Lead Launch Rewind

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb, 2001 by Susan Thea Posnock

A LOOK AT THE SURVIVORS AND THOSE THAT DIDN'T LAST AMONG THE NEW MAGAZINES THAT FOLIO: PROFILES EVERY MONTH.

A MAGAZINE'S FIRST YEAR OF LIFE IS PERILOUS. BUILDING CIRCULATION, finding advertisers, getting newsstand placement, locating good editorial talent and trustworthy printers--any one of these going awry can kill a title.

Different titles face different hurdles. On the business-to-business side, job number one is to identify a market that advertisers will be willing to support, says Hal Jaffe, principal, Magazine Consulting Group. Consumer magazines, on the other hand, rely far more on raising capital. "Their failure has a lot more to do with being undercapitalized, because there's such an enormous cost these days in acquiring circulation for consumer books."

Peter Craig, Jaffe's Magazine Consulting Group partner, feels the main problem for consumers titles is gaining the audience. "A magazine that can let a retailer know that there's copies to be sold will find a place," he says. "You need some leverage and staying power. You need enough money to wait out the market." And while the odds are stacked against success, every year the industry is flooded with new entries. FOLIO: profiles one of these infant magazines each issue in the "Lead Launch" section. This month, we took a look back at publications we featured from the fall of 1998 to the middle of last year and discovered why some of those hopeful endeavors survived and others did not.

Of the 21 magazines FOLIO: profiled in that time frame, seven have folded. While none of the publications profiled in the first six months of 2000 has bowed out, six of those profiled in 1999 are no longer published, and one from the last half of 1998 is gone.

Web Hosting

LAUNCHED: JANUARY 2000

PUBLISHER: INFOTONIC INC.

STATUS: STILL PUBLISHING

Profits don't come quickly to most new magazines. Some-times it takes years to get into the black. Web Hosting did it with its fourth issue.

The secret behind the title's success couldn't be more straightforward: The controlled-circulation title, geared toward business and technology executives at Web-hosting firms, found a solid advertising base. Ad pages grew from 20 in the January 2000 launch issue to 40 with the first anniversary issue. Web Hosting is generating more than $700,000 in ad revenue and has also held industry events that have created more than $200,000 in sponsorship revenue.

Co-editor and publisher Dmitri Eroshenko says that beyond simply providing information needed by Web professionals, the publication has succeeded because of its attitude: "We made an effort to stay away from being a traditional, drab trade press."

From the start, the Web-hosting market had projections of rapid growth: The industry was expected to reach $15 billion by the end of 2000, says Eroshenko. But now the market has broadened beyond expectations. It's a space that larger, more traditional tech companies are getting into. "IBM and AT&T want to get a piece of the Web-hosting pie," says Isabel Wang, Eroshenko's counterpart.

As with most new magazines, the first year had its bumps. For the initial three issues, the company outsourced production and encountered sub-par quality and high costs. "The biggest lesson we learned was the importance of a good in-house production team and having a good partnership with the printer," Eroshenko says.

Trans-World STANCE

LAUNCHED: MARCH 2000

PUBLISHER: TRANS WORLD MEDIA, A DIVISION OF TIMES MIRROR MAGAZINES

STATUS: STILL PUBLISHING

Publishers have finally discovered a teen male category that goes beyond narrowly focused special-interest magazines. TransWorld STANCE was one of two 2000 launches to reach young men by focusing on general interest and service, the other being Rodale's MH-18.

"I think the introduction of MH-18 has helped a lot, because there's starting to be an area for teen boys' magazines," says Fran Richards, publisher of STANCE and Skateboarding, and vice president of sales and marketing for the TransWorld titles. This has helped the magazine to deal with its greatest challenge: educating the newsstands to find a proper place for the product. "We've been leaning on them to put us near the boys' sports magazines, because we don't feel boys go where the adult men's magazines are. Having MH-18 has opened the eyes of advertisers and newsstand people."

MH-18 and STANCE don't compete against one another on the newsstand, Richards says, because they target different segments of the teen male audience. "Most of the advertisers are buying both of us." The magazine did 330 ad pages in the six issues published in 2000 and will up its frequency to eight times this year.

In spite of TransWorld's knowledge of its audience through its action-sports titles, Richards says, there have been a few surprises along the way. "We learned a lot in the process about how much we could and couldn't achieve in terms of creating a broader product," he says. For instance, service items were less popular, but advice on girls was of great interest.