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Monday, August 31, 2009

A LOCAL VICTIM OF THE GLOBAL CRISIS

The Thai language licensed edition of Arena magazine has not appeared since June and is very likely to be a high profile local victim of the crisis that has been sweeping the global print publishing industry.
Arena
was launched in the U.K. in 1987 and, at its height, was selling more than 90,000 copies per month. At the end it's circulation was down to less than 30,000 copies per month, prompting publishers Bauer Media to pull the plug at the start of March this year.
The Thai edition of
Arena was licensed by Inspire Entertainment and debuted in August 2006. It sold for 100 baht, and a recent publishers media kit claimed a circulation of 100,000 copies per month.
The publisher of the Thai language edition of Arena failed to respond to an email requesting comment for this story.
This story is a perfect example of the downside of licensing. A publisher can spend a great deal of time and money building a brand, however the fate of their magazine is ultimately out of their control.

2 comments:

Anonymous 12:09 PM  

I've noticed that you no longer include complete postings from your blog on my Bloglines RSS Reader. Fair enough, I won't read your blog, unless your headline is VEry, VERY compelling. Otherwise, I've got another 250 feeds to look at. Why have you done this? Counterproductive.

(c) 2016 Written by Andrew Batt 12:37 PM  

Carl,

Thanks for your comment. I did change the auto setting in Blogger to 'short' because, a few months ago, I was having problems with at least three sites that were lifting content and reproducing it as their own - and possibly benefiting from ad revenues in the process.

How would you suggest I tackle this issue? I certainly don't want to lose you as a reader, but at the same time I object (as a blogger and also in my day job as a publisher) to others lifting my content for personal gain.

Your comments are truly welcome on this issue, as I've been trying to find a workable solution, without the time-consuming task of trying to get those sites to take down my stories each and every time.

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