Faced with a powerful disruptive force that is redefining content consumption patterns, specialty B2C magazines have to move away from a content-centric to community-centric approach to compete.
The chart above is the story. Companies that either did not exist or where not considered competition even 10 years ago now control over 60% of the total online advertising revenue...and Facebook is just getting started on its monetization strategy. Analytics firm emarketer.com, estimates that online ad spending worldwide will rise to around 22% of the total ad spend, up from an estimated 16% today. This increase is coming at the cost of newspapers, magazines and directories...all of which are already seeing sharp declines in ad revenues.
Most magazine publishers have established a strong digital presence, and in fact, would boast of an increased combined readership across their print and online brands. However, this increased readership has not translated into revenues...with online revenue unable to make up the gap from falling print ad and subscription revenues.
I believe the problem is the way publishers look at the digital media. For most digital is an extension of their print strategy. The online experience they provide their readers is generally not too different from their print titles. Publishers do incorporate certain community tools like blogs, forums, chats etc., but these are all peripheral to the content.
However, the advent and popularity of social media has proved that personalization and community interaction are central to keeping users engaged and active in the online world. Therefore it is imperative to rethink existing content strategies and for magazines to reconstruct themselves as community platforms.
While the concept of community could defer from publication to area of interest. A community platform would broadly emphasize the following:
- Personalisation: Move over editor's point of view. Hello readers' point of view. Personalisation begins from the home page with each reader getting a news feed most relevant to them. This can begin from a simple geographic location, with new users being served content related to or most relevant to their geographies. As their level of interaction with the site increases so too does the level of personalisation. Yahoo is an early pioneer (http://www.fastcompany.com/1770673/how-yahoo-got-to-a-billion-clicks), but I believe this is just the start.
- Social Interactions: Or as fellow blogger Santosh GR calls it "giving social conversations a first class status." Basically the news feed incorporates social conversations from the community along with the core magazine content.
- Curation: Now this could be a sticking point for some publishers. But online any content that your user wants/needs/can find relevant is useful content. It does not matter if that has not been created by your editorial team. The idea is to meet the end-to-end needs of your user so they don't tab off to another location to find what you are not providing.
- Long tail: A community platform provides value for businesses along the long tail For example: It is viable for a local car dealer to reach potential buyers in their area on a car community platform. Doing this in a magazine would not be viable. Using other online media would not provide the kind of targeting possible on a special interest community platform.
A community platform also creates greater revenue opportunities for publishers. That, however, is best left for my next post.
