Print Magazine Sales Dropping - Readers Favoring Digital Editions

With the current state of our economy, everyone from average citizens to large corporations are finding ways to cut costs and still maintain some semblance of their daily lifestyle. One of many ways of doing this largely relates to Dirxion and the products we offer, and for the sake of this article, we’re talking about the Magazine industry.

With the recent failure of major newspapers, it wasn’t long before magazine sales started to dive bomb, and as of this writing, they definitely have. This is due to many contributing factors, but a few worth noting are:

1. Consumers are cutting back on entertainment and leisure costs (which includes magazine subscriptions).

2. Advertisers are making large online advertising buys as opposed to print.

3. The ipod generation heavily prefers their content to be delivered digitally. If they can’t get it online, then they choose not to get it at all.

There is a win-win situation to this, as publishers are starting to realize faster than ever - and that would be the conversion of their magazine to a digital format. Cutting costs on print, and delivering the digital content that consumers demand makes everyone happy. The publishers that realize this now are the ones that will survive in our current disaster of an economic state. The ones that don’t, well, thanks for playing.

Myrna Blyth, a veteran in the print industry, recently summed it up nicely over at PubExec.com:

““In good times, when advertising is floating everything …that’s fine,” Blyth says. “But in this ‘perfect storm,’ you now have this incredibly strong competitor, the Internet, which is taking the time of your potential readers and, at the same time, giving them very similar material.”

In other words, if publishers aren’t jumping on the digital bandwagon, they’ll quickly see themselves left behind.

Last month, Jane Zarem at AudienceDevelopment.com said, “No one expects print magazines to disappear, but the days of publishing in a single format are long gone. A paradigm shift toward electronic delivery has been underway”.

We couldn’t agree more. To find out more about publishing your magazine in a cutting edge digital format, head over to the Digital Magazine information page on Dirxion.com