With eCommerce, magazine publishing turns a new page

Since the dawn of the Internet, magazine publishers have had to rethink the way they connect with their readership. As they watched the consumers who were once giddy about their glossy pages begin to favor digitized editions, they scrambled to follow the curve and stay relevant. Lucky for most magazine publishers, print subscriptions were never their bread and butter. Print advertising, however, was.

“It wasn’t so long ago that almost every magazine chased ever larger circulation, even if it meant losing money in the process,” explained the editors of Ad Age. “It worked because print-ad sales paid the bills — and then some.”

Today, new revenue streams have emerged, which include digital advertising, online subscriptions, book publishing, hosted events and eCommerce. Some of these new opportunities, however, come with substantial learning curves – eCommerce being one of them.

Selling products has always been an indirect goal for many magazines. Even casual readers recognize this focus by the flipping through the first dozen or so pages of any magazine. Consolidating all of these ads into an online marketplace, therefore, makes perfect sense. In fact, it just makes it easier on the reader to purchase those featured products.

To get a feel for what these online marketplaces look like, here are 10 publications and publishers that have taken the eCommerce plunge:

1. Domino
2. Condé Nast
3. SI’s Golf Magazine
4. LA Times
5. Lucky Magazine
6. Men’s Health, Women’s Health  
7. Elle
8. National Geographic
9. The Smithsonian
10. Thrasher

To deliver an online marketplace, however, magazine publishers have to muster up an entirely new IT skill set. Unlike the skills required to set up a single online store, executing a full marketplace often requires additional software and advanced eCommerce development skills. And that’s just half the battle. Whether an advertiser will continue to pay for ads, be it print or digital, when they can instead list their products for sell on a magazine’s site, must also be taken into consideration.

In an article published on TheMediaBriefing.com, Steve Price, managing director of iSubscribe, said, ”[Publishers] are offering the content, then waving bye bye to those consumers who go elsewhere to buy.” So for Price and many others, walking away from the opportunities afforded by eComemrce might not be a good idea.

For those in publishing who are in fact looking to eCommerce as a new revenue stream, reach out to the team at NetSphere Strategies for everything from consulting to development and support.