Are Magazines Going Online Handicapped?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb, 2000

On the Internet, many brands--like eBay and Amazon--are being created very quickly. But content brands, like Slate and Salon, haven't taken off in the same way. "Do traditional content brands have a place on the Internet or not?" was a question posed to Thomas Middelhoff, chairman and CEO, Bertelsmann AG, at the American Magazine Conference.

"Internet brands create tremendous brand awareness overnight," Middelhoff said. "But it's always complicated to transform an offline brand into a cool and hip online brand. The need of the Internet consumer is different from the need of the magazine consumer. So you have to define the new, specific need of the consumer if you want to bring your magazine brand online. That, I believe, is really complicated because if you have a tremendous magazine brand, it has a specific perception. So it's much easier to define a new brand and to develop it on the Net. It's not impossible to bring an offline brand--a magazine--onto the Net successfully, but we have to define what the onl ine consumer really wants and what we have to offer. Another panelist suggested that, "The big challenge is to find people who can bring our brands into alignment with the new possibilities of distribution platforms. If we can't do that, we are likely to end up like the TV companies when they missed the cable opportunities. We're just going to miss the ball."