HOW MAGAZINES ARE FAILING READERS
Many thanks to regular reader Klong of Consciousness for the note about this extremely interesting article '10 Ways Tech Magazine Are Failing Readers' from Gadget blog Gizmodo.
What's written doesn't only apply to tech magazines, although given the nature of the subject I think it's fair to say that readers are probably more demanding than most. They expect reviews of the latest products today and not in two months time - which is so often the case with print - however I do think most mainstream publications do a reasonable job of having online and print complementary products.
Most of the points in the article are fair comment, but in countries like Thailand where online advertising isn't as widespread as elsewhere there's no financial reason why publishers should be giving away their content for free. I know from my own experiences that readers stop buying a print product if they can read the same stories online. That's one less magazine sold but no financial benefit from them becoming an online fan of the publication.
Free content is just one of the points covered in the article. Have a look because it does make interesting reading.
2 comments:
Free content on website=fewer sales? If it were that simple, no newspapers or magazines would offer content on their websites, when we know that is not the case. Newspapers have to offer news updates, for example, or they would fail to compete with other news sources on the internet. Many readers still prefer to get the printed product, even if they do read stories on the net. And so on, and so forth...
I know there's more to this situation, but when we started posting content online we had a number of people question the need to buy/subscribe to our magazine when they could read most of the stories online.
Because online ad revenues just aren't there for most publishers in Thailand print still remains the number one focus. I really can't see that situation changing in the next 12-18 months.
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