHome and MacAddict have become fairly thin - not quality-of-content-wise, just
the number of pages. MacWorld is also very thin compared with, say, 1997. Randomly, I
pull out the March 1997 edition, which features the PowerBook 3400 on the cover. This
is pre-Jobs and the clones (Moto, Power etc.) are still in full force. The back chunk
is teaming with ads (and, for some reason, PowerBook 5300s are still worth something).
Not now. Ads, vendors are far fewer. There's no Mac competition, of course, although
the need for less specialised hardware means that PC vendors can sell peripherals to
Mac customers (FireWire, USB etc.). The other problem is that the mags face publishing
once each month, which means their 'news' sections are weeks old for those who trawl
MacSurfer daily.
Do you feel guilty enough to click a banner yet?
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