The true measure of success

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 1990 by Ron Scott

The true measure of success

Is our health defined by advertising linage or by readership? There has been a rather insistent drumbeat in the media about the health, or lack thereof, of magazine publishing, and it is all based on ad linage or ad revenue. From The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to CNN and NBC, the drums sound this sad story. But what about the reader?

More people are reading more magazines in America than ever before. Newsstand sales of magazines in both dollars and units continue to rise. We are publishing more magazines because readers want more specialized, more targeted editorial creations--and they are willing to pay a premium price for them.

People want to read. They want to learn. It is true that the amount of time people spend reading has declined. But you will probably be surprised to learn, as I was, that the amount of time people devote specifically to reading magazines and books is increasing. This fact comes from a study of American reading habits by John P. Robinson, sociology professor at the University of Maryland, and is summarized in the May 1990 issue of American Demographics.

Professor Robinson notes that, "Taken together, the amount of time people spend reading in all three formats (newspapers, books and magazines) has fallen more than 30 percent--from 4.2 hours a week in 1965 to 2.8 hours in 1985. But the time people spend with books and magazines has increased slightly, from 1.7 to 1.9 hours a week. The overall decline comes because the time the public spends with newspapers has fallen, from 2.5 hours to just 1 hour per week."

After taking the reader through a chart of time-use by age, education, work hours, marital status and number of children in a household, Professor Robinson concludes, "The time-use figures in the table are rather conservative, since they exclude reading done while working, eating or doing other activities. But while our surveys show that people spend less than 10 percent of their free time reading, reading still ranks as the third most consuming of freetime activities (after TV and social life). As the average age and education levels of the population rise, Americans may spend more time reading in the years ahead. But whether newspapers will recoup much of their audience remains to be seen."

Imagine our audience: 10 percent of people's leisure time plus the time devoted to reading at work and in concert with cooking, eating, fixing the sink, gardening, watching the stars, planning our dream house, deciding which TV program to watch or tape, etc. Magazines, unlike television, are interactive, and we can refer back to them again and again. It is hard to imagine TV as an aid to cooking, but it is not hard to imagine reading while the TV is on.

Perhaps John Mack Carter (editor in chief of Good Housekeeping) has again

helped us to focus our attention on our priorities. John Mack, John Peter (a magazine design consultant) and I were discussing the value of cover lines at a recent Folio/MPA seminar when John Mack, as he often does, captured and articulated an old thought in a new way: Cover lines should be designed to get people to read our magazines rather than to sell magazines. What an interesting thought! Imagine a magazine publishing industry devoted to readers and judged by the number of people who read our magazines rather than the number of ad dollars we collect.

Is such a Utopia in sight? Perhaps. The confluence of a number of powerful factors will leave us with few alternatives other than returning to the business of attracting readers. We face a significant increase in the cost of direct mail soliciting subscribers, as well as in the costs of delivering copies to subscribers. We also seem to be facing a reduced level of ad revenues relative to manufacturing and subscription costs.

Subscription costs have been subsidized by advertising revenues; that is, if advertisers are willing to pay to have their ads displayed in copies of magazines mailed to deeply discounted subscribers, then publishers are being reimbursed by advertisers for costs that would otherwise be paid by subscribers. It follows, then, that when advertising revenues decline and advertising revenues are no longer available to subsidize subscribers, subscribers will either have to pay more or stop subscribing.

But wait. When people don't renew a magazine, do they stop reading that magazine? Or do they re-enter that large pool of readers who buy from one to four copies each year of a monthly magazine? A 1985 newsstand reader survey done by Historical Times, now Cowles Magazines, indicates that 54 percent of newsstand buyers buy between one and four copies of a monthly each year. Other studies also indicate that the average newsstand buyer reads and buys four copies a year.

For the past decade or so, subscription discounts rather than subscription prices have been "protected" by raising newsstand prices every time costs dictate an increase in subscription pricing. As we now know, this has had a debilitating effect on single-copy circulation as the price/volume equation reduced the number of marginal buyers.