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Issue for March 2016

Publisher's Note

Posted on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 2:48 PM

Important:

Large-scale IT system damage has prevented sending you a complete and timely issue. We apologize for this inconvenience and expect to be back to normal service by the time of the next issue. Thank you for understanding.

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Shifting Magazine Revenues

Posted on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 1:46 PM

In the news: How magazine revenue sources have changed since 2004.

In early March, Folio: vice president Tony Silber analyzed the past decade in the magazine world. To sum it up, he writes: "It's not a 'magazine industry' anymore, it's an industry of powerful brands that all have a print-magazine component. The print magazine is no longer the hub of the wheel, but it remains an important point of engagement with audiences and an ad vehicle that produces resilient revenue."

So how are revenue streams changing? Between 2004 and 2014, print advertising has gone from being 66.7% of a B2B brand's revenue to 46.6%. Perhaps more surprising in the B2B realm, events have nearly doubled as a revenue stream, from 8.4% to 15.6% of a brand's business. Paid subscriptions also became a smaller piece of the B2B revenue pie, falling from 11.6% to 5.6%. Read more of Silber's analysis here.

Also Notable

Newspaper Revenues

Elsewhere in the publishing world, newspapers continue to struggle with declining print circulation and overall ad revenue. In a Bloomberg.com piece this week, Gerry Smith writes about the challenges facing today's newspaper publishers and points to a marked upsurge in mergers and acquisitions. Read the article, ominously headlined "Newspapers Gobble Each Other Up to Survive Digital Apocalypse," here.

The FTC vs. Lord & Taylor

The FTC recently filed a complaint with Lord & Taylor over a piece of native advertising in Nylon magazine that stretched the boundaries of acceptable sponsored content. The article blended in a bit too seamlessly with the surrounding editorial content, lending a false sense of objectivity to a piece that, in reality, Lord & Taylor paid to print. According to C. Ryan Barber of The National Law Journal in a March 15 article, "the settlement bars the Lord & Taylor from continuing to misrepresent the origin of paid advertisements but does not include a financial penalty." The complaint comes after a December 2015 warning that the FTC would be cracking down on guideline-breaking sponsored content. Read Barber's article here.

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