Companies all over the world have been aggressively creating and/or expanding their digital/online departments for a while now. And while it’s a difficult task for any industry to change so drastically, it can be argued that print media and magazine publishers have had an especially challenging task.
Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc. says they’ve seamlessly transformed their brands and magazines all through big-time layoffs and gaining control over their own online ventures without AOL’s intervention.
When asked about the traditional model of magazine subscriptions, Moore replies:
Ann: Gone, gone. It is advertising only and it is working beautifully. That is why I said there is a real business here [in digital]. We did prove to ourselves that you absolutely have a business. Remember this: We amortize our offline editorial costs. A writer for Sports Illustrated, Tom Verducci, our baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, he writes 50+ columns for the magazine, but he writes another 60+ columns for SI.com. That is why the margins on our dot-com businesses are so high. We have 3,500 journalists who write for the print products. The work they do on the dotcom makes for very high margins on the online businesses.
Via PaidContent.org
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Ms. Moore says Time Inc. only saw “significant ad dollars” show up online last year, or 2006. That’s a deeply sad commentary from the CEO of a company with a long history of experimentation on the web.
I’m biased here, since I worked at Pathfinder, but that site was the second in the world (after what was then HotWired.com) to sell ads for money on a website–in 1994!
June 12th, 2007 at 6:07 am