Publishing in the Knowledge Economy - DTI Home Page

Publishing in the knowledge economy
The industry today
the Internet. For a fuller discussion of
subscriptions, see the customer focus section.
In common with mass market newspapers,
there has been a retreat from the Web on the
part of consumer magazine publishers, with
high-profile sites being closed or sold.
One publisher of specialist titles told us:
“The Internet should be an opportunity for some
specialised titles, mainly for commerce and
classifieds, e.g. travel and books, but it’s taking
a long time to take off. It is quite hard to
monetise it. For most interests, there is a natural
online community, but there’s masses
of stuff available on the Web from libraries,
universities, etc. The danger is that your site
just becomes a signpost. No-one is spending
any money at any point, so how can you get
a share of it?”
By contrast, a publisher of magazines aimed
at car buyers and male electronics purchasers
told us that the Internet:
“Is very significant for us. One of our sites is
profitable on the basis of selling display
advertising and selling content from it on to
other sites. It also generates print
subscriptions.”
A report by consultants McKinsey, published
in the McKinsey Quarterly 1st Quarter 2001,
summed up the dilemma facing many magazine
publishers:
“Many magazines fall between the available
choices: they spend a lot of money building a
complete website and end up with one too
costly to be a companion site but not compelling
enough to attract the high traffic and revenue of
a destination site. Resources are wasted, and
readers are unhappy; people who are
passionate about their magazines expect the
Web version to be as good as its print
counterpart, and if a site billed as a destination
experience fails to live up to those expectations,
the chances of success fall and the magazine
risks losing valuable print subscribers.”
Some of the same arguments apply to
so-called ‘masthead’ programming, that is,
magazine-branded television programming,
discussed below.
Recently, mobile has emerged as an
important platform/threat for teen magazines,
with text messaging absorbing ever increasing
amounts of time and money in the teen and
even pre-teen age groups.
10.5 Books
As has already been mentioned, there are a
number of ways in which book publishers have
embraced the Internet. For academic and STM
publishers it has become fundamental. It is a
major opportunity for them to create arrays of
new services that meet the demands of
academic, research and library users. One
leading academic publisher told us:
“I am a big believer in server-side e-books
(NetLibrary, ebrary, 24 by 7, etc). The ability to
search across the field and cross-refer is what
libraries want and what users want. But the
business model’s still unclear – many pioneers
have gone bust.”
Print on demand is also a big opportunity,
especially in this segment, as it allows
publishers to keep books in print that would
otherwise be uneconomic. However, the need
to clear third party rights before using the
content in this manner was described to us as
“a potential show-stopper”. Of course, as time
goes on, publishers will be securing rights to
use content in this way – or at least attempting
to do so.
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