THE END OF PORTFOLIO
Conde Nast's glossy business magazine Portfolio is no more.
Despite attracting a reported 415,000 circulation the two-year-old title will disappear next month, highlighting lack of advertising as the main reason for its demise. The number of pages were said to be more than 60 per cent down year-on-year during the first three months of 2009.
A few copies of Portfolio did find their way to Thailand although I can't imagine there were too many subscribers here.
John Friedman predicts this could be the first of the big name business magazines to cease printing, whereas BusinessWeek's Jon Fine looks at the reasons behind the demise.
5 comments:
There's another, rather gloating, article about this on The Big Money. FYI!
http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/sausage/2009/04/27/portfolios-predictable-death
Thanks for that link Lana, it's certainly another interesting perspective.
I'll quote one line from that story: "Anyone paying attention to the business journalism genre over the past decade would have realized that you can't cover this world in a timely way if you publish only once a month."
My own magazine does exactly that - aims to cover the the world of business once a month. We're doing okay but the competition is far less here that that which Portfolio faced.
I think the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Portfolio, but the question now is how many other of the big business publications might end up going the same way?
I'm trying to figure out why it would cost $150 million dollars to start up a magazine. Are they buying printing presses? Office buildings? What costs that much?
David,
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1894413,00.html
Here's the answer to your question. They had huge budgets for writers and photography, and also spent a lot of money pre-launch on market research and marketing.
It seems that the people who were running this magazine were depending upon name recognition, rather than content, to drive revenue.
I don't think name brands sell anymore: There are simply too many of them. And even with the name brands that they bought, whether on the writing, editorial photography staff, they did not utilize them effectively.
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