Magazine publishing’s phony war
19 November 2024
This guest post from Peter Houston asks: You do know it doesn’t have to be print or digital, right?
I stumbled into a bit of a spat on LinkedIn recently that felt like it could have come straight from the mid-90s. New combatants, upgraded weaponry, but the same old slugfest.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was a reprise of the Print vs Digital death match. FML!
The virtual fisticuffs started with a question about the alleged inability to measure ROI from print advertising. And with that single, sad, strawman we were off.
First the pixelheads fired in… ‘NO! I never understood why people spend money advertising in print’. The pagesniffers parried… “NO! Much better to pay for a 15 second reel on Insta. LOL!”
I checked out at this point, but I can see the replies in my head…
🤖 Digital is ‘wholly trackable’.
👃🏻 Is it, aye? Tracked by the same bots reading it?
🤖 Well, print is disposable.
👃🏻 There’s magazines on my shelf older than you.
For the record, there are studies on the positive ROI of print advertising, but I suspect the question asker wasn’t actually looking for an answer. They just wanted to make the point that digital is sooooo much better than print…
Thankfully I see way less of those stupid print vs digital exchanges than I did back in the day. Aside from a handful of digital zealots – the most hard-bitten page-sniffers know they need digital – most media people have got their heads around the idea that IT’S NOT A F*CKING COMPETITION!!!
It’s not just that print and digital are not mutually exclusive, they both work at their absolute best when they work in tandem.
- Digital delivers discoverability and reach
- Print delivers lasting, tangible value
Not the future doesn’t mean no future
I don’t think anyone believes print is the future of magazines.
The news media has picked up on a slew of print reboots recently. From The Onion to Playboy BusinessWeek, everybody loves a good resurrection story. And, yes, it’s great to see. But, no, we’re not going back to the way it used to be.
Print is a portfolio play now, and whether you support your print with digital content, or your digital content with a print premium, the two are better together.
Digital lets you keep the beat steady, print is the big key change. Think Westlife getting up off their stools but singing a song that you actually like.
Part of the toolkit
I’m not sure how Jacob Donnelly would feel about me placing him in the pixelhead camp. But with a CV that includes newsletter-giant Morning Brew and crypto-news site CoinDesk, his background definitely skews digital.
And yet even Jacob has confessed to a penchant for print. Now running the excellent media newsletter A Media Operator, he recently confessed that he would love to launch a print magazine about his passion for military history.
However, clear-eyed as ever, he said this:
I love print. If I could, I’d launch a print military history magazine tomorrow. It has a place in the media ecosystem… Print is an awesome product.
But that’s what it is: a product. It’s part of a broader swathe of offerings that media operators should have in their toolkit to ensure that they’re delivering value to their audience.
Jacob believes, and I agree, that niche publishing is the future; smaller audiences with publishers maximising Life Time Value. And he thinks that’s where print comes in.
Some percentage of your audience will want it. And getting someone to pay $5 a month for that print product could be the difference between an LTV of $60 per year versus $6 or even $0.60
Jacob concludes:
Media companies will be more niche and have smaller teams. They can still generate good money, but it’ll be driven more by reader revenue with a complement of advertising. Some of that reader revenue will come from print. It’ll be a good part of the business. But it’s not the future. The future will remain digital with various paid offerings around it.
That only works as part of a portfolio play, where print is a product choice, not a sacred relic. It’s there to serve a unique but complementary purpose alongside newsletters, podcasts or apps. Each has its own utility, each has its own USP, its own part to play in your value proposition.
Let’s all just say no to the the digital vs print falsehood whenever it raises its stupid head. Give print its place on the field of combat and acknowledge that most magazine makers need digital to survive.
Let’s send publishing’s phony war back to the nineties… a great decade for magazines, music and of course the early days of the internet. But, please, leave the print vs digital BS back there with Mrs Thatcher, Furbies and back-to-front jeans.
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This post originally featured on Peter’s newsletter, The Magazine Diaries.