Content Marketing Today

Why Print Technology Media Has One Foot in the Grave

Is the rest of trade publishing also at death’s door?

I am sad to report on my observations of the state of the market because technology publishing and I go back 25 years.  But, it’s important to understand what has happened because this market segment represents a microcosm of what is happening to print publishing overall.

I have been around technology publishing long enough to remember the introduction of the IBM PC in August 1981.  Not only did this launch represent the birth of a new era in computing, which created thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley.  It also created a new generation of publications that were dedicated to personal computers. 

Just two years after the arrival of the IBM PC, I arrived at Ziff Davis to take charge of a recently launched magazine called PC Tech Journal. It was the runt of the litter in a company which featured PC Magazine and PC Week.  We were able to take it from a bimonthly publication to a monthly and to revenues of $8 million per year.  Today, that revenue would look pretty darn good, but back then it was almost a rounding error.  At the time, the joke around Ziff Davis was that PC Magazine had become so large (400 page issues were not unusual) that the company was going to introduce a portable version.  In fact, there was so much advertising that what began as a monthly was soon publishing 24 times per year.

Those days are long gone.  I just received the July 2008 issue of PC Magazine which is positively anorexic. Understanding how it got to this precarious state provides critical lessons on why content marketing has become the essential alternative to traditional advertising for so many companies.

Here are some key stats:

• Total magazine pages–116 (a typical issue of my little technology magazine was 150 plus pages)
• 46% advertising; 54% editorial pages.  A healthy ratio for a successful trade publication is 60% advertising and 40% editorial
• Even that high editorial to advertising ratio includes just 52 editorial pages.  In my judgment, this does not provide the critical mass to maintain reader devotion.  It certainly doesn’t maintain my own.
• Major missing advertisers
• Dell
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Apple
• Lenovo
• Xerox
• Sony
• They provide a list of best products each month. 33 of the major brands mentioned are not advertising in the magazine. 10 years ago, 90% of them would’ve been regular advertisers. 
• They used to have a big multipage advertiser Index.  That has been stripped out to make room for regular editorial pages.
• PC Magazine used to be chock-full of product reviews that went into depth and were incredibly valuable to readers.  Now there are few reviews.  They are short.  And, you are referred to their website to get the rest of the reviews.

This last point provides a clue to the likely demise of this genre of publication.  In many cases, they are effectively saying “If you want the good stuff or the more complete stuff, you can find it online.” This, of course, begs the question: If I have to go online for that, why should I bother with the print publication at all?  It’s

Moreover, the disappearance of the big brands from their advertising pages means that I am missing a lot of information about brands and products that that is important to me as a buyer of PCs and related products.  Going back in time to the launch of these once successful technology publications, the ads were in many ways just as important as the editorial.  Good ads told us a lot about hardware and software products that we would want to buy. Thus, the value of PC Magazine is reduced even further.

I will wrap up this sad story with Dell as a metaphor for what has happened.  Michael Dell founded the company in 1984, when he was a 19-year-old college student.  His model was new: sell your product directly to customers over the phone.  Why did those phones ring?  They rang because Dell placed enormous amounts of advertising in PC Week and in PC Magazine.  Back then, he was quick to attribute his success to be advertising that he ran into those publications.  Back then, there was no Internet.  There was no alternative source for Dell to drive phone calls that resulted in billions of dollars of revenue. In fact, if your profession involves the purchase of PCs for your company, you had to read those publications. PC Week had the smug but accurate slogan, “Be in it or be out of it.”

Now, when we are looking for a PC from Dell, we know we can find everything we need to know on the Internet.  Obviously, Dell knows that, too.  Otherwise, they would be continuing to run multiple pages of ads in every issue of PC Magazine–as they did for more than two decades.

You will see this pattern repeated in the technology marketplace and, more generally, in the trade publishing marketplace.  Print publications are struggling.  Many of their online versions are terrific, but cannot generate enough revenue to sustain organizations built around a print model.

A ray of publishing hope at Ziff Davis Enterprise

Almost all of the good news is for content marketers who are going directly to their customers without a print publication intermediary.  After all, technology buyers still need the information.  If you, as a content marketers, can provide it, you get their vote and their money.  But, there is a ray of hope on the horizon at Ziff Davis Enterprise.  There, my old colleague, Mike Azzara, is working on a plan to help their current and former advertisers develop meaningful and relevant content so that once again the publishing company can participate in the success of its customers.