Who's Reading Digital Magazines?
Posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 4:00 PM
Not editors. A survey reveals only a minority are digital subscribers
themselves.
By William Dunkerley
We did a quick
survey about reading habits and practices of editors vis-a-vis digital
magazines. The results show: editors are digital pushers, not users.
What this means is that we are doing more digital publishing than
digital reading.
That's an interesting dichotomy to ponder as you
plan the digital future of your publication. If we are not eager
adopters of digital magazines, what makes us think our readers will be?
The
Push for Digital
A lot of the push for migrating from print
to digital is based on financial arguments. Many magazines never
recovered from ad losses incurred in the Great Recession. Attempts to
reinvigorate print ad content may have failed. That's prompted hopes for
digital revenues to make up the shortfall.
A lot of statistics
bandied about suggest that print is indeed dying and that digital is the
key to survival for magazines. We examined this issue in our sister
publication STRAT in October 2013 in an article titled "The
False Allure of Going All Digital." We found evidence that
interest in digital advertising greatly exceeds that of print
advertising. See Figure 1.
Figure
1: Interest in digital advertising far exceeds that with print. The
graph exemplifies this in relative terms. (Source: Google Trends)
Some
ad industry publications harp on the meteoric growth in digital
advertising. But they often quote figures in terms of percentages, not
dollars. When you look at the dollars, you see a different picture: for
now, and even projecting into the future, the actual revenue from
digital advertising is a relatively small percentage. See Figure 2.
Figure
2: For most print publishers, digital revenues are still a very small
part of the revenue pie. By 2016 digital is expected to double, but that
still leaves it well below print circulation and advertising in size.
(Source: Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast, 26th
edition)
The First Survey
As editors, our
fortunes are tied closely to success in ad sales. More ads, more
editorial pages and greater budgets.
So we surveyed a sample of Editors
Only readers to see how many are engaged in producing digital
magazines. This was just a quick survey, and we don't claim a high
degree of accuracy. But it should be accurate enough to give us insights
into the current situation.
The results?
We found that a
resounding 85 percent of editors are involved in producing digital
magazines. Almost all of them are doing print magazines too. For
example, Nancy Doucette, managing editor of Rough Notes magazine,
explains: "The publication I work for is a trade publication. It is a
print publication. We also have on our website a digital version of that
same print publication." Our survey didn't ask whether or not
participants' digital magazines are replica editions, but half of the
respondents volunteered that they are. That means that if we had
included that question in the survey, the percentage of replica editions
reported would likely be significantly higher.
The Second
Survey
Then we did another survey of EO readers. For
this one we drew a separate sample that did not include participants in
the first survey. This time we asked whether the editors themselves are
subscribers to any digital magazines. We found that only one-third are.
What's more, less than half of those digital subscribers spend more than
a single minute reading the issues they subscribe to.
Karen
Hildebrand, VP-editorial at Dance magazine, says, "I receive
digital editions of a few magazines as part of a print edition package.
Honestly, I rarely read the digital editions. I simply forget about
them."
A number of respondents reported that they read the
digital editions of their competitors. Mike McNulty, editor of Wire &
Cable Technology International, explains, "I don't subscribe to any
outside digital magazines; but I read my own digital edition, as well as
that of my competitors."
Our Methodology and Results
A
note on our survey methodology: Why did we do two separate surveys
instead of asking all the questions in a single survey? It's because we
anticipated that after reporting engagement in the publication of a
digital edition, respondents might be reluctant to admit to not
subscribing to any outside digital publications themselves.
That
suspicion was born out in the results. Even though we kept the questions
separate, there appears to have been reluctance to report not
subscribing to outside digital magazines. How do we know that? The
response rate in the survey about subscriptions was about half that of
the other survey.
If we had asked the same question in both
surveys, one would expect the response rates to be approximately the
same. The vast difference in response rates indicates a reluctance to
answer the question about subscriptions. The response rate would likely
been even lower if we had asked both questions together.
This all
suggests that the actual percentage of editors who subscribe to outside
digital magazines is actually less than the one-third that our survey
indicates.
So, in conclusion, we ask the question again, "If we
are not eager adopters of digital magazines, what makes us think our
readers will be?"
William Dunkerley is principal of
William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.
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