IS YOUR WEB SITE Stealing YOUR READERS?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 15, 2000 by R.J. Lehmann

Some smaller niche titles are taking precautions to avoid cannibalization of their print products on the Web. But overall, the Net is boosting rather than eclipsing subscription sales.

Why buy the magazine if you get the Web site for free? As more and more Americans get connected, the fear that content-rich Web sites might eclipse a magazine's paid reader base has been raised anew. Most industry observers say the concerns still hold no significant weight, but some titles have taken steps to ensure their sites are used to build brand awareness and subscribers, and not simply to give away the product.

Thomas Masterson, Business Week's vice president of consumer marketing and circulation, offeres what's been a mantra among industry leaders: a strong, content-rich Web site is more likely to bring new readers to the magazine than to cannibalize subscriptions.

"Our site has been a great source of new readers, which is something we've been tracking since Business Week Online was launched," says Masterson. "It's allowed us a new avenue to market our content to potential readers of the magazine, and by providing quite a bit of original content for the site that doesn't appear in the magazine, we're able to also market the site to existing readers of the magazine."

Michael Rogers, vice president and general manager of Newsweek Interactive and an editor of Newsweek, says if anything is being cannibalized by rich-content magazine Web sites, it's public libraries.

"Being able to read a magazine without paying for it is not new, and being able to read a magazine's archives without paying for them is not new, says Rogers. "Both have always been possible in the periodicals section of your local library.

"What the new technology has done is taken that ability and brought it directly and conveniently into millions of homes, and it's been a wonderful thing for the industry," he adds. "But just as no one worried about public libraries causing people to stop subscribing to magazines, I don't think that should be a major concern with the Web. Its effect has been overwhelmingly positive in opening up new revenue streams for publications, and bringing new readers into the fold."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the tendency of sites to build subscription sales rather than knock them down has been particularly evident among those titles serving the business and technology sectors that appeal most to online users.

At Forbes.com, for example, content from three separate Forbes titles--Forbes, Forbes ASAP and Forbes FYI--is combined with original Web-only content to introduce both new and existing readers to all three magazines.

Bruce Rogers, vice president of marketing for Forbes, says at least half of new subscribers to all three titles have come either from Web enrollments or email marketing within the past two years.

"Interest in investment and markets has grown exponentially over the past 10 years, and the Web has become the major way of getting that information to consumers. That's where our new readers for the print titles are all coming from," says Rogers. "It's been a major boon to us and to our ability to publish ASAP and FYI without needing to do very much else to build awareness of them."

However, the use of the Web to build print brands hasn't been limited to New Economy titles or A-list consumer magazines. For Reason, a 30-year-old, non-profit, 50,000-circulation political opinion title based in Los Angeles, the Web has helped earn the magazine respect and name-recognition it didn't have before the advent of the Web.

"In the print world, we've always been seen as a marginal little magazine with a tiny cult following, but according to the tracking surveys of groups like DoubleClick, we're in the Top 10 most clicked/trafficked political sites on the Web," says Reason founder and chairman Robert Poole. "That's allowed us to place our editors on the Sunday morning opinion shows and other venues like that with more regularity," he says.

"Unfortunately, no, it hasn't meant a major spike in subscriptions yet. But it has meant more people are paying attention to us and so, even if putting all our content on the Web means we aren't necessarily getting every subscriber we possibly could, the benefits have far outweighed any minor drawbacks."

Print Persists

Still, some industry observers are surprised that widespread subscription cannibalization hasn't taken root.

"I have to admit, five years ago I expected at this point you'd see a lot more subscribers giving up paying for print versions of magazines in favor of the Web," says Bill Glavin, chairman of the Magazine Studies department at Syracuse University's Newhouse School (named after Advance Publications chairman S.I. Newhouse).

"It's difficult to understand why there hasn't been more of it, and whether it's due more to just different audiences between print and the Web, or whether there's still something important about the tactile look and feel of a publication," says Glavin.

Tom Burke, director of Conde Nast's consumer marketing database agrees. "If you want to read an in-depth article, it's easier in a magazine than it is with a bunch of screens on the Web," he says. "People still don't look at the Web as a replacement for a magazine."