Anyone working in or around the magazine industry knows one thing for certain: Everyone’s got an opinion. Prognostications on the print magazine industry range from doom and gloom to nothing but sunshine and moonbeams.
If you’re in the business of print magazines, like we are, you don’t have the luxury of choosing one position or the other. Common business sense requires us to critically examine what’s really going on. Is the print magazine industry in danger of collapse? Let’s take a closer look.
Roy Stevenson is a travel magazine writer and industry coach, so he’s deeply in touch with the realities of his market niche.
“These naysayers will tell anyone within earshot that the Internet has completely overtaken the print industry,” Stevenson writes on his travel writing site PitchTravelWrite. “One prominent travel blogger even predicted that by the year 2020 print magazines would cease to exist! Naturally, as a print media freelance writer I feel more than a little concern when I hear these gloomy predictions,” he continues.
So he took a deeper look at what’s going on in the industry, in his niche and the larger print market in general, to uncover the truth. What he found was, in his words, both enlightening and encouraging.
Let’s break down some of the information he uncovered, and some of our own.
The Enlightening Data about Print Magazines
The first encouraging news Stevenson reports is that new title launches outnumber closures by a wide margin, based on Mediafinder.com stats, a big reversal from the situation in 2009.
While new launch numbers are down, so are folding rates, meaning that the ones that are currently being published are surviving past that critical 3-year mark. (New launches, based on industry averages, have less than a 20% chance of surviving past that point.)
Let’s put this into perspective, looking at launches and closures compared to the overall number of magazines in the U.S. You can see from the data below from Statista, the overall number of magazines is staying fairly steady over the last few years and is significantly higher than it was 10-15 years ago.
more detail at: http://www.freeportpress.com/an-honest-look-at-state-of-the-magazine-industry-summer-2017/