7/6/2019 0 Comments How will the future be funded?Welcome to part two of The Glossy Project. This article will look at the future of payment models and advertising within the magazine industry. Much of the commentary surrounding the magazine industry is that it is on the downturn. This is seen in recent closures of big name print magazines within Australia in recent years, such as Cleo, Cosmopolitan, and Yen, which mirror a similar pattern globally. Around the world, magazine publishers are trying to adapt to the challenges and opportunities that economic shifts and digital advances present. Magazines as brands In an article for B&T, John Bastick discussed how the future of magazines, is not to define themselves as magazines. Rather than just print publications, they instead should be defined as ‘brands’. This encompasses a wide range of formats across both digital and print. More than just “paper and staples”, Bastick argues how a 21st century magazine involves a brand with a website, a social media strategy, an e-commerce business, holds events, and so on. In this case, it’s clear that a magazine, and its future, is so much more than the object you hold in your hands. When Grazia magazine relaunched in 2016 nearly one year after shutting its doors due to poor circulation, it announced its return as a digital only platform. “Since its digital relaunch… Grazia has built an amazing new iteration of a brand,” Said the general manager and publisher of Grazia Australia Marne Schwartz. “In an era where the print media channel is in heavy decline and publishers are withdrawing from independent circulation… this is an exciting opportunity to revolutionise how and where people engage with print.” If the future for print publishing is in this transition to ‘brands’, then it's inevitable that we will see a change and evolution in payment models. Advertising With a consistent shift in how magazines are being consumed, the way in which advertisers can utilise them as a platform is also changing. Where print magazines were once a way to reach a highly targeted audience, an increase in online media consumption has changed the way that advertisers now reach their desired audience. The American Graphics Institute (AGI) outlined how the future of magazine advertising is being impacted by a shift of advertising spending online. Specialised advertising no longer requires reaching audiences who read specific content. The monopoly that printed advertisements in magazines once had on its readers has been erased by new online advertising networks like Google and Facebook. Google offers user profiles that allow specialised advertising to reach users anywhere online. For example, a sports fan can be targeted while they look up the weather online. This shift, combined with the amount of time that consumers spend online rather than purchasing print magazines, has created a transition in advertising dollars to online formats. According to the AGI, Google now brings in more than $80 billion in advertising revenue, more than every magazine combined. The changes represent one of the most fundamental shifts for a business that has long relied on a simple formula: glossy printed volumes with high-priced ads. Now, magazines will have to embrace the future of alternative online sources of revenue in order to stay alive. Paywalls and Subscribtions A growth in digital readerships has led to paywalls being a major way to gain revenue for online magazines. This is often aligned with subscriptions. Paywalls are broadly classified in two categories: hard and soft, based on the level of access to content without a fee. Hard paywalls require users to pay for almost all of the content, where soft paywalls offer more freedom and allow readers to subscribe if they choose to read more content. Paywalls are now considered a standard feature of the digital media industry due to a number of examples of success, like the New York Times. As well as their success, these types of pay models can also contribute to a higher quality of content as it's being funded by the public. In going forward, this could be a major way that online publications are funded in the future. Personally, I have noticed a rise in these pay models, as it is rare to read an online article these days without coming to a paywall. The New York Times paywall. Crowdfunding - Patreon
Another notable way to monetise an online format is through crowdfunding models, such as Patreon. This is an online crowdfunding platform that allows creative individuals to run a subscription content service and create revenue from their work. It is used for a number of reasons: podcasts, videos, music, visual art, and writers and journalists. Payment methods like Patreon are extremely useful for individuals who create zines, which I will delve into further in article 3. Perhaps, as zines and independent publications grow, so will this crowdfunding method. Stay tuned…
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