Sunday, June 9, 2013

Digital Magazine Advertising to Hit 3.8 Billion by 2017

Lewis Hine - Richard Green (with hat), 5 year old newsie.  Many of these little newsboys here. Richmond, Virginia, 1911

Magazine companies have been one of the most successful segments of publishing to take advantage of the digital space. Very early on they have been able to leverage their strong brands across a wide spectrum, including paywalls, dedicated apps, and inclusion into Zinio. Advertisers are increasingly spending more money on digital properties, and by 2017 analysts expect almost 3.8 billion dollars will be spent.

The big news coming out of the annual Price Waterhouse and Cooper report on digital advertising, has overall spending to dramatically increase to $3.8 billion in 2017, when it will represent a quarter of overall advertising, from $2.4 billion in 2012. Customers who actually purchase the digital content will also increase from $275 million in 2012 to $1.4 billion in 2017.

North America and Britain are poised to generate 20% of their overall revenue from digital properties. This mainly stems from their investment in a proper dedicated infrastructure, while the rest of Europe will only see a modest 10% increase by 2017. Westerners have had a proven track record of expressing a willingness to pay for digital content, whether it be accessing the HTML5 edition or taking out a subscription on the Apple Newsstand.

The shift to digital advertising is almost proportionate to the rate the decline of the print industry. In 2008, a record 9.8 billion was spent and then fell to $7.9 billion in 2012, and it is expected to diminish further to $6.4 billion in 2017.

Statistically younger people tend to embrace digital media over the printed editions, due to the versatility of being connected to your smartphone or tablet. This demographic represents the core buyers of tomorrow and they in turn influence their own children within twenty years. Companies such as Glossi are spearheading the next generation of magazines, who are adopting a DIY approach. Anyone can take pictures, generate internet content, or write their own articles and offer them to any social or website platform.

Currently, magazine companies do not operate their digital properties as autonomous entities and they are heavily reliant on their printed editions for their articles. Likely this trend in the industry will not change by 2017, due to the failures of The Daily.

One of the largest barriers of digital advertising in magazines is the lack of a unified standard. This applies not only to metrics, with being able to monitor your data, but also the wide array of platforms. There are different requirements to deliver your media to Blackberry, Android, iOS, Windows 8, HTML5, Zinio, PressReader, Apple Newsstand, or any other 3rd party. All of these options have the entire industry in a state of confusion over what ecosystem to support and where the money is best spent. Do you continue with online advertising on their main website? Do you invest with Amazon, Google and Apple to spread your message via in-app advertising? Do you continue to spend money on the printed edition? There are many options to consider, with no definitive status quo.

Digital Magazine Advertising to Hit 3.8 Billion by 2017 is a post from: E-Reader News

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